Prehistory

In The Second Sex, Prehistory is neither a recoverable golden age of female rule nor a simple story of biological destiny. It is an uncertain setting in which Beauvoir asks how male dominance became established: what physical, reproductive, and economic conditions mattered, and how did human beings turn those conditions into a hierarchy? The answer is provisional, built from contradictory ethnographic accounts and an existentialist distinction between biological circumstances and the meanings societies give them.

Evidence and the Problem of Reconstruction

Beauvoir stresses that evidence about early human societies is contradictory, especially for the pre-agricultural period. It is not even certain whether women’s musculature or respiratory capacity differed from men’s in the same way as in later societies. Women carried heavy loads, but that task does not by itself establish inferiority: men may have kept their hands free to defend a traveling group from human or animal attackers, making their role more dangerous and strength-demanding. Reports and traditions also describe women participating in warfare and vendettas, including accounts associated with Herodotus and the Amazons of Dahomey.

The uncertainty does not erase physical asymmetry from Beauvoir’s account. She considers it likely that men generally had greater physical force, a marked advantage in an environment of wild animals, rudimentary tools, and severe resistance from nature. But she does not treat strength as an explanation that operates identically in every age. A bodily difference matters in relation to what a particular society must do, the tools it possesses, and how it distributes work and protection.

Reproduction, Survival, and Social Dependence

Pregnancy, childbirth, and menstruation, in Beauvoir’s reconstruction, could interrupt women’s work for extended periods. Without birth control, frequent pregnancies might absorb much of a woman’s time and strength, while the sparse resources of hunting, gathering, and fishing communities made it difficult to provide for many children. Women therefore depended on protection from warriors and on food obtained through male hunting and fishing. Beauvoir presents this dependence as a material condition with far-reaching consequences, not as proof that women were naturally destined for subordination.

She also places these burdens within the precarious circumstances of early human life. In nomadic groups with little attachment to territory or property, descendants and inheritance had limited importance; children could be regarded as burdens, and infanticide was frequent in nomadic peoples. In this setting, giving birth did not necessarily confer social pride or a lasting sense of authorship. Beauvoir argues that reproduction and breastfeeding, as natural functions, did not by themselves provide the kind of project through which a person could claim a higher meaning for existence.

Labor, Technology, and Open Futures

The contrast Beauvoir draws is between reproductive and domestic repetition, on one side, and activity that makes and changes the world, on the other. When motherhood constrained women to housework, that labor could bind them to recurring tasks and what she calls immanence: the same work renewed day after day, without producing a new future. By contrast, the human maker, or Homo faber, extends physical capacities through tools and projects. Even a simple stick or club enlarges a person’s reach; a dugout canoe makes the sea an object of purposeful exploration rather than a boundary.

This distinction is also connected to risk. Hunting and warfare could demand that men expose their lives in actions understood as serving ends beyond mere survival. Beauvoir argues that societies consequently granted prestige to the capacity to risk life rather than to the capacity to give life. The exclusion of women from warrior expeditions thus matters in her explanation not simply because combat required strength, but because it kept women from activities through which a group recognized power, purpose, and human achievement.

Technology, however, can alter the significance of physical difference. Beauvoir notes that modern machinery may require only a fraction of the muscular resources conventionally associated with men, while control of great energy can be reduced to operating a switch. The minimum strength demanded by a task, rather than an abstract comparison between bodies, determines whether women can perform it on equal terms. The burdens of maternity likewise vary with social arrangements: repeated pregnancies and unsupported childcare weigh heavily, whereas reproductive choice, social assistance during pregnancy, and childcare can make maternal responsibilities easier to reconcile with work.

From Prehistory to Historical Hierarchy

Beauvoir’s account of Prehistory feeds into a broader argument about historical change. In the earliest agricultural division of labor described through historical materialism, men hunted and fished while women worked at home; yet domestic work included pottery, weaving, and gardening, so women could hold an important place in economic life. With the development of metal tools and the plow, agriculture expanded and demanded more intensive labor, changing the material context in which work was divided. The point is not that one prehistoric arrangement can be established with certainty, but that economic and technical conditions affect the value and consequences of bodily differences.

The book rejects the idea that signs of female prestige prove an earlier social order in which women were men’s equal political counterparts. Beauvoir acknowledges traditions and myths that preserve memories of women in powerful roles, but treats a supposed golden age of matriarchy as a myth rather than a demonstrated history of reciprocal authority. Even when woman appears as Earth, Mother, or Goddess, symbolic power does not necessarily make her a political subject or a peer. In this interpretation, the historical question is not settled by identifying female deities or maternal prestige; it is whether women possessed autonomous authority and reciprocal relations with men.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

Prehistory supplies the material starting point for Beauvoir’s account of women’s historical subordination, but it does not function as a single-cause origin story. Reproductive demands, physical strength, tools, food scarcity, warfare, and divisions of labor acquire their force through particular social conditions. The book’s governing distinction is between a body and the situation in which that body must live: biological facts alone cannot explain a fixed feminine nature or an inevitable social destiny.

That distinction also shapes the book’s treatment of time and freedom. Repetitive work and the demands of reproduction can confine women to maintaining the present, while projects and technical activity open a future. The contrast is not presented as an eternal difference between the sexes: changing technology and social support can change what bodies are able to do and what lives can become. Prehistory therefore serves as both an account of material constraints and a warning against mistaking historically produced limits for natural necessity.