“No, woman is not our brother”

Jules Laforgue’s “No, woman is not our brother” gives stark form to the belief that women and men cannot be companions on equal terms. In the conclusion of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir uses the expression to frame the conflict between the sexes as a historical condition to be examined, not a fate that biology has sealed.

The expression and its argument

The sentence appears as a compact description of women made separate and unknown, with their relation to men reduced to antagonism rather than fellowship. Its force lies in the contrast between brotherhood, which implies mutual recognition, and a relation described instead as perpetual conflict. Beauvoir presents the formulation as one to which many men might still assent; it represents a durable way of imagining the sexes as incapable of fraternity.

Historical separation, not eternal hostility

Beauvoir sets the phrase against a distinction between natural difference and historical relations. She argues that no physiological destiny requires men and women to remain enemies. Human beings, in her account, are not merely members of a species: humanity is shaped through historical becoming and through the ways people take up their circumstances. The antagonism captured by Laforgue’s sentence can therefore be understood as an expression of a changeable moment in history, rather than an original curse.

The unequal conditions behind estrangement

Earlier in the book, Beauvoir asks why reciprocity between the sexes has not emerged as it has in other conflicts between groups. Women are as numerous as men, but, unlike a group subordinated by a clearly identifiable historical event, they have been subordinate for as long as history can be traced. They have not formed a unified political subject with a shared past, independent institutions, or common space; they remain dispersed among men and tied to them through family, work, and economic interests. The result is an unusual bond: women are subordinated within a social whole whose two halves are also necessary to each other. Laforgue’s image of separation thus names a real conflict while risking the impression that its cause is simply an unalterable difference between the sexes.

The book’s broader challenge

Beauvoir’s analysis connects women’s subordination to other systems that mark a group as essentially different and use that difference to justify its assigned place. She compares the mechanisms of sexist, racial, and class oppression, while also distinguishing their histories: women’s circumstances cannot simply be equated with those of other oppressed groups. Such comparisons illuminate how imposed identities can present the effects of subordination as proof of an inherent inferiority. The phrase about brotherhood is therefore both a diagnosis of estrangement and a proposition the book tests against the social conditions that produce it.

From antagonism toward reciprocity

The conclusion does not treat the sexes’ dissatisfaction with each other as evidence that conflict must continue forever. Instead, it asks whether their struggles express a transitory historical situation. The expression’s bleak refusal of brotherhood marks the problem Beauvoir seeks to reopen: not whether men and women are identical, but whether their relation must remain one of domination and opposition. Its significance rests in this tension between a familiar declaration of permanent division and the book’s insistence that the division has a history—and can therefore be transformed.