The Second Sex: Select excerpts

Insofar as woman is concerned the absolute Other, that is–whatever magic powers she has–as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject. Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself for-itself before a male group; they have never had a direct or autonomous relationship with men. "The relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship", said Lévi-Strauss. Woman's concrete condition is not affected by the type of lineage that prevails in the society to which she belongs; whether the regime is patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or undifferentiated (undifferentiation never being precise), she is always under men's guardianship; the only question is if, after marriage, she is still subjected to the authority of her father or her oldest brother–authority that will also extend to her children– or of her husband. In any case: "The woman is never anything more than the symbol of her lineage. Matrilineal descent is the authority of the woman's father or brother extended to the brother-in-law's village." She only mediates the law; she does not possess it. In fact, it is the relationship of two masculine groups that is defined by the system of filiation, and not the relation of the two sexes.

Here is an important fact that recurs throughout history: abstract rights cannot sufficiently define the concrete situation of woman; this situation depends in great part on the economic role she plays; and very often, abstract freedom and concrete powers vary inversely.

"Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal property, and the possession of her is as good as a security–indeed, properly speaking, woman is only man's annexe." Here [Balzac] is speaking for the bourgeoisie, which intensified its antifeminism in reaction to eighteenth-century license and threatening progressive ideas. Having brilliantly presented the idea at the beginning of They Physiology of Marriage that this loveless institution forcibly leads the wife to adultry, Balzac exhorts husbands to rein in wives to total subjugation if they want to avoid the ridicule of dishonor. They must be denied training and culture, forbidden to develop their individuality, forced to wear uncomfortable clothing, and encouraged to follow a debilitating dietary regime. The bourgeoisie follows this program exactly, confining women to the kitchen and to housework, jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed in daily life rituals that hindered all attempts at independence. In return, they are honored and endowed with the most exquisite respect. "The married woman is a slave who must be seated on a throne," says Balzac; of course men must give in to women in all irrelevant circumstances, yielding them first place; women must not carry heavy burdens as in primitive societies; they are readily spared all painful tasks and worries: at the same time this relieves them of all responsibility. It is hoped that, thus duped, seduced by the ease of the condition, they will accept the role of mother and housewife to which they are being confined. And in fact, most bourgeois women capitulate. As their education and their parasitic situation makes them dependent on men, they never date to voice their claims: those who do are hardly heard. It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women's liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband's, she would deplore even more having this property be abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women; she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.

Abortion was officially recognized, but only for a short time, in Germany before Nazism and in the Soviet Union before 1936. But in spite of religion and laws, it has been practiced in all countries to a large extent. In France, every year 800,000 to 1 million abortions are performed–as many as births–and two-thirds of the women are married, many already having one or two children. In spite of the prejudices, resistance, and an outdated morality, unregulated fertility has given way to fertility controlled by the state or individuals. Progress in obstetrics has considerably decreased the dangers of childbirth; childbirth pain is disappearing; at this time–March 1949–legislation has been passed in England requiring the use of certain anesthetic methods; they are already generally applied in the United States and are beginning to spread in France. With artificial insemination, the evolution that will permit humanity to master the reproductive function comes to completion. These changes have tremendous importance for woman in particular; she can reduce the number of pregnancies and rationally integrate them into her life, instead of being their slave. During the nineteenth century, woman in her turn is freed from nature; she wins control of her body. Relieved of a great number of reproductive servitudes, she can take on the economic roles open to her, roles that would ensure her control over her own person.

[Of man:] But he does not like difficulty; he is afraid of danger. He has contradictory aspirations to both life and rest, existence and being; he knows very well that "a restless spirit" is the ransom for his development, that his distance from the object is the ransom for his being present to himself; but he dreams of restfulness in restlessness and of an opaque plenitude that his consciousness would nevertheless still inhabit. This embodied dream is, precisely, woman; she is the perfect intermediary between nature that is foreign to man and the peer who is too identical to him. She pits neither the hostile silence of nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition against him; by a unique privilege she is a consciousness, and yet it seems possible to possess her in the flesh. Thanks to her, there is a way to escape the inexorable dialectic of the master and the slave that springs from the reciprocity of freedoms.

[...] [Woman] emerged as the inessential who never returned to the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. [...] She is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. [...] Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in the subject's eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her.

The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude: whatever his hidden intention, hit is significant in itself. Pissing on caterpillars, Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and exterminating others; he takes a laughing pity on those that are determined to live and generally lets them off; he is delighted by this game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would have been just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in front of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God's despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. Likewise, faced with female animals, the male, from the top of his pedestal, sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes unpredictable, gives, takes back, satisfies, pities, or gets irritated; he defers to nothing but his own pleasure; he is soverign, free, and unique. But these animals must not be anything but animals; they would be chosen on purpose, their weaknesses would be flattered; they would be treated as animals with such determination that they would end up accepting their condition. In similar faction, the blacks' petty robberies and lies charmed the whites of Louisiana and Georgia, confirming the superiority of their own skin color; and if one of these Negroes persists in being honest, he is treated even worse. In similar fashion, the debasement of man was systematically practiced in the concentration camps; the ruling race found proof in this abjection that it was of superhuman essence.

As for Stendhal, we saw that woman barely takes on a mythical value for him: he considers her also being a transcendence; for this humanist, it is in their reciprocal relations that freedoms are accomplished; and it is sufficient that the Other is simply another for life to have, according to him, a little spice; he does not seek a stellar equilibrium, he does not nourish himself with the bread of disgust; he does not expect miracles; he wishes to concern himself not with the cosmos or poetry but with freedoms.

That is, he also experiences himself as a translucent freedom. The others–and this is one of the most important points–posit themselves as transcendents but feel they are prisoners of an opaque presence in their own hearts: they project onto woman this "unbreakable core of night". In Montherlant there is an Alderian complex where heavy bad faith is born: these pretensions and fears are what he incarnates in woman; the disgust he feels for her is what he fears to feel for himself; he intends to trample in her the ever possible proof of his insufficiency; he asks scorn to save him; woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that inhabit him. Lawrence's life shows us that he suffered from an analogous complex but more purely sexual: woman in his work has the value of a compensatory myth; through her is found an exalted virility of which the write was not very sure; when he describes Kate at Don Cipriano's feet, he believes he has won a male triumph over Frieda; nor does he accept that his female companion challenges him: if she contested his aims, he would probably lose confidence in them; her role is to reassure him. He asks for peace, rest, and faith from her, just as Montherlant asks for the certitude of his superiority; they demand what they lack. Self-confidence is not lacking in Claudel: if he is shy, it is only the secret of God. Thus, there is no trace of the battle of the sexes. Man bravely takes on the weight of woman: she is the possibility of temptation or of salvation. For Breton it seems that man is only true through the mystery that inhabits him; it pleases him that Nadja sees that star he is going toward and that is like a "heartless flower"; his dreams, intuitions, and the spontaneous unfolding of his inner language: it is in these activities that are out of the control of the will and reason that he recognizes himself: woman is the tangible figure of this veiled presence infinitely more essential than her conscious personality.

As for Stendhal, he quietly coincides with himself; but he needs woman as she does him so that his dispersed existence is gathered in the unity of a figure and a destiny; it is as for-another that the human being reaches being; but another still has to lend him his consciousness: other men are too indifferent to their peers; only the woman in love opens her heart to her lover and shelters in its entirety. Except for Claudel, who finds a perfect witness in God, all the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux's words, woman to cherish in them this "incomparable monster" known to themselves alone. In collaboration or combat, men will come up against each other in their generality. Montherlant, for his peers, is a writer, Lawrence a doctrinaire, Breton a leader of a school, Stendhal a diplomat or a man of wit; it is women who reveal in one a magnificent and cruel prince, in another a disturbing animal, in still another a god or a sun or a being "black and cold...like a man struck by lightning, lying at the feet of ths Sphinx," and in the other a seducer, a charmer, a lover.

For each of them, the ideal woman will be she who embodies the most exactly the Other able to reveal him to himself. [...] [The] only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, sould sister, woman-sex, and female animale is always man. Regardless of the ego looking for itself through her, it can only attain itself if she consents to be his crucible. In any case, what is demanded of her is self-forgetting and love. [...] Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice; they desire it without claiming to deserve it; but–except for the astonishing Lamiel–all their works show they expect from woman this altruism that Comte admired in and imposed on her, and which, according to him, also constituted both a flagrant inferiority and an equal superiority.

We could find many more examples: they would always lead to the same conclusions. In defining woman, each writer defines his general ethic and the singular idea he has of himself: it is also in her that he often registers the distance between his view of the world and his egotistical dreams. [...] [In all cases, woman] as other still plays a role inasmuch as even to transcend himself, each man still needs to take consciousness of himself.

Certainly fidelity is necessary for sexual love, since the two lovers' desire encompasses their singularity; they do not want it contested by outside experiences, they want to be irreplaceable for each other; but this fidelity has meaning only as long as it is spontaneous; and spontaneously, erotic magic dissolves rather quickly. The miracle is that it gives to each of the lovers, in the instant and in their carnal presence, a being whose existence is an unlimited transcendence: and possession of this being is undoubtedly impossible, but at least each of them is reached in a privileged and poignant way. But when individuals no longer want to reach each other because of hostility, disgust, or indifference between them, erotic attraction disappears; and it dies almost as surely in esteem and friendship; two human beings who come together in the very moment of their transcendence through the world and their common projects no longer need carnal union; and further, because this union has lost its union, they are repelled by it [...] Eroticism is a movement toward the Other, and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses become, for each other, the Same; no exchange is possible between them anymore, no giving, no conquest.

Throughout her childhood, the little girl was bullied and mutilated; but she nonetheless grasped herself as an autonomous individual; in her relations with her family and friends, in her studies and games, she saw herself in the present as a transcendence: her future passivity was something she only imagined. Once she enters puberty, the future not only moves closer: it settles into her body; it becomes the most concrete reality. It retains the fateful quality it always had; while the adolescent boy is actively routed toward adulthood, the girl looks forward to the opening of this new and unforeseeable period where the plot is already hatched and toward which time is drawing her. As she is already detached from her childhood past, the present is for her only a transition; she sees no valid end in it, only occupations. In a more or less disguised way, her youth is consumed by waiting. She is waiting for Man.

At about thirteen, boys serve a veritable apprenticeship in violence, developing their aggressiveness, their will for power, and their taste for competition; it is exactly at this moment that the little girl renounces rough games. [...] [The] attitude of defiance, so important for boys, is unknown to them; true, women compare themselves with each other, but defiance is something other than these passive confrontations: two freedoms confront each other as having a hold on the world whose limits they intend to push; climbing higher than a friend or getting the better in arm wrestling is affirming one's sovereignty over the world. These conquering actions are not permitted to the girl, and violence in particular is not permitted to her. [...] The male has recourse to his fists and fighting when he encounters any affront or attempt to reduce him to an object: he does not let himself be transcended by others; he finds himself again in the heart of his subjectivity. [...] In the South of the United states, it is strictly impossible for a black person to use violence against whites; this rule is the key to the mysterious "black soul"; the way the black experiences himself in the white world, his behavior in adjusting to it, the compensations he seeks, his whole way of feeling and acting, are explained on the basis of the passivity to which he is condemned. [...] In the same way, for the adolescent boy who is allowed to manifest himself imperiously, the universe has a totally different face from what it has for the adolescent girl whose feelings are deprived of immediate effectiveness; the former ceaselessly calls the world into question, he can at every instance revolt against the given and thus has the impression of actively confirming it when he accepts it; the latter only submits to it; the world is defined without her, and its face is immutable. This lack of physical power expresses itself as a more general timidity: she does not believe in a force she has not felt in her body, she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation, she can only accept a place that society has already made for her. She accepts the order of things as a given.

There is an obscene paradox in the superimposing of a pompous ceremony on a brutally real animal function. The wedding presents its universal and abstract meaning: a man and a woman are united publicly according to symbolic rites; but in the secrecy of the bed it is concrete and singular individuals who confront each other face-to-face, and all gazes turn away from their embraces. [...] It is stupid and barbaric to want to put it all into one night; it is absurd to transform an operation as difficult as the first coitus into a duty. The woman is all the more terrorized by the fact that the strange operation she is subjected to is sacred; and that society, religion, family, and friends delivered her solemnly to the husband as to a master; and in addition, that the act seems to engage her whole future, because marriage still has a definitive character. This is when she feels truly revealed in the absolute: this man to whom she is pledged to the end of time embodies all of Man in her eyes; and he is revealed to her, too, as a figure she has not heretofore known, which is of immense importance since he will be her lifelong companion. However, the man himself is anguished by the duty weighing on him; he has his own difficulties and his own complexes that make him shy and clumsy or on the contrary brutal; many men are impotent on their wedding night because of the very solemnity of marriage. [...] Too much impetuousness frightens the virgin, too much respect humiliates her; women forever hate the man who has taken his pleasure at the expense of their suffering; but they feel an eternal resentment against the one who seems to disdain them, and often against the one who has not attempted to deflower them the first night or who was unable to do it. [...] The "wedding night" transforms the erotic experience into an ordeal that neither partner is able to surmount, too involved with personal problems to think generously of each other; it is invested with a solemnity that makes it formidable; and it is not surprising that it often dooms the woman to frigidity forever. The difficult problem facing the husband is this: if he "titillates his wife too lasciviously," she might be scandalized or outraged; it seems this fear paralyzes American husbands, among others, especially in college-educated couples, says the Kinsey Report, because wives, more conscious of themselves, are more deeply inhibited. But if he "respects" her, he fails to waken her sensuality. This dilemma is created by the ambiguity of the feminine attitude: the young woman both wants and rejects pleasure; she demands a delicateness from which she suffers.

A normal man considers objects around him as instruments; he arranges them according to the purpose for which they are intended; his "order"–where woman will often see disorder–is to have his cigarettes, his papers, and his tools within reach. [...] But to find a home in oneself, one must first have realized oneself in works or acts. Man has only a middling interest in his domestic interior because he has access to the entire universe and because he can affirm himself in his projects. Woman, instead, is locked into the conjugal community: she has to change this prison into a kingdom. Her attitude to her home is dictated by this same dialectic that generally defines her condition: she takes by becoming prey, she liberates by abdicating; by renouncing the world, she means to conquer a world.

She regrets closing the doors of her home behind herself; as a young girl, the whole world was her kingdom; the forests belonged to her. Now she is confined to a restricted space; Nature is reduced to the size of a geranium pot. [...] But she is going to make every attempt to refuse this limitation. She encloses faraway countries and past times within her four walls in the form of more or less expensive earthly flora and fauna; she encloses her husband, who personifies human society for her, and the child who gives her the whole future in a portable form. [...] Especially at evening time, when the shutters are closed, woman feels like a queen; the light shed at noon by the universal sun disturbs her; at night she is no longer dispossessed, because she does away with that which she does not possess; from under the lamp shade she sees a light that is her own and that illuminates her abode alone: nothing else exists.

Logic in masculine hands is often violence. Chardonne explained this kind of sly oppression well in Epithalaminum. Older, more cultivated, and more educated than Berthe, Albert uses this pretext to deny any value to opinions of his wife that he does not share; he untiringly proves he is right; for her part she becomes adamant and refuses to accept that there is any substance in her husband's reasoning: he persists in his ideas, and that is the end of it. Thus a serious misunderstanding deepens between them. He does not try to understand feelings or deep-rooted reactions she cannot justify; she does not understand what lives behind her husband's pedantic and overwhelming logic. He even goes so far as to become irritated by the ignorance she never hid from him, and challenges her with questions about astronomy; he is flattered nonetheless, to tell her what to read, to find in her a listener he can easily dominate. In a struggle where her intellectual shortcomings condemn her to losing every time, the young wife has no defense other than silence, or tears, or violence.

Many young couples give the impression of perfect equality. But as long as the man has economic responsibility for the couple, it is just an illusion. He is the one who determines the conjugal domicile according to the demands of his job: she follows him from the provinces to Paris, from Paris to the provinces, the colonies, abroad; the standard of living is fixed according to his income; the rhythm of the days, the weeks, and the year is organized on the basis of his occupations; relations and friendships most often depend on his profession. Being more positively integrated than his wife into society, he leads the couple in intellectual, political, and moral areas. Divorce is only an abstract possibility for the wife, if she does not have the means to earn her own living: while alimony in America is a heavy burden for the husband, in France the lot of the wife and mother abandoned with a derisory pension is scandalous. But the deep inequality stems from the fact that the husband finds concrete accomplishment in work or action while for the wife in her role as a wife, freedom has only a negative form. [...]

It is also true that the man is more defenseless than previously against this despotism; he recognizes his wife's abstract rights, and he understands that she can concretize them only through him: it is at his own expense that he will compensate for the powerlessness and the sterility the wife is condemned to; to realize an apparent equality in their association, he has to give her more because he possesses more. But precisely because she receives, takes, and demands, she is the poorer. The dialectic of the master and slave has its most concrete application here: in oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Males are chains by their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that the wife demands checks, because men alone practice a profession that the wife demands that they succeed, because they alone embody transcendence that the wife wants to steal it from them by taking over their projects and successes. [...]

The situation has to be changed in their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a "career" for the woman. Men who declare themselves antifeminist with the excuse that "women are already annoying enough as it is" are not very logical: it precisely because marriage makes them "praying mantises," "bloodsuckers," and "poison" that marriage has to be changed and, as a consequence, the feminine condition in general. woman weighs so heavily on man because she is forbidden to rely on herself; he will free himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something to do in this world.

Very often the kept woman interiorizes her dependence; subjected to public opinion, she accepts its values; she admires the "fashionable world" and adopts its customs; she wants to be regarded according to bourgeois standards. She is a parasite of the rich bourgeoisie, and she adheres to its ideas; she is "right thinking"; in former times she would readily send her daughters to a convent school, and as she got older, she even went to Mass and openly converted. She is on the conservative's side. She is too proud to have made her place in this world to want to change. The struggle she wages to "arrive" does not dispose her to feelings of brotherhood and human solidarity; she paid for success with too much slavish compliance to sincerly wish for universal freedom. 615

In the United States, the influence of venerated "Moms" is strong; this is explained by the leisure time their parasitic existence leaves them; and this is why it is harmful. "Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation", says Philip Wylie, speaking of the American Mom, "she seldom has any especial interest in what, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is _something." Their effort is not integrated into a coherent and constructive plan, it does not aim at objective ends: imperiously, it tends only to show their tastes and prejudices or to serve their interests. They play a considerable role in the domain of culture, for example: it is they who buy the most books; but they read as one plays a game of solitaire; literature takes its meaning and dignity when it is addressed to individuals committed to projects, when it helps them surpass themselves toward greater horizons; it must be integrated into the movement of human transcendence. [...] Not being specialized in politics or economics or any technical discipline, old women have no concrete hold on society; they are unaware of the problems action poses; they are incapable of elaborating a constructive program. Their morality is abstract and formal, like Kant's imperatives; they issue prohibitions instead of trying to discover the paths of progress; they do not positively try to create new situations; they attack what already exists in order to do away with the evil in it; this explains why they are always forming coalitions against something–against alcohol, prostitution, or pornography–they do not understand that a purely negative effort is doomed to be unsuccesssful, as evidenced by the failure of prohibition in America or the law in France voted by Marthe Richard. As long as woman remains a parasite, she cannot effectively participate in the building of a better world.

The "feminine world" is sometimes contrasted with masculine universe, but it must be reiterated that women have never formed an autonomous and closed society; they are integrated into the group governed by males, where they occupy a subordinate position; they are united by a mechanical solidarity only insofar as they are similar: they do not share that organic solidarity upon which any unified community is founded; they have always endeavored–in the period of the Eleusinian mysteries just like today in clubs, salons, and recreation rooms–to band together to assert a "counter-universe," but it is still within the masculine universe that they frame it.

The notion of miracle differs from the idea of magic: from within a rationally determined world a miracle posits the radical discontinuity of an event without cause against which any thinking shatters, whereas magic phenomena are united by secret forces of which a docile consciousness can embrace the continuous becoming–without understanding it. The newborn is miraculous for the demigod father, magic for the mother who has undergone the ripening in her womb. Man's experience is intelligible but full of holes; that of the wife is, in its own limits, obscure but complete. This opacity weighs her down; the male is light in his relations with her: he has the lightness of dictators, generals, judges, bureaucrats, codes, and abstract principles. This is undoubtedly what the housewife meant when, shrugging her shoulders, she murmured: "Men, they don't think!" Women also say: "Men, they don't know; they don't know life." As a contrast to the myth of the praying mantis, they juxtapose the symbol of the frivolous and importunate bumblebee.

It is understandable why, from this perspective, woman objects to masculine logic. Not only does it not have bearing on her experience, but she also knows that in men's hands reason becomes an insidious form of violence; their peremptory affirmations are intended to mystify her. They want to confine her in a dilemma: either you agree or you don't; she has to agree in the name of the whole system of accepted principles: in refusing to agree, she rejects the whole system; she cannot allow herself such a dramatic move; she does not have the means to create another society: yet she does not agree with this one. Halfway between revolt and slavery, she unwillingly resigns herself to masculine authority. He continuously uses force to make her shoulder the consequences of her reluctant submission. He pursues the chimera of a freely enslaved companion: he wants her to yield to him as yielding to the proof of a theorem; but she knows he himself has chosen the postulates on which his vigorous deductions are hung; as long as she avoids questioning them, he will easily silence her; nevertheless, he will not convince her, because she senses their arbitrariness. Thus will he accuse her, with stubborn irritation, of being illogical: she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded.

The woman does not positively think that the truth is other than what men claim: rather, she holds that there is no truth. It is not only life's becoming that makes her suspicious of the principle of identity, nor the magic phenomena surrounding her that ruin the notion of causality: it is at the heart of the masculine world itself, it is in her as belonging to this world, that she grasps the ambiguity of all principles, of all values, of all that exists.

There is a justification, a supreme compensation, that society has always been bent on dispensing to woman: religion. There must be religion for women as for the people, for exactly the same reasons: when a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, the mirage of transcendence must be offered to it. It is to man's total advantage to have God endorse the codes he creates: and specifically because he exercises sovereign authority over the woman, it is only right that this authority be conferred on him by the soverign being. [...] Woman adopts an attitude of respect and faith before the masculine universe: God in his heaven seems barely farther from her than a government minister, and the mystery of Genesis matches that of an electrical power station. But more important, if she throws herself so willingly into religion, it is because religion fills a profound need. In modern civilization, where freedom plays an important role–even for the woman–religion becomes less of an instrument of constraint than of mystification. The woman is less often asked to accept her inferiority in the name of God than to believe, thanks to him, that she is equal to the male lord; even the temptation to revolt is avoided by pretending to overcome injustice. The woman is no longer robbed of her transcendence, since she will dedicate her immanence to God; souls' merits are judged only in heaven and not according to their terrestrial accomplishments; here below, as Dostoevsky would have said, they are never more than occupations: shining shoes or building a bridge is the same vanity; over and above social discriminations, equality of the sexes is reestablished.

An authentic love should take on the other's contingence, that is, his lacks, limitations, and originary gratuitousness; it would claim to be not a salvation but an inter-human relation. Idolatrous love confers an absolute value on the loved one: this is the first lie strikingly apparent to all outsiders: "He doesn't deserve so much love," people whisper around the woman in love; posterity smiles pityingly when evoking the pale figure of Count Guibert. It is a heartrending disappointment for the woman to discover her idol's weaknesses and mediocrity. [...] Even if the chosen one is worthy of the deepest attachment, his truth is earthbound: it is not he whom the woman kneeling before existence; her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships. She flatters him, she bows down before him, but she is not a friend for him, since she does not realize he is in danger in the world, that his projects and finalities are as fragile as he himself is; considering him the Law and Truth, she misunderstands his freedom, which is hesitation and anguish. This refusal to apply a human measure to the lover explains many feminine paradoxes. The woman demands a favor from the lover, he grants it: he is generous rich, magnificent, he is royal, he is divine; if he refuses, he is suddenly stingy, mean and cruel, he is a devilish being or bestial. One might be tempted to counter: If a yes is understood as a superb extravagance, why should one be surprised by a no? If the no manifests such an abject egotism, why admire the yes so much? Between the superhuman and the inhuman is there not room for the human?

[...] The woman will be able to find her joy in this enrichment she brings to her loved one; she is not All for him: but she will try to believe herself indispensable; there are no degrees in necessity. If he cannot "get along without her," she considers herself the foundation of his precious existence, and she derives her own worth from that. her joy is to serve him: but he must gratefully recognize this service; giving becomes demand according to the customary dialectic of devotion. And a woman of scrupulous mind asks herself: Is it really me he needs? The man cherishes her, desires her with singular tenderness and desire: But would he not have just as singular feelings for another? Many women in love let themselves be deluded; they want to ignore the fact that the general is enveloped in the particular, and the man facilitates this illusion because he shares it at first; there is often in his desire a passion that seems to defy time; at the moment he desires this woman, he desires her with passion, he wants only her: and certainly the moment is an absolute, but a momentary absolute. Duped, the woman passes into the eternal. Deified by the embrace of the master, she believes she has always been divine and destined for the god: she alone. But male desire is as fleeting as it is imperious; once satisfied, it dies rather quickly, while it is most often after love that the woman becomes his prisoner.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate his transcendence; they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and end in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe.

Women–except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences–do not use "we"; men say "women", and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. [...] Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. they have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work economic interests, and social conditions to certain men–fathers or husbands–more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in history. [...] The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: cleavage of society by sex is not possible. This is the fundamental characteristic of women: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other.