Aurignacian

The Aurignacian is a prehistoric period invoked in Simone de Beauvoir’s examination of how societies have represented sex and organized human existence. Its surviving figurines provide a concrete contrast between images of women and men; set beside the book’s account of labor, freedom, and social constraint, they illustrate why bodily difference alone cannot explain women’s historical position.

Figurines and Sexual Representation

Citing a 1934 account by H. Bégouën, the book notes that Aurignacian remains include numerous statuettes of women whose sexual attributes are strongly emphasized, as well as roughly sketched vulvas represented on their own in caves. Masculine statuettes, by contrast, are very rare, and the evidence described includes no representations of the male organ. The contrast makes the period’s material record a telling example of how bodies could be made visible and significant in sharply different ways.

The book places these finds against later prehistoric evidence. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, female effigies of this kind disappear; in the Magdalenian, vulva representations persist in small numbers, while phalluses are found in great quantity. This shift does not, by itself, establish a single explanation for prehistoric belief or social organization. Its significance in the discussion lies in the change in what was represented, and in the warning against treating sexual imagery as a timeless expression of innate gender roles.

Biology, Labor, and Human Projects

The Aurignacian evidence sits within a broader argument that human existence is not adequately explained by biological function. Giving birth and nursing, the book argues, are natural functions rather than projects that, on their own, confer a higher meaning on existence. When women are assigned domestic labor as an extension of motherhood, repetitive work can confine them to immanence, renewing the same tasks without opening a future of their own.

This argument is set against the account of men as makers who extend their reach through tools, inventions, and undertakings that project them beyond the present. The contrast is not offered as proof that men possess an inherent superiority; rather, it identifies the unequal value societies have given to different activities. The prehistoric figurines contribute to this inquiry into how bodies acquire meaning, while the book’s central framework rejects the claim that a physiological destiny determines women’s possibilities.

Historical Situation and Unequal Time

The book’s ethical framework treats each person as a freedom realized through projects and movement toward an open future. Women, it argues, are autonomous subjects who discover themselves in a world where men position them as the Other, attempt to fix them as objects, and restrict their transcendence. The resulting conflict is between a person’s claim to be essential and a social situation that casts her as inessential. The questions guiding the inquiry concern the paths open to women, the circumstances that restrict their freedom, and the possibility of independence within dependence—not whether a constrained life can be declared happy.

The account of rural women shows how that restriction is lived through time and labor. A French peasant woman may share her husband’s responsibilities and property, and may even wield considerable authority at home, while carrying an exhausting workload: tending animals and gardens, doing heavy fieldwork, preparing meals, maintaining the household, and bearing and caring for children. Rising at dawn, she moves between animal care, meals, childcare, fieldwork, and evening mending or cleaning. With little time for her health or leisure, she is denied the social outings available to men, and the work can wear her down prematurely. This daily repetition gives concrete form to the book’s distinction between labor that merely renews the present and projects that claim a future.

Economic and social expectations extend that constraint beyond rural life. The book describes women as encouraged to seek marriage and masculine support, while professional training and commitment are often weakened by the expectation that marriage is their destination. Work can offer a route away from marital dependence, but the unequal rewards of marriage and the promise of an exceptional, advantageous match complicate that choice. The contrast between repetitive domestic time and an uncertain but self-directed future thus connects the prehistoric discussion of sexual representation to the book’s larger account of women’s historical situation.