The New York Review of Books - 07.11.2019

44 The New York Review

another. Conservatives fret that

“woman is losing herself, woman is

lost,” Beauvoir writes, while others

reassure themselves that “women are

very much still women” even in the

more egalitarian Soviet Russia. De-

pending on where you look, Beauvoir

notes, femininity is either woman’s

eternal and inescapable nature, or it is

in danger of dying out if women don’t

do a better job of practicing it. How can

both of these propositions be true?

And yet the category of female must

mean something: Why else were wives

not allowed to open bank accounts

(until 1965), or women to attend the

École Normale Supérieure? Beauvoir

reconstitutes “female” as a category,

but one whose primary significance

is social. There may be no stable defi-

nition of femininity, but, Beauvoir

shows, the feminine is consistently

defined in opposition to the masculine.

Oversexed or undersexed, cunning or

feeble minded, selfless or selfish: what-

ever contradictory qualities get attrib-

uted to women, even the putatively

good ones, end up serving as rationales

for why men, not women, should have

the bank accounts and ENS diplomas.

In her epigraph to The Second Sex,

Beauvoir quotes the little-known

seventeenth- century philosopher Pou-

lain de la Barre: “Everything that has

been written by men about women

should be viewed with suspicion, be-

cause they are both judge and party.”

By the time Beauvoir worked this idea

into her analysis in the mid-twentieth

century, her readers were likely to be

at least loosely familiar with central

concepts in Marx and Freud, both of

whom, along with Friedrich Engels,

Beauvoir discusses at some length in

the book. Readers were ready to re-

ceive the idea (whether they liked it

or not) that men had a stake—a sort

of class interest—in promoting their

superiority, and that even reasonable

men of science might be unconsciously

motivated in their repeated discoveries

of women’s inferiority.

An old thought was now more richly

resonant: when it comes to their assess-

ments of women’s capacities, men are

not impartial—they are interested. For

many of her readers, Beauvoir’s analy-

sis helped clear out the vestiges of the

notion that male authority over women

was divine or natural: it was instead the

story of one social group dominating

another.

The second volume of The Second

Sex, Lived Experience, follows woman

through all the phases of life, from

childhood through old age. The inti-

macy Beauvoir achieves on the page is

sometimes startling. “During the first

three or four years of life,” she writes in

a chapter called “Childhood,” “there is

no difference between girls’ and boys’

attitudes... boys are just as desirous

as their sisters to please, to be smiled

at, to be admired.” But soon, boys are

pushed toward emotional indepen-

dence, a process that may look—and

feel—harsh:

Little by little boys are the ones

who are denied kisses and ca-

resses, the little girl continues to

be doted upon, she is allowed to

hide beneath her mother’s skirts,

her father takes her on his knees

and pats her hair.

But “if the boy at first seems less

favored than his sisters, it is be-

cause there are greater designs for

him.”

The girl, meanwhile, is headed for a

fall:

When her acquaintances, studies,

amusements, and reading mate-

rial tear her away from the mater-

nal circle, she realizes that it is not

women but men who are the mas-

ters of the world....

The father’s life is surrounded

by mysterious prestige: the hours

he spends in the home, the room

where he works, the objects around

him, his occupations, his habits,

have a sacred character.... Usually

he works outside the home, and it

is through him that the household

communicates with the rest of the

world : he is the embodiment of this

adventurous, immense, difficult,

and marvelous world.

This is, of course, a portrait of the

educated, professional man’s daughter.

What it’s like to realize that your father

lacks prestige, or daily feels thwarted in

that difficult outside world, is not nearly

as well plumbed by Beauvoir, as many

critics have pointed out. This is a pit-

fall of her somewhat freewheeling ap-

proach. In Lived Experience Beauvoir

must once again conjure the category

“female,” this time from the inside,

and it involves a lot of moving parts.

Drawn together from personal experi-

ence, friends’ experience, interviews

with women in the US and France, and

a small number of sociological surveys

about European women, Beauvoir’s

generic woman in these chapters is ac-

tually a shapeshifter: sometimes work-

ing class, though more often middle

class, sometimes a lesbian, sometimes

a wife, sometimes a professional work-

ing woman. She is implicitly a Catholic,

white Frenchwoman. Beauvoir has no

methodological apparatus that would

pass muster with a social scientist; her

authority depends on the reader’s ac-

ceptance that, although there is no

such thing as a generic woman, there is

enough common social experience that

the category holds, and that Beauvoir

can speak for it convincingly. For many

readers, she did.

But The Second Sex is not only about

women. It’s also, inescapably and no

less intimately, about men. In writing

about young women’s sexual initiation,

she compares it to young men’s:

With penis, hands, mouth, with his

whole body, the man reaches out to

his partner, but he remains at the

heart of this activity, as the subject

generally does before the objects

he perceives and the instruments

he manipulates; he projects him-

self toward the other without los-

ing his autonomy; feminine flesh

is a prey for him, and he seizes in

woman the attributes his sensual-

ity requires of any object; of course

he does not succeed in appropriat-

ing them: at least he holds them;

the embrace and the kiss imply a

partial failure: but this very failure

is a stimulant and a joy.

Writing about wives, she inevitably

wrote about husbands:

The husband “forms” his wife not

only erotically but also spiritually

and intellectually; he educates her,

impresses her, puts his imprint on

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