France

France in The Second Sex is more than a geographic setting: it is a central case through which Simone de Beauvoir examines how women’s freedom is restricted and contested. Its schools, households, workplaces, marriage customs, laws, and reproductive policies show the difference between possessing formal rights and having the economic and social means to use them. The account also places French conditions beside those elsewhere, treating national differences as evidence of how institutions and customs shape women’s lives rather than as expressions of an unchanging female nature.

France as setting and point of comparison

France enters the book through concrete places in Beauvoir’s life and work. Born in Paris in 1908, she passed the philosophy agrégation at the Sorbonne in 1929, taught in Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and then taught in Paris from 1938 to 1943. After the war she became a leading figure in existentialism and worked with Jean-Paul Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. Her analysis of women’s situation thus emerges from sustained engagement with French education, public life, and social institutions, while repeatedly testing French experience against conditions in other societies.

The national frame also belongs to the book’s publication history. First published in France in 1949 by Éditions Gallimard, The Second Sex appeared in English in 1953. Its passage into English involved a shortened translation commissioned by Alfred Knopf from H. M. Parshley, a retired professor of zoology; the American publisher pressed for cuts, while Parshley sought Beauvoir’s advice about the abridgments. The contested translation is part of the book’s international history, but the argument itself remains closely grounded in the institutions and social expectations Beauvoir describes in France.

France is not treated as uniform. The book compares women’s position there with that in Italy and Spain, where Beauvoir says Catholic practices and the cult of the Virgin are associated with more passive and self-denying expectations, and with Protestant Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon societies, which she presents as less restrictive in this respect. These comparisons are arguments about historical and religious formation, not claims that every woman within a country shares the same experience. Elsewhere, the book sets France beside the United States and the Soviet Union to show that changes in law or employment can coexist with older structures and unequal conditions.

Childhood, education, and the making of feminine roles

The account locates women’s later dependence in childhood socialization. A girl’s upbringing is often overseen chiefly by women relatives and teachers, who draw her into a feminine world; the father’s influence on daughters is generally secondary. The boy, although initially cared for by his mother, is more quickly encouraged to develop as a boy and to move outward from her sphere. Beauvoir’s point is that childhood conduct is not simply a natural rehearsal for adulthood: family practices teach children which futures are available to them.

French schooling and family life appear in a particularly stark wartime example. Beauvoir recalls students at Sèvres whose household duties were added to their academic work; two became seriously ill, one with Pott’s disease and another with meningitis. She contrasts the girls’ burden with the greater freedom granted to boys. Girls are expected to stay at home, their activities are monitored, and they are seldom encouraged to organize their own recreation, such as long walks, cycling trips, billiards, or bowling. The resulting limits on initiative are social as well as personal: customs make independent activity difficult even when a girl wants it.

The culture surrounding girls reinforces the same hierarchy. Literature, songs, legends, mythology, and children’s stories present history and achievement through male figures: men are credited with building countries, governing, discovering, and creating. The contrast between numerous celebrated heroes and the comparatively isolated figure of Joan of Arc shows how a girl may be taught to imagine her own future through stories organized around men. In this way, the public memory available to her helps narrow the futures she can readily picture.

Puberty makes that anticipated future feel immediate. Beauvoir describes the girl’s youth as a period of waiting: childhood has ended, yet the present seems to offer occupations rather than ends she can claim as her own. Changes in the body intensify her uncertainty, especially where she has been taught to regard the body as suspect or shameful. Household chores can further exhaust girls already managing studies or training, while family restrictions curtail their movement and leisure. These pressures do not establish an inevitable destiny; they show how a social situation can be experienced through the body and interpreted as personal limitation.

The book also identifies routes by which a girl can begin to take charge of her future. Study, sport, vocational training, and social or political activity can draw her attention beyond dependence on male approval and reduce the centrality of love and sexual conflict. Yet independence is harder to achieve when family and custom do not support it, and even an ambitious girl may fear that commitment to work will mean failing to fulfil what society calls her destiny as a woman. Sexual initiation is another transition, approached differently according to each girl’s earlier experience and circumstances; it is not presented as a single uniform passage.

Marriage, work, and domestic time

Marriage remains a powerful social expectation in France, especially for young women. In rural settings, an unmarried woman may be treated as an outcast and remain dependent on her father, brothers, or brother-in-law; moving to a city may be practically unavailable. Marriage can make her mistress of a household, but it also binds her life to a man. In some bourgeois households, girls are not prepared to support themselves and face a choice between dependence at home and poorly paid domestic employment. Even women with more freedom may find that men’s economic advantage makes marriage appear preferable to a career.

This pressure is not merely a matter of family sentiment. A woman living alone may be regarded as socially incomplete even if she earns a living, while motherhood outside marriage remains scandalized and can place both mother and child at a disadvantage. Beauvoir observes that some young bourgeois women marry in order to gain freedom from household control; marriage promises adult standing, but its promise rests on a social order that makes independence difficult to secure by other means. Matrimonial announcements and the continuing activity of the Green Ribbon Club, where people of both sexes meet, illustrate the organized social machinery surrounding marriage.

The economic evolution of women’s condition, Beauvoir argues, is beginning to alter marriage. In its emerging form, marriage could be a freely chosen union of two autonomous individuals, with reciprocal commitments, equal grounds for divorce, and adultery treated as a breach by either party. Motherhood, too, could be understood as a responsibility freely assumed rather than as natural servitude, and paid maternity leave could recognize it as work. But this is a transition, not an accomplished transformation: only part of the female population participates in production, and old values survive within modern arrangements. The meaning of marriage in the present can therefore be understood only in relation to the past it continues to carry.

Formal responsibility for the couple does not necessarily confer authority on the husband alone; nevertheless, the practical organization of married life may still follow his employment and income. The wife can be expected to move with him between provinces and Paris, to the colonies, or abroad; standards of living, daily schedules, and social connections commonly follow his work. If she lacks independent income, divorce may be only an abstract option. In France, Beauvoir contrasts the precarious position of an abandoned wife and mother receiving a derisory pension with the heavier alimony obligation imposed on husbands in the United States. A legal possibility means little when the means to act on it are absent.

Domestic work makes the limits of women’s time visible. A report published in Combat in 1947 estimated that married women spent about three hours and forty-five minutes on housework on each working day and eight hours on a day of rest: around thirty hours a week, or three-quarters of a woman worker’s or employee’s working week. This burden is especially severe when added to paid employment. The tasks recur without completing a lasting project: dishes must be washed again, surfaces dusted again, and clothes mended only to become dirty or torn once more. Beauvoir compares this cycle to the torment of Sisyphus because the work consumes effort while repeatedly restoring the household to the condition that requires more work.

The contrast is between repetitive maintenance and activity that opens a future. Beauvoir describes housework as locking women into domestic repetition, while men’s productive activity is more readily understood as invention and transformation. The distinction is not that women lack the capacity to create projects; it is that the organization of labor confines many women to work whose results must immediately be undone or renewed. In rural life, the account makes the scale of this labor concrete: alongside fieldwork and animal care, a woman prepares meals, manages the household, looks after children, draws water, and returns to domestic tasks after the day’s work outside.

Paid employment offers an important route toward independence, but it does not automatically release women from unequal conditions. Employers welcome women’s low wages, while male workers may view them as threatening competition. Women’s integration into unions is therefore significant: it gives them a way to defend their interests and makes coalition with male workers more possible. Even where a woman earns wages, factory work can be layered on top of household labor, while low pay and social expectations may leave her economically oppressed. Beauvoir treats work as the material basis of freedom, not as a simple guarantee that every employed woman is already free.

Reproductive law and unequal access

France’s restrictions on contraception and abortion expose a sharp contradiction between public morality and private practice. When contraceptive precautions fail, women may face an unwanted pregnancy and abortion, an operation that Beauvoir says haunts the love lives of many women in France. Bourgeois society, in her account, accepts depictions of childbirth but treats discussion of abortion as indecent. Yet the practice is widespread: the text reports estimates of hundreds of thousands of abortions annually, with figures around 800,000 to one million cited for the early 1940s, and argues that abortions were roughly as numerous as births.

Criminalization does not stop the practice; it makes it clandestine and distributes its risks unequally. In the Seine district in 1943, 1,300 investigations led to 750 charges, 360 women arrested, and 513 convictions, while the text contrasts those figures with an estimated 15,000 abortions in the district. The figures illustrate the gap between enforcement and prevalence. Beauvoir also emphasizes the class division within that gap: women with money and social connections may find competent care, obtain a therapeutic procedure more easily, or travel to Switzerland, where abortion was more readily tolerated. Poorer women, including employees, secretaries, students, workers, and peasants, are more exposed to danger, stigma, and the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

The unequal access to contraception deepens the disparity. Bathrooms and greater resources make contraceptive practices easier for many bourgeois women than for workers or farmers without running water. Poverty, inadequate housing, and the need for a wife to work outside the home are among the reasons couples seek abortions; the text notes that many couples decide to limit births after two children. The same woman may be described in public as a devoted mother and privately have to prevent or end a pregnancy. This juxtaposition unsettles the idea that maternity is a simple, universally chosen destiny.

The criminal ban also places women in an impossible social position. An unmarried mother may face such severe stigma that some women prefer suicide or infanticide to bearing the social consequences of illegitimate motherhood. Meanwhile, the law does not ensure higher birth rates: the evidence cited by Beauvoir shows repression failing even as women risk illness, sterility, or death. The issue is therefore not an abstract disagreement about morality alone; it is the collision of legal coercion, unequal resources, social shame, and women’s need to determine whether they can bring a child into the world.

In the book’s later discussion of women’s independence, France’s legal and civic changes remain incomplete. The law no longer lists obedience to a husband among a wife’s duties, and women have become voters. But a ballot and the end of a formal duty do not provide economic autonomy to a wife or mistress maintained by a man. Beauvoir distinguishes such negative liberties from concrete freedom: paid work can reduce women’s dependence on a male intermediary, but employment must be understood alongside low wages, class oppression, domestic labor, and the structures that still organize the world in men’s interests.

National difference and the unfinished transition

France’s institutions are presented neither as timeless nor as uniquely resistant to change. The book compares French contraceptive and reproductive conditions with those in England and the United States, where birth control gives women more ability to refuse motherhood, while arguing that French women are often pushed toward costly and painful abortions. It also notes that women’s sexual activity is treated more permissively in the United States, whereas in France male disdain for women who have multiple partners can inhibit their freedom, including when the same men benefit from their relationships. The comparison draws attention to the way social judgment can constrain a formally possible choice.

The same qualification applies to work and emancipation. Modern marriage may be moving toward reciprocity, women may enter production, and legal obedience may have ended; none of these changes on its own dissolves inherited structures. A woman’s apparent choice to depend on a man can be shaped by wages too low to sustain a decent life, social expectations about clothing and respectability, and the absence of affordable alternatives. In this setting, economic dependence is not merely a private preference: it is reproduced through the conditions under which women must make choices.

France ultimately serves as an example of a broader argument about historical change. Women are autonomous beings, yet they encounter a world that can confine them to the position of the Other and restrict the projects through which freedom becomes concrete. Economic change is crucial, but it must bring social, cultural, and moral consequences before women’s condition is transformed. The book’s account of France therefore ends not with a claim that formal progress has settled the question, but with a distinction between rights on paper and the lived capacity to work, choose, and shape a future.