Second-Wave Feminism: de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir published Le Deuxième Sexe in two volumes in France in 1949, a nearly 1,000-page study combining biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, literature, and existentialist philosophy in pursuit of a single question posed in its opening pages: "What is a woman?" Her most quoted formulation, appearing in the second volume, "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient" — "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" — rejects any account of femininity as a fixed biological or psychological essence, treating it instead as a historically and socially constructed situation imposed on women from childhood onward through upbringing, myth, and institution. De Beauvoir draws her central conceptual tool, the analysis of Woman as "the Other" against a masculine "Self" or "Subject," from a fusion of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) with the existentialist vocabulary of her lifelong intellectual partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, developed in Being and Nothingness (1943); where Sartre analyzes the look of the Other primarily in general ontological terms, de Beauvoir applies the same structure specifically and systematically to the historical relation between the sexes.