Eternal Feminine and Eternal Masculine

The Eternal Feminine and Eternal Masculine name supposedly timeless essences through which women and men are cast as natural, opposing kinds. Simone de Beauvoir challenges that framework: it turns historically produced relations into an eternal contest, concealing how women are made subordinate and how that subordination can change.

The “Eternal” as an Abstraction

The expression belongs to a vocabulary of fixed identities that de Beauvoir questions from the outset. She asks what “woman” means when femininity is described as a mysterious reality, yet its supposed essence cannot be consistently defined. Biological and social sciences, she argues, no longer support immutable entities that determine the characteristics of women, Jews, or Black people; characteristics arise in relation to a situation. To deny the existence of an eternal feminine is therefore not to deny that women exist, but to refuse a supposedly timeless essence as their explanation.

The same critique applies to the masculine half of the opposition. In the conclusion, de Beauvoir says that the battle of the sexes is often imagined as a struggle between uncertain essences in a timeless heaven of Ideas. That picture mistakes an abstraction for history: the conflict assumes different forms on earth at different historical moments. Neither anatomy nor an eternal masculine-feminine polarity, by itself, explains the relations between actual people.

Myth, Authority, and Self-Justification

De Beauvoir locates the force of such abstractions in their social use. Myths of femininity arise most readily where people have leisure to idealize women beyond the practical demands of shared work and poverty. Patriarchal society then carries experience toward a transcendent Idea, using myth to present its customs and laws in emotionally compelling form. Religion, tradition, language, tales, songs, and film can all transmit these images, making a group’s expectations seem natural and timeless.

This process also helps explain why the feminine ideal shifts to serve different interests. A woman may be represented as a threat, a source of comfort, or an embodiment of harmony; the image can transform a particular relationship or emotion into a timeless judgment about women as a whole. For de Beauvoir, the myth is not evidence of an eternal feminine nature. It is a means by which a social order makes its values appear self-evident and justifies the place it assigns women.

Her historical account traces that justification through institutions and arguments made by men. Lawmakers, religious authorities, philosophers, writers, and scholars have treated women’s subordinate position as divinely ordained or socially useful. When women’s entry into paid work made their demands materially consequential, opponents also invoked science to argue for female inferiority. The rhetoric of equality could preserve the hierarchy: “separate but equal” status, de Beauvoir observes, resembled the justification used under Jim Crow laws, while leaving discrimination intact. The ideal of the “true woman” as dependent and irresponsible similarly described a condition imposed by the dominant group, then treated that condition as proof of women’s nature.

Unequal Relations, Not a Timeless War

The framework also obscures the asymmetry between the sexes. De Beauvoir distinguishes a conflict between abstract masculine and feminine essences from the concrete history of women’s subordination. Women are not a numerical minority, but they have not formed a unified group with a shared independent past, labor solidarity, or common space. They are dispersed among men and often bound to particular men through family, work, economic interests, and social circumstances. Class and race divide them as well: bourgeois women may be aligned with bourgeois men rather than proletarian women, and white women with white men rather than Black women.

This dispersal helps explain why women have not collectively asserted themselves as subjects in the way that proletarians or Black people have, in de Beauvoir’s comparison. Their actions, she argues, have often been symbolic and their gains dependent on what men were prepared to concede. The relationship is not simply a contest between two self-contained camps: the sexes are bound together in a fundamental social unit, even as one side is treated as the essential subject and the other as the Other. The supposed eternal battle can thus conceal the historically specific power relation that structures the conflict.

The comparison with other forms of oppression clarifies both the shared mechanism and its limits. De Beauvoir relates the language of the “eternal feminine” to stereotypes such as the “black soul” and “Jewish character”: each can reduce people to a cliché that rationalizes subordination. Yet she does not treat these histories as identical. She notes that the situation of Jews differs, while drawing an analogy between women and Black people where paternalistic authority insists that an oppressed group remain in the place chosen for it. The comparison illuminates a recurring strategy of power without erasing the different conditions in which it operates.

From Imposed Conflict to Possible Change

The conclusion recasts conflict as a response to oppression rather than a destiny written into sexual difference. Women confined to immanence may try to restrict men in turn, because making the world a shared prison could lessen the pain of their own confinement. De Beauvoir describes this antagonism as defensive: the existing hierarchy has been imposed, not ordained by an immutable essence or a flawed choice inherent in women. Oppression creates a state of war, but that war need not be the permanent expression of an eternal masculine and feminine nature.

She contrasts that defensive struggle with a changed political possibility. Women are beginning to seek escape from confinement and to enter the sphere of transcendence; men who insist on remaining sovereign subjects resist recognizing their companions as equals. The resulting conflict is between freedoms that attempt to dominate one another, not proof that the sexes are naturally enemies. De Beauvoir’s analysis leaves the outcome open: the future depends on whether these relations can change and whether women can participate in human possibility without first being confined to a supposedly feminine essence.