Beauvoir, The Second Sex – III

Posted: Mon, Mar 3, 2025

The Sentence That Set the World on Fire

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”

  • Literal translation: “One is not born woman; one becomes it.”
  • Popular translation: “Women are made, not born.”
  • Parshley translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
  • Borde & Malovany-Chevallier translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

The social constructivist reading: gender is the social meaning of sex.

  • To become a woman is to be socialized into the (social) institution of womanhood.
  • Womanhood as an institution exists prior to the self; the self is inducted into it.
  • B & M-C: “ ‘Woman’ in English used alone without an article captures woman as an institution, a concept, femininity as determined and defined by society, culture, history.” (Even if one is sympathetic to the social constructivist reading, does it really make sense to say any particular individual becomes woman the social institution?)

The existentialist reading: gender is an individual’s response to sex.

  • “Existence precedes essence”: womanhood is not a given, but an active, situated process of creation, of becoming; it is an individual’s (sometimes-idiosyncratic) response to the situation they find themselves in (anatomical, relational, social, political etc.).
  • Bonnie Mann explains that “to ‘become’ a woman is not the same as to be made into one, as if one were exclusively a passive object being acted on by external social forces. . . . To ‘become’ is to actively take up one’s social condition in a way that is, at least potentially, spontaneous, creative and free. . . . On this view, Beauvoir could never be understood to have claimed that ‘women are made not born.’ ”

Jigsaw

I’ll assign everybody to become the expert on one of four passages from the chapters we read. Focusing on the passage you’ve been given, please answer the following questions; I’ll then ask you to teach the passage to your classmates.

Here are the passages:

  1. On puberty: pp. 342–46.
  2. On femininity: pp. 346–49.
  3. On homoerotic flings: pp. 355–59.
  4. On poetry and nature: pp. 372–77.

And here are the questions:

  • What is a social constructivist reading of this passage? That is, how are girls socialized into womanhood as an institution?
  • What is an existentialist reading of this passage? That is, what is the situation confronting girls, and how do the different ways girls respond to it then turn them into women?

Some complications to consider:

  • Are the two readings mutually exclusive?
  • Are the experiences that Beauvoir discusses universally shared, or are they specific to only some women (and whom in particular)?
  • To what extent do you think what Beauvoir says still holds true today? What has (not) changed?