Summary Of The Second Sex By Simone De Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: Introduction
Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
Summary and Analysis The Second Sex is one of the earliest attempts to confront human history from a feminist perspective. De Beauvoir starts to ask multiple questions about women’s existence. She wonders to know “what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be.” It is a fact that females exist in the human species, and they make up about one half of humanity, but de Beauvoir seeks to get an answer to her question: what a woman is. She argues that her function as a female is not enough to define women. De Beauvoir begins her research to get an answer to her question. She notes that the relationship between the two sexes, men and women, is not equal as on the legal papers. Men represent both the positive and the neutral while women represent only the negative. De Beauvoir finally infers that man fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them as “the Other”. Frist, de Beauvoir states that “humanity is male and man defines woman not to herself but as a relative to him: she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” Man is the subject while woman is the object. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. On the other hand, she is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. According to de Beauvoir, the two sexes do not share the same word equally. For example, Man has more opportunities to achieve in the economy, industry,
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