Study Guide to The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the book that arguably stands as the stepping stone for all
other feminists' work. As a work of post-WWII, The Second Sex stirred up controversary as women in France and America had just earned their right to vote and men who fought on the front returned home to reclaim the jobs that had been filled by women. Moreover, the fight for liberation and equality for women continues to impact politics and philosophy even today. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of de Beauvoir’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

BY WALTER JAMES MILLER, EDITOR, MONARCH NOTES, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

When - according to Simone de Beauvoir - did woman become inferior to man? Why is woman an easy prey to male domination? Why have women never rebelled against their male oppressors, as the Irish and the blacks have challenged theirs? Why has there never been a female Shakespeare or a female Beethoven? Why does de Beauvoir call marriage? “woman’s biggest trap”?

In what ways is The Second Sex based on de Beauvoir’s own life-style? How does her literary style resemble that of the Bible?

These and many other equally interesting questions are taken up in this Monarch Note. But it will have little meaning for you unless you have already read or are now reading The Second Sex (Vintage Books: Random House). The author, editors, and publishers of this study-guide assume it will prompt you often to refer to your copy of de Beauvoir’s masterpiece.

THE SECOND SEX: ITS PLACE IN HISTORY

Few books have contributed to the expansion of human consciousness as has The Second Sex by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. If Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) opened the twentieth century to psychology - the understanding of man’s inner world and the power of his sexuality - de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) opened the second half of the twentieth century to the reevaluation of women’s role throughout history in a world dominated by men, and subsequently, to women’s continuing struggle for emancipation and equality.

The Second Sex, published in France in two volumes, was an immediate success. Its first volume appeared in June 1949 and sold 22,000 copies in one week; the second appeared the following November and sold as well. Even before publication, three chapters had appeared in issues of Les Temps Modernes, and each issue was snatched from the newsstands. In 1953 it appeared in English translation and sold two million copies. It was translated into fifteen languages, and stayed on the best-seller list for a year in Japan.

Immediately it unleashed an unparalleled storm of controversy, evoking both praise and outrage. Simone de Beauvoir herself became the subject of admiration as well as of insult and mockery.

The Second Sex was much ahead of its time. It had been only four years prior to its appearance that women in France had finally won the right to vote. (In the USA women had won this right in 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.) As a matter of fact, a regressive period for women was already long under way by 1949, the year of the book’s publication. This was the period immediately following World War II, when men were returning from the front to reclaim those jobs that had been filled by women. Dutifully, most women returned to their homes amidst a general euphoria accompanied by a cultural blitz that hailed the “true woman” as synonymous with wife, homemaker, and mother. The baby-boom followed.

INFLUENCE IN USA

Fourteen years passed after the publication of The Second Sex before the women’s movement emerged. That much time was needed for Simone de Beauvoir’s radical ideas to ferment and for women to absorb them. In 1963 The Feminine Mystique by the American feminist Betty Friedan appeared and became a best-seller, having a tremendous influence as a consciousness-raiser among American women. Although in her book Better Friedan did not acknowledge her debt to Simone de Beauvoir, years later she admitted that it was de Beauvoir who had started here on the new road. Friedan adapted de Beauvoir’s ideas and simplified them to make them accessible to American women. She offered women the vision of equality within the system, while de Beauvoir insisted that only a restructuring of society would enable women to gain true equality. If Simone de Beauvoir was, and still is, the theoretician of the women’s liberation movement, Betty Friedan rendered the theory more tangible and made de Beauvoir’s ideas less revolutionary, more practical and accessible. In 1966, two years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique. NOW (The National Organization for Women) was founded in the USA. Three years after the formation of NOW the women’s movement began to organize in France but didn’t come into the forefront until 1971.

THE BIBLE FOR FEMINISTS

The Second Sex serves as the stepping stone for all other feminists’ work. The eruption of the women’s liberation movement years after the appearance of her radical study of womankind places Simone de Beauvoir as the uncontested mother figure of the movement. Although many feminists continue to take issue with some of her ideas, and others question her radical solution, they all acknowledge her, and in the process have produced many new studies and scholarly papers. These studies have encouraged scholars to investigate areas of womankind never probed before, and have turned women’s studies into a serious academic discipline in many universities. Simone de Beauvoir became a cult figure for many, and The Second Sex became required reading, a sort of Bible, for feminists. In spite of many serious reservations, it is still valid and powerful as a consciousness-raiser and as a classic in the field.

The Second Sex does not deal only with women’s condition and need for independence. In fact, it calls for a sweeping and radical revamping of an entire society. If women, half of the world population, will change their lives and become, like men, economically and emotionally independent, men too will be forced to change their lives. Not only will an equal number of women and men be in the workforce, but women also will compete with men. With women out of the home, the responsibilities of organizing the family and caring for children will have to be shared. Signs of this change are already visible in many places.

The year 1974, the 25th anniversary of The Second Sex, saw numerous conferences, essays, and a general celebration that epitomized The Second Sex as the classic study of woman. On its 30th anniversary in September 1979, a three-day conference. “The Second Sex - Thirty Years Later” was held at New York University and attended by over 800 women (and a few men) who came from throughout the United States and from abroad. At the conference, which featured presentations on women, culture, and society, it was acknowledged that The Second Sex still remains the only thorough attempt to understand the situation of modern women from a historical, economic, sociological, psychological, and literary point of view. The conference acknowledged the immense excitement that the book still generates among current feminists, and the debt they owe de Beauvoir.

The French minister at the recently founded Ministry of Women’s Rights, Yvette Roudy, has summed up the importance of de Beauvoir’s achievement in Because of Them (1985)

If there had not been Simone de Beauvoir’s very complete, very solid, and enduringly true theoretical and historical analysis, the effects of the women’s movement struggles which sprang up around 1968 would not have been as powerful.

I do not think that any movement, whatever it might be, can thrive unless it is based on a serious, coherent analysis of the situation, and it is the framework furnished by Simone de Beauvoir that permits us to work and advance even today. If I had not read The Second Sex and other texts by Simone de Beauvoir, I would not have the self-assurance which I do to continue the task I’m in the process of accomplishing.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: A WOMAN WHO LIVED LIKE A MAN

Simone de Beauvoir’s life is as revolutionary as her book The Second Sex. In her life, she put into practice the ideas she advocated in her famous book: a woman should be economically and emotionally independent and live to her full potential as a human being. Although today we see more and more such independent women, it was almost unheard of when Simone de Beauvoir was growing up in the beginning of this century. She actually had the courage and the strength of conviction to live like a man. Many women looked up to her with admiration and sought to imitate her way of living. No wonder that she became a model and symbol for the new woman.

At a time when women’s main function in life was conceived as being housewives, wives, and mothers, Simone de Beauvoir rejected home, marriage, and motherhood. Refusing to be enslaved to a house, she lived in hotels. Refusing to be dependent on a man or to serve one, she rejected marriage and worked for her living. To fulfill her potential as a human being, she dedicated her life to her writing career. She had a lifelong relationship with a man without marrying him or even living with him - a moral sin and inconceivable behavior in the thirties, especially for a woman. To exercise complete freedom and experience the richness of life, she took lovers and kept her relationships in the open.

In short, she took complete charge of her life, inventing the kind of life she wanted to live. The Second Sex is a call for women to take charge of their lives, to choose freedom and independence rather than servitude to men.

De Beauvoir herself was rigidly educated to yield to authority, be it parental or religious, and to conform to the decorum and constraint of her upper social class. The fact that she rebelled and rejected her social and religious background gives credit to her very inquisitive and intelligent mind that questioned received ideas and every convention, while constructing an altogether different life for herself.

“I have never met anyone in the whole of my life who was so well equipped for happiness as I was, or who labored so stubbornly to achieve it,” she wrote in the second volume of her autobiography. That happiness is not a matter of mere luck but of choice and hard work; that people are responsible for the kind of lives they live; and that being happy is a matter of personal decision - these are profound and daring concepts. They definitely worked in Simone de Beauvoir’s case.

THE EARLY YEARS

Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris, a city she loved and where she lived all her life. The family had an apartment overlooking the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, the “Greenwich Village” of Paris. Simone and her younger sister, Helene, used to watch passers - by from their balcony, with Simone inventing lives for them.

Home was besieged by contradictions. Although both her parents came from the upper class, they could not afford living in accordance with their class, and the gap between their social standing and their economic standard created a keen and perennial tension that cast its shadow over all their lives. Her father, George, a handsome, life-loving man, was a lawyer by profession, though he hardly practiced it, and an actor by passion. He loved the theatre but his social status prevented him from pursuing a career in the theatre. Still, he spent much of his free time acting with amateur groups and associating with theatre people who often filled the house with merriment and recitation.

“BOURGEOIS MARRIAGE … UNNATURAL”

Her father’s joy of life and devout individualism contrasted greatly with her mother’s rigid conventionalism. Simone’s mother came from a richly bourgeois, Catholic family. She was promised a large dowry when she married George de Beauvoir, but her father, a banker, was forced into bankruptcy - a disgrace and a crime at the time - when Simone was one year old. From that time her mother continuously felt guilty and responsible for the family’s near-poverty situation. She took upon herself the role of caring for the household without any servants, but became very bitter as a result. “Outdated ideas prevented her from working away from home,” wrote Simone years later; had she done it “she would have risen in her own esteem … she would have escaped from a state of dependence that tradition made her think natural but that did not … agree with her nature.” Her mother was very formal and rigid, “her heart and mind had been squeezed into an armor of principles and prohibitions,” and from an early age Simone knew that she was not going to live like her mother. And when she observed her father coming home in the early hours of the morning after having visited one of his women friends, smelling of liquor - and her mother’s silent bitterness - she concluded that “bourgeois marriage is an unnatural institution.”

Simone was “a madly gay little girl,” brimming with energy and “very, very happy” although from an early age she was prone to fits of rage, falling to the ground in convulsions, her face turning purple. She was very gifted and learned to read at three, reciting poems and little stories her father had taught her, or which she wrote herself. At seven her proud parents bound her stories into a book. The evenings would pass with her father reading aloud to his family from the great classics, and often they would act and recite together. Simone grew up to love books and learning and to think that to be an author was the greatest occupation.

But the family was relatively poor, and long into her teens Simone and her sister wore their rich cousins’ hand-me-down dresses. Her parents were too poor to have her educated at home by governesses as were her cousins and the other children of the upper class. At the age of five she attended a very rigid religious school, but she loved learning and rose to the top of her class. There she met her classmate Zaza, a vivacious, bright little girl, and the two became inseparable for years.

A REBEL AT 12

When she was 12 Simone began to rebel against her parents and question the validity of their values. This soon led her to lose faith in religion and to reject bourgeois conventions and modes of behavior. Following a heated argument, she would often hear her father say, “Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.”

Financially the situation at home deteriorated and the family had to move to a smaller and less expensive apartment. Knowing that there would be no dowries for the girls and therefore no possibility of marriage, her father encouraged his daughters to study. “My dears,” he told them, bitterly acknowledging his failure, “you’ll have to work for your living.” But later, when Simone did just what he had told her, he resented her for it and she was very hurt. She expressed the turbulence of her feeling in the diary she had been keeping. At 15, when she was asked what she would be later in life, she answered, “a famous author,” and she obsessively pursued the goal she had set for herself.

EXCELLING IN STUDIES

Simone decided to continue her studies in the university, although it was unheard of for a girl of her class. She excelled in all her studies, which consisted of literature, mathematics, Latin, and philosophy, but even her amassing of diplomas did not satisfy her father, who rejected a daughter with the brain of a man. She was often lonely and depressed, and in her diary at that time of her life, words such as “...