Myth of Woman

The Myth of Woman is the male-made ideal through which women are imagined as everything men desire and fear, yet rarely as people who define themselves. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir connects this symbolic figure to women’s subordination: because men have possessed concrete power and the authority to represent the world, they have made woman the Other and turned that position into a fluctuating, contradictory myth. The myth may praise, idealize, or condemn women, but it preserves the same asymmetry: men appear as subjects, while women are made meaningful in relation to them.

Formation and Historical Conditions

The account begins from women’s historical position, not from a timeless feminine essence. Beauvoir argues that men held the concrete powers and constructed codes that established women as the Other. This arrangement served men’s economic interests, but also answered a deeper need: a subject seeks to define itself against what it is not. Woman consequently becomes, in the male imagination, a figure through whom man hopes to encounter and complete himself.

That symbolic role is sustained by women’s limited ability to form a collective subject. Unlike groups whose shared histories, traditions, religions, or spaces can help them organize, women have no comparable independent past or common institutional ground in Beauvoir’s account. They are dispersed among men and bound to particular fathers and husbands through homes, work, and economic interests. Class and race divide them further: bourgeois women may align with bourgeois men rather than proletarian women, and white women with white men rather than Black women. The intimate tie between women and their oppressors distinguishes their situation from other forms of domination and makes collective opposition difficult.

Beauvoir nevertheless sets women’s position beside those of other subordinated groups to examine how inferiority is justified. Her encounter with racism in the United States and Mexico, alongside her understanding of antisemitism, helped clarify how women, Black people, and Jews could be reduced to abstract clichés that rationalized subjugation. The comparison does not erase the differences among their histories: she notes, for example, that women have always existed as a sex, whereas other subordinated groups have histories shaped by identifiable events. The parallel lies in the process by which a ruling group presents a condition it has imposed as proof of the subordinate group’s supposed nature.

The nineteenth-century entry of women into paid work made this conflict more materially visible. Industrialization gave women’s demands economic grounds, while employers’ use of women’s lower wages could set women workers against male workers. In France, a survey covering 1889–93 found that women received half men’s wages for a day of equal work; a 1908 survey recorded women’s home-work rates as no more than twenty centimes an hour and sometimes as little as five. The resulting competition impeded any automatic solidarity between women and the proletariat. Beauvoir argues that integration into unions enabled women to defend their interests without being positioned simply as cheap labor against male workers.

The language of “separate but equal” likewise shows how apparent recognition could preserve subordination. Beauvoir compares that formula, used by antifeminists to describe women’s status, with the principle enacted by Jim Crow laws in the United States. In both settings, a claim to equality could conceal discrimination and protect a hierarchy created by the dominant group. The ruling caste then treated the subordinate condition it had produced as evidence of innate inferiority, a circular argument Beauvoir describes as bad faith.

A Figure of Contradictions

The myth is not a stable portrait with a single meaning. It gathers opposed images: woman can appear as idol or servant, source of life or darkness, medicine woman or witch, prey or downfall. She can be represented through figures as different as Eve and the Virgin Mary. The contradictions are not incidental flaws in an otherwise coherent ideal; they are central to its operation. Since woman is defined negatively, from the standpoint of a male subject, the image changes with his hopes and fears rather than resolving into an account of a woman’s life as her own.

The same instability shapes woman’s assigned relation to nature. She may be imagined as a mediator between nature and man, or as nature’s unruly temptation; as the embodiment of moral values, or as their danger. Men expect her to serve as companion, public, and judge, confirming their sense of themselves, yet her indifference or resistance can frustrate that expectation. Thus the figure is at once the promise of self-recognition and the reminder that the other person cannot be wholly absorbed into the self.

Beauvoir’s analysis of the male gaze makes that contradiction explicit. Woman is cast as treasure, prey, game, risk, muse, guide, judge, and mirror: the Other through whom a man imagines he can surpass himself without being limited. He seeks to make her his own while retaining the value of her difference. The imagined reward is therefore also a failed dream. She exists independently of the image imposed on her, and no single representation can contain her: every idealized figure calls up an opposing one. The myth’s apparent abundance conceals its dependence on the woman’s inessential status.

Who Makes the Myth

For Beauvoir, the capacity to create myth is bound to the capacity to appear as a subject. A myth expresses the hopes and fears of the consciousness that projects it. Since women have not been able to establish themselves as subjects on equal terms, they have not created a comparable, independent body of religion or poetry; in the book’s formulation, they continue to dream through men’s dreams. The celebrated male heroes of those traditions—Hercules, Prometheus, and Parsifal—occupy the central action, while women take secondary roles.

Men have also supplied the categories through which women are represented in relation to them: father, seducer, husband, jealous man, good son, bad son. These figures do not receive the same mythic dignity as woman, whom male representation makes an entire symbolic category. The asymmetry is clearest in sexual representation. Woman is designated as “sex,” flesh, delight, and danger, while the fact that man is also a sexual and carnal being is left unproclaimed. The point of view that constructs the world as though it were the world itself belongs to men, and its partial perspective passes as universal truth.

The myth is therefore more than a collection of literary images. It is a representational structure that makes male experience appear universal and defines women through their relation to male desire, authority, and self-understanding. Its idealizing images can be as restrictive as openly hostile ones: praise of the compliant, carefree, childlike woman leaves her subject to the terms set by the ruling group. The myth’s flattering surface does not undo the material and social conditions that keep women subordinate.

Change and Significance

The myth’s continuing force is historical, not inevitable. Beauvoir observes that women may be displaced as privileged objects when the state or a political leader absorbs men’s attention; she also argues that socialist ideology rejects the treatment of any human category as an idol. Yet even under such systems, men remain individuals, and the figure of woman can retain a special value in their imaginations. She points to the persistence of sentimentality in letters written by German soldiers to French prostitutes despite Nazism, and to the prominent roles given to woman as lover and mother by Communist writers such as Aragon and Vittorini.

She consequently treats the myth as capable of decline, but not as already overcome. As women assert themselves as human beings, their supposed marvelous otherness may lose its hold; for the present, Beauvoir says, the myth remains alive in men’s hearts. Its dissolution depends on more than replacing one flattering image with another. It requires women to be recognized as subjects rather than as figures that supply men with nature, affirmation, desire, or transcendence.

The concept brings together the book’s account of representation and power. Woman is made to signify too much—opposed qualities, hopes, dangers, and meanings—while being denied the authority to define what she signifies. This is why the myth can present itself as universal knowledge of women while remaining a construction from the male point of view. Its contradictions disclose the work it performs: it turns women’s imposed position into an apparently natural essence, and makes that essence serve as an explanation for the very subordination that produced it.