"become a woman"

“Becoming woman” describes femininity as a social and historical formation, not an immutable essence carried by the body from birth. The distinction gives the book a way to ask how a human being comes to occupy the position called woman—and how that position might change—without treating biology as destiny.

The Phrase and Its Meaning

The phrase is the English translation of a formulation that H. M. Parshley had rendered as “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” The later translators chose “woman” without an article. They explain that, in this usage, the word names an institution and a concept: femininity as defined by society, culture, and history, rather than an individual female person. That grammatical choice makes the claim about a process of social formation, not merely the stages of an individual life.

The book’s introduction sets the problem by questioning what femininity is supposed to mean. It describes competing assertions that women remain essentially feminine or that femininity is disappearing, while noting that people who share the same bodily classification may still be judged not to count as women. The demand to become, remain, or perform femininity therefore depends on a supposedly mysterious standard whose content is unclear. Against the idea of a timeless essence, the book treats womanhood as a condition formed in relation to circumstances.

The Body and Its Possibilities

The argument does not deny bodily differences; it challenges the assumption that those differences carry a fixed social meaning. The body is treated as a situation: a person’s way of grasping the world and the outline within which projects are undertaken. Physical capacities can affect what is possible under particular conditions, but they do not establish an unchanging hierarchy of human worth or determine what a woman can become.

The book therefore frames comparison as a question of possibilities rather than a final verdict based on the present. Woman is “not a fixed reality but a becoming”; her capacities must be considered in that becoming, and cannot be fully assessed by reducing her to what she has been or is now. Because a human being is understood through transcendence and the surpassing of present limits, the argument refuses to “close the books” on what women may be able to do. Biology matters through the context in which it is lived, not as a complete explanation of a person’s future.

Social Formation and Material Conditions

The account connects becoming woman to the historical relation in which man is treated as the universal subject and woman as the relative, inessential Other. The book describes a social order that takes masculine experience as the unmarked human norm while treating women’s bodies and perspectives as particular. Femininity is thus not simply an inner quality: it is shaped within relations that define women from outside themselves and constrain their opportunities to act as independent subjects.

Those constraints have material force. The book argues that women’s subordination cannot be explained by a single historical event or by numerical minority status: women have always been present in numbers comparable to men, yet have been subordinated across recorded history. Their dispersion among men, and their ties through homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to fathers and husbands, make collective self-organization difficult. The resulting dependence helps reproduce the position women are expected to occupy.

Economic arrangements also shape what femininity can mean in practice. When women enter paid work, their demands acquire an economic basis, but employers’ use of women as low-paid labor can intensify conflict with male workers. The book cites historical wage disparities and argues that women’s integration into unions made it possible to defend their interests without being treated simply as competition. Becoming woman is therefore connected not only to ideas and conduct but also to labor, wages, and access to collective organization.

Otherness, Myth, and Change

The book’s theory of the Other explains why the process is unequal. Groups may define themselves against outsiders, and those relations can be challenged through conflict and mutual recognition. In the relation between the sexes, however, the masculine term has been established as essential while woman is assigned the position of absolute Other. The book asks why this relation has not achieved reciprocity and links the answer to women’s limited means of organizing themselves as a collective subject.

The myth of the Eternal Feminine helps make that arrangement seem natural and permanent. It replaces the varied lives of actual women with a single timeless Idea; when a woman’s behavior contradicts the prescribed model, the contradiction is attributed to her failure to be feminine rather than to the model’s falsity. The book also compares this reasoning with racialized stereotypes, while distinguishing the differing historical positions of women, Black people, and Jews. Such comparisons reveal a recurring mechanism of subordination without making those histories identical.

The idea of becoming consequently makes change thinkable. If women’s present situation offers fewer possibilities, that inequality is a condition produced and maintained through social arrangements, not proof of an eternal female nature. The book’s account does not promise that change follows automatically: women’s dispersed circumstances and economic dependence impede collective action. But by treating femininity as a becoming rather than a fixed reality, it leaves women’s capacities open to historical transformation.