The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir

Instructor: Liu Ying刘英

Your Topic Goes Here

One is not born,

but rather becomes,

a woman.

The Second Sex

★Woman as the second sex

★The second sex derived from the first sex

★Women in the position of the “other”

★What does it mean to be an “other”?

★I and the other

★We and the other

Themes

★ Immanence vs. Transcendence

★ Nature vs. Nurture

★ Production vs. Reproduction

Motifs

★ The Eternal Feminine

• This myth takes many forms—the sanctity of the mother, the purity of the virgin, the fecundity of the earth and of the womb—but in all cases serves to deny women‘s individuality and trap them inside unrealizable ideals.

• De Beauvoir points out that just as there is no such thing as the “eternal masculine,” there is no such thing as “eternal feminine.” Or, to put it differently: there is no essence, only experience. All beings, de Beauvoir insists, have the right to define their own existences rather than labor under some vague notion of “femininity.”

★The Other

•  De Beauvoir uses the term Other throughout The Second Sex to diagnose the female's secondary position in society as well as within her own patterns of thought.

• For a being to define itself, it must also define something in opposition to itself. “At the moment when man asserts himself as subject and free being, the idea of the Other arises,” She completes him, but she herself is incomplete.

Simone de BeauvoirThe Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe, June 1949) is one of the best known works of the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.

she is considered the mother of post-1968 feminism. There has also been a growing awareness of her as a major French thinker and existentialist philosopher.

Essentialism about sexual difference

• Women´s essence = women have certain attributes, all women and everywhere and at all times

• This is biological essentialism• According to it women have

biological basis that makes them cognitively and morally different from men (less rational and less morally accountable)

• Essentialism about sexual difference is therefore a very much criticized doctrine

S. de Beauvoir and J.P. Sartre

The final conclusion

Men and women should work together and respect each other as equal.