The Second Sex: Woman as the Other

Abstract

At an early stage in the Introduction to The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir quotes, with approval, the following passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’¹ As de Beauvoir sees it there are two such dualities, or contrasts, to be noted in social reality as we know it. First, there is the duality of the Subject and the Other; second, there is the duality of Man and Woman. These pairs of opposites are not unrelated, moreover: Man always appears as the Subject, while Woman always appears as the Other.