The Second Sex summary

Most of today’s societies are patriarchal – that is, men occupy the majority of the positions of power. And it’s often assumed that it was always so. But that’s not the case.

In fact, women once wielded more power than men. Many prehistoric societies were matriarchal. Largely based on farming, these societies shared their property and regarded children as an invaluable asset: the means of perpetuating society. As women were the ones capable of bearing children, they were granted an almost sacred status. Indeed, children would usually take the mother’s clan name – in contrast with today’s custom of taking the father’s family name. The great importance placed on women’s fertility was further symbolized by the female gods worshipped by many early societies, like the goddess Ishtar in Babylon, and Gaea, the Greek earth goddess.

As males came to be seen as the active force in creating life, the rules of society also changed to consolidate the power of the patriarchy.

One major shift was the development of private property and familial inheritance.

We often think of history as a steady progression, a series of improvements leading up to the happier days we find ourselves living in. But is this the case for women? Not quite, although there are areas where woman’s role in society has improved.

Starting in the fifteenth century, women began to take on a more prominent role in cultural life. Their lives were still overwhelmingly dominated by the institution of marriage, but some women gradually found ways of gaining access to previously male arenas.

As long as religion’s been around, it has influenced the way humans think and act. It’s also had a huge impact on the way we view women.

Indeed, many religions situate woman beneath man right from the beginning.

So is religion the only source for our ideas about women? Of course not – there are non-religious myths as well.

For example, there are many myths about menstruation, something only females experience. Even as late as the 1940s, many people in the south of France believed that, if salted by a menstruating woman, pork being cured for ham or bacon would go bad. And while this might seem absurd to us today, such thinking is perpetuated by phrases like, “Well, it’s her time of the month,” which implies that menstruation has such a mystical sway over women that they can no longer control their own behavior.

So if woman is something defined by history, religion and myths, how does one become a woman in the present?

The process begins right after birth. When children are born, their minds are the same. But when society divides them into girls and boys, it creates two very different ways of being in the world.

So what happens as the girls grow older?

As the separation between boys and girls becomes clearer, girls feel more and more trapped in their situation. At first they think that having children would be a nice thing, because they see the positive effect a mother’s care has on a young child. But as they grow older, and become less dependent on their mothers, girls begin to see being confined to the home as undesirable. Instead, they start to desire the father’s role, which is filled with possibility and agency. This desire is epitomized in a shocking statistic: the English physician Havelock Ellis showed that while only one percent of boys wanted to be girls, over 75 percent of girls wanted to be boys.

For men and women alike, the loss of virginity marks an initiation into the world of adulthood. But for women, this event is only one marker on the painful path to mature sexuality.

First the budding woman has a terrible insight: she will have sex with men, and this idea fills her with disgust. This is because the things the male gaze consumes – her breasts, her hips, her flesh – are the very symbols that make her a woman subjugated to male power. Many girls express this disgust by harming themselves, which allows them to both punish and take control over the flesh. In this way, a girl can create a feeling of agency by reenacting on herself the active man who hurts the passive woman.

We all know what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much: babies. And for female humans this marks the final transition to becoming woman.

In a patriarchal society, pregnancy symbolizes man’s transcendent power to plant a child in the immanent, female flesh.

We’ve seen how marriage has played a crucial role in the history of women's subjugation, but how have women been affected by marriage in more recent times?

In short, little has changed.

Subjugation isn’t always about money. It manifests itself in other ways, too.

For example, woman is pressured to dress in a way that pleases the male gaze – even when such dress is uncomfortable. Short skirts allow for less freedom of movement than trousers, and high heels quickly cause blisters. Skimpy lingerie don’t serve any practical purpose, while corsets make it difficult to breathe. But the male gaze is so strong that many women think that dressing “well” makes them feel good, when in fact it’s making them feel desired by the gaze that is forcing them to be desirable in the first place.

So, marriage and motherhood turn girls into women, but what about unmarried women? Aren’t they free from the trappings of a male-dominated culture?

Nope.

If the situation of women is so tragic, why do they not simply revolt?

When the author was writing, women’s rights was not yet a mass movement. And even today, despite the many women fighting for their rights, the majority of women are still constantly subjugated, which eliminates any feeling of responsibility for their situation, and makes them believe they are powerless to change it.

How many rom-coms have you seen where the woman justifies her relationship with some schmuck by saying, “But I love him!”

Why do they do that?

We’ve now seen the many forces that transform the female into woman – a grim process. But what about the future? Is equality on the horizon?

To be truly equal man and woman must see each other as peers, and that will require mutual recognition of the subjectivity of both man and woman. This means neither man nor woman may objectify the other. For example, think of an underwear ad where the male body is made into flesh for women’s pleasure. This reversal of power may feel satisfying to women, but, really, it only perpetuates antagonism between the sexes.