Middle Ages

The Middle Ages in The Second Sex are part of a history of continuity and change: inherited accounts of women’s nature survived even as their institutional uses shifted. The book treats medieval ideas neither as timeless truths nor as an isolated episode, but as elements in a longer system through which male authority defined women, regulated their lives, and made subordination appear justified. Its historical argument is also a critique of historical writing: women’s past has largely been narrated through the perspectives and interests of men.

Historical setting and argument

The Middle Ages enter a history organized around the changing forms of women’s subordination. The book proposes that the hierarchy between the sexes cannot be explained by simply naming one sex as naturally dominant. It asks how male authority prevailed, how it was maintained, and what material and ideological arrangements made it seem legitimate. The account reviews prehistoric and ethnographic evidence through an existentialist framework, while recognizing that evidence about women’s position in early societies is contradictory and incomplete.

That method matters for the medieval period: it locates historical claims about women within specific relations of power rather than treating them as neutral descriptions. The book argues that lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers, and scholars repeatedly presented women’s subordinate condition as ordained by heaven or beneficial on earth. Such claims made social arrangements seem like consequences of nature or divine order, even when they served the interests of men.

Inherited ideas and authority

The book places medieval arguments within a much longer intellectual inheritance. Aristotle’s account of generation, in which woman supplies passive material and the male principle supplies activity and life, persisted through the Middle Ages and into the modern era. This persistence illustrates how an old theory could continue to shape accounts of sexual difference after its premises had become contestable: the historical authority of an explanation could outlast its evidentiary basis.

More broadly, religious and philosophical traditions helped turn male supremacy into a supposed right. The book identifies religious legends, including those of Eve and Pandora, as resources used to support accounts of women’s inferiority. Medieval authorities therefore belong to a history in which inherited theological and philosophical ideas did not merely describe women; they helped furnish arguments for the social order assigned to them.

Law, marriage, and the medieval quarrel

The medieval querelle des femmes is described not simply as a debate about women in the abstract, but as a conflict between clergy and laity concerning marriage and celibacy. Its terms reflected competing institutional concerns, while women’s status was treated within arguments largely framed by men. The controversy thus exemplifies the book’s distinction between a dispute about women and a history in which women themselves control the terms of debate.

The book also connects women’s legal and familial position to the social regime founded on private property. It argues that this regime brought about the married woman’s wardship, linking marriage and women’s legal dependence to arrangements of property and inheritance rather than to an unchanging feminine nature. The account does not present medieval society as a self-contained cause: it uses the period to show how institutions could translate male interests into customary and legal constraints.

Myth, history, and women’s status

The book rejects the idea that traces of female authority in ancient traditions prove that women once enjoyed equality. It considers accounts of women’s former high position and the hypothesis of an early matriarchy, but concludes that a golden age of Woman is a myth. A woman’s sacred or symbolic power, in this analysis, is not the same as political authority or reciprocal standing with men. Even when represented as Earth, Mother, or Goddess, she could remain outside the sphere of human rule rather than be recognized as an equal subject.

This distinction shapes the book’s interpretation of historical memory: idealized images of women can coexist with their exclusion from power. The medieval period is one setting in which inherited ideas and institutional disputes continued to frame women from outside their own perspective. The argument refuses a simple story of progress from an earlier female sovereignty to later subordination; instead, it asks who held authority, whose interests defined social arrangements, and whether women could act as autonomous subjects within them.

Significance in the larger account

The Middle Ages help reveal the persistence of male-authored accounts across changing eras. In the book’s conclusion to its historical survey, women’s history is said to have been written by men, and women’s lot to have been determined according to men’s projects, fears, and needs rather than women’s interests. The medieval quarrel over marriage and celibacy, the inheritance of older theories about sexual difference, and the relation between property and married women’s wardship all support this larger claim.

The period’s significance is therefore analytical rather than merely chronological. It shows how arguments about women can be shaped by disputes among male institutions, how historical ideas acquire the authority of custom, and how a symbolic elevation of women does not necessarily grant them power. Against accounts that treat femininity as an immutable essence, The Second Sex reads women’s situation as historically constituted—and asks whether the arrangements inherited from the past allow them the freedom to pursue projects of their own.