Introduction The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir written in 1949 I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman.

n. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel for women; it is now almost over; lets not talk about it any more. Yet it is still being talked about . . . It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all, what place they hold in this world, what place they should hold. Yet at the same time, femininity is considered to be in jeopardy; we are urged, Be women, stay women, become women. So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. If the female function is not enough to define woman, and if we also reject the explanation of the eternal feminine, but if we accept, even temporarily, that there are women on the earth, we then have to ask: what is a woman? This is a question that de Beauvoir attempts to grapple with in later parts of the book. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being . . . He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other. In asking why it is harder for women to contest male sovereignty de Beauvoir notes that women face an unusual and unique problem that contrasts starkly from other civil and human rights movements. Black people, the working class and Jews were often forced to live in their own ghettos they share a different physical and social space from their oppressors, making the Us and Them dynamic more apparent. Women have no past, no history, no religion of their own . . . They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests and social conditions to certain men. . . This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. In no country is her legal status identical to mans and often it puts her at a considerable disadvantage. Even when her rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs. Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so on, and they hold the most important positions. Women are often complicit in their own oppression, in their own Otherness because they see themselves as benefitting from being the Other particularly in relation to men. The familiar line from George Bernard Shaw sums it up: The white American relegates the black to the rank of shoe-shine boy, and then concludes that black are only good for shining shoes. Women are often worse or inferior when it comes to certain things (such as employability and education), because their capacities are shaped by a society that already condemns them to a state of inferiority. How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which one lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit womens freedom and can she overcome them?