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t. e. The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. [3]
Donna Haraway wrote that, "despite important differences, all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born a woman [one becomes one].'" [7] This "most famous feminist sentence ever written" [92] is echoed in the title of Monique Wittig's 1981 essay One Is Not Born a Woman.
Beauvoir examined women's subordinate role as the 'Other', patriarchally forced into immanence [11] in her book, The Second Sex, which some claim to be the culmination of her existential ethics. [12] The book includes the famous line, "One is not born but becomes a woman," introducing what has come to be called the sex-gender distinction.
Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555) by Titian, showing the goddess Venus as the personification of femininity. Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed, [ 1 ][ 2 ] and there is also some evidence that some behaviors ...
In the book, de Beauvoir put forward the idea that equality did not require women be masculine to become empowered. [41] With her famous statement, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", she laid the groundwork for the concept of gender as a social construct, as opposed to a biological trait. [42]
As an existentialist, de Beauvoir accepted Jean-Paul Sartre's precept that existence precedes essence; hence "one is not born a woman, but becomes one". Her analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other , this de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. [ 18 ]
"One Is Not Born a Woman", delivered in September 1979 at the "30th Anniversary Conference of the Second Sex" held at New York University, takes up the outcomes of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist political visions for lesbians. [6] Wittig writes "Lesbians Are Not Women" under the assumption that the term "woman" is defined by men. [7]
Judith Pamela Butler[1] (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, [2] queer theory, [3] and literary theory. [4]