England is a comparative setting in The Second Sex, used to show how reproductive control and women’s literary work are shaped by social conditions rather than by biology alone. The book presents England both as a place where women can refuse motherhood through birth control and as part of a wider literary history in which women writers struggled against restrictions on their creative development.

Reproductive Autonomy and Work

In its account of the working woman’s divided demands, the book contrasts England and America with France. It says that women in England and America can at least refuse motherhood at will through birth control, whereas women in France are often driven to painful and costly abortions or burdened with an unwanted child. The difference illustrates how access to reproductive choice affects whether women can sustain professional lives.

That choice remains limited by social expectations and care arrangements. Unmarried motherhood provokes scandal, and the lack of well-organized day nurseries and kindergartens can make even one child an obstacle to a woman’s activity. A woman may continue working only by leaving the child with relatives, friends, or servants; otherwise she faces a painful choice between sterility and responsibilities difficult to reconcile with a career. England’s relative scope for refusing motherhood therefore does not erase the broader conflict between sexual and professional life, but it marks a consequential difference in women’s available options.

Women’s Work and Economic Conditions

England also appears in the book’s comparison of women’s employment before the Second World War. A prewar census figure cited there states that 26.9 percent of women aged eighteen to sixty worked in England. The figures for France and India were higher, but the book cautions that rural labor inflated those totals; comparisons of commerce, liberal professions, and public service placed France, England, and the United States at roughly the same level.

These statistics sit within a larger argument about the conditions required for equality. Work can expand women’s independence, but employment alone does not free them when domestic labor, childcare, and unequal expectations remain their responsibility. The book’s account of women’s economic position thus treats work and reproduction together, rather than assuming that entry into paid occupations by itself resolves women’s subordination.

Literary Work and Its Limits

In its discussion of women’s writing, the book places England among several national traditions whose women novelists have repeatedly drawn on domestic and conjugal themes. Such writing may bring authors recognition and wealth, yet the book argues that conventional subjects have not necessarily enlarged readers’ vision of the world. This criticism concerns not the mere presence of domestic life in literature, but the way prescribed feminine roles can constrain what writers are encouraged to imagine and represent.

The book also identifies English writers among those who have challenged unjust social arrangements. It names George Eliot as having turned revolt into a detailed, dramatic vision of Victorian England. At the same time, it invokes Virginia Woolf’s judgment that Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot had to spend so much energy freeing themselves from external constraints that they reached the point of wider artistic possibility exhausted. Their achievement and its limits make England part of the book’s account of how women’s authorship can expose social restrictions while still bearing their costs.

Significance in the Argument

England therefore serves two related purposes in the book. Its contrast with France makes reproductive autonomy a practical condition of women’s ability to work, while its literary history shows how social restrictions shape the subjects and scope available to women writers. In both cases, the decisive issue is not a fixed feminine nature but the concrete opportunities and burdens through which women attempt to pursue independent projects.