The real woman

“The real woman” is not simply a woman who loves, bears children, or has a female body. It is a social ideal in which a woman accepts being defined as the Other: a subordinate figure whose identity and value are measured in relation to men. The phrase exposes a central contradiction in women’s lives: they may be treated as peers in principle, yet still be expected to relinquish the autonomy that would make equality real.

The ideal of the subordinated woman

In its discussion of D. H. Lawrence, the book identifies the “real woman” as one who unhesitatingly consents to defining herself as the Other. This ideal does not necessarily portray women as bad or contemptible; it can praise them as good while preserving their subordination. Its apparent affirmation of femininity therefore conceals a demand: a woman is recognized as properly feminine when she accepts the limits men assign to her.

The phrase also distinguishes social definition from bodily function. A woman does not become “real” merely by having a woman’s body or by taking on the roles of lover and mother. Sexuality and maternity can be claimed by an autonomous subject. The prescribed “real woman,” by contrast, accepts an identity organized around male expectations rather than establishing herself as a subject in her own right.

A contradiction between equality and femininity

The book describes a painful split produced by men’s double demand. Women are, for the most part, accepted as peers and equals, yet they are still expected to remain inessential. These two destinies cannot be reconciled: women are left hesitating between autonomy and the role of the “real woman,” without being securely suited to either. The resulting instability is not presented as a natural defect but as an effect of incompatible social demands.

The contradiction is also visible in the different meanings assigned to work and success. A man’s action in the public world can reinforce his virility, joining social achievement to masculine identity. A woman’s success, however, is made to seem inconsistent with femininity when femininity requires her to present herself as an object and as the Other. The ideal thus makes women’s efforts toward independent social existence appear to count against their accepted identity as women.

The ideal across social relations

The book places this pattern within a broader account of otherness. Through her travels in the United States and Mexico, Simone de Beauvoir encountered racism directly and, alongside her friendship with Richard Wright, developed a sharper understanding of the relation between sexism and other forms of subordination. Women, Black people, and Jews could each be reduced to an abstract cliché that justified treating their particularity as a reason for subjugation. The comparisons illuminate a shared process of imposed definition, without making the groups’ histories identical.

The distinction matters: women are not a numerical minority, and their subordination does not begin with one dated conquest or expulsion. They are dispersed among men and bound to fathers or husbands through homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions. Class and race can divide women from one another: bourgeois women may align with bourgeois men rather than proletarian women, and white women with white men rather than Black women. That fragmentation makes collective opposition harder and helps explain why the ideal of the “real woman” can persist as a social expectation rather than simply an individual choice.

The same logic appears in work and economic dependence. Employers welcomed women workers in part because they accepted low wages, while male workers could view them as threatening competition. In the book’s account, women’s integration into unions offered a way to defend their interests without remaining isolated competitors. The “real woman” ideal belongs to this material setting as well as to ideas about femininity: the expectation that women stay subordinate is reinforced by arrangements that restrict their economic independence.

Refusing the prescribed role

The book presents the ideal as historically changeable, not as a permanent truth about women. If women appear inferior, it argues, their situation gives them fewer possibilities; the question is whether that arrangement must continue. Rejecting the myth does not require erasing sexual difference or sacrificing the richness of relations between women and men. It means grounding behavior, feeling, and passion in truthful recognition of women as human beings rather than in a role that makes them objects.

That change requires more than asking women to endure the strain of liberation alone. The book hopes that men will accept without reservation the situation being created, so that women can inhabit it without being torn between equality and subordination. The “real woman” is therefore a critical expression: it names the ideal that makes women’s freedom appear incompatible with femininity, and points toward a future in which women can live for themselves as human beings.