Waiting for a Man

Waiting for a Man names a learned orientation toward the future: the girl is taught to expect love, marriage, and a man’s intervention to deliver happiness and adulthood. Simone de Beauvoir presents this expectation not as an innate desire or proof of female incapacity, but as a consequence of social arrangements that make male authority and approval appear to offer a woman her most promising route to security and recognition.

Identity and Social Formation

The expectation begins before adolescence, in stories and songs that repeatedly cast women as those who wait while men set out, struggle, and act. The girl is figured as a captive or sleeping heroine awaiting rescue; the young man becomes the seeker and liberator. Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty give this pattern familiar forms, while the promise that a prince will arrive makes patience seem like a path to happiness. Beauty is treated as the quality that earns love, and suffering or renunciation can be presented as the prelude to a heroine’s eventual triumph.

This narrative training shapes conduct as well as fantasy. The girl learns that she must be loved in order to be happy, and therefore that she must wait for love. Attention to appearance can become an absorbing concern because beauty is represented as a condition of romantic success. The stories thus connect waiting to a larger bargain: the heroine receives recognition not through an independent project but through the attention of a man.

Adolescence and Suspended Time

De Beauvoir distinguishes the girl’s experience from that of the boy. Both may imagine romantic partners, but a woman does not occupy the same central place in the boy’s anticipated destiny that a man occupies in the girl’s. During childhood, the girl can understand herself as an autonomous person in her relationships, studies, and games. At puberty, however, the future she had imagined settles into her body and seems to draw near as a predetermined role. Detached from childhood but not yet able to claim an independent adult future, she experiences youth largely as a period of waiting.

That waiting is not simply a private mood. The girl is encouraged to understand marriage as an honorable, comparatively less strenuous career and as the route to social dignity and sexual recognition as lover and mother. Family and peers reinforce the expectation: parents orient daughters toward marriage, and masculine admiration can confer status among girls. In American colleges, de Beauvoir notes, a student’s standing may be measured by the number of dates she has. What looks like personal anticipation is therefore reinforced by social rewards and expectations.

Marriage, Dependence, and the Promise of Rescue

The man imagined by the girl is at once a lover, a protector, and a route out of the parental home. He is associated with wealth and power, and his embrace promises security reminiscent of parental protection. Yet the apparent escape from one authority can lead to submission to another: rather than opening the future through an active conquest of her own, the girl is taught to place it in the hands of a new master. In this arrangement, man appears to her as the essential Other, while she takes herself to be the inessential counterpart.

De Beauvoir rejects the claim that this surrender follows naturally from an inferiority already present in girls. She argues instead that humility and dependence are produced by the girl’s history, her surrounding society, and the future proposed to her. Male prestige has material foundations: men hold social and economic power, and the girl is repeatedly shown that pleasing a man may be in her interest. The expectation of rescue is thus sustained by conditions that make dependence seem both practical and desirable.

The marriage ideal also divides a woman’s energies. When parents prepare daughters for marriage rather than personal development, girls may receive less specialized training and become less committed to professional work than their brothers. Their resulting disadvantage can then strengthen the desire for a husband, tightening the cycle. Work offers a possible means of independence, but economic inequality and the prospect of a fortunate marriage continue to exert pressure. The choice of an independent path consequently demands a moral effort that the social arrangement does not equally demand of men.

Material Conditions and the Cost of Waiting

The larger conditions surrounding marriage include an unequal distribution of work. Child care and housekeeping remain chiefly women’s responsibility, while the burdens of pregnancy and inadequate access to effective birth control can further restrict their lives. The example of the French peasant woman makes the division concrete: she may work in the fields, care for animals, prepare meals, manage the household, and raise children, often with little time for her health or leisure. Domestic and reproductive labor can confine women to repeated tasks rather than give them the means to build an independent future.

De Beauvoir describes housework as labor that begins again after each apparent completion. A woman may clean and maintain a home, only for the same tasks to return the next day; the work perpetuates the present rather than opening a new horizon. This repetitive time contrasts with the open future promised by romantic stories. Waiting for a man is therefore not only an expectation about love: it takes shape in a society where women’s work and economic dependence can make marriage seem like a way out, even as marriage may preserve the very dependence from which they hope to escape.

The Concept’s Existential Significance

The argument rests on de Beauvoir’s existential distinction between transcendence and immanence. A person realizes freedom through projects that reach beyond the present; being confined to repetition and treated as an object obstructs that movement. Woman’s predicament is that she remains an autonomous freedom but is placed in a world where men define her as the Other and attempt to confine her to immanence. Waiting for a man is one expression of this conflict: the girl’s future is imagined as something bestowed by another person rather than made through her own projects.

The concept consequently links childhood stories, adolescent expectations, marriage, education, paid work, and domestic labor. Its force lies in showing how a seemingly romantic hope can also organize a woman’s time and possibilities. De Beauvoir’s account does not treat waiting as a universal female instinct; it examines the social conditions that teach girls to expect fulfillment through masculine love and support, and that make independence more difficult to pursue.