Women are "the Other" (the Other)

“Woman as the Other” describes a relation of power, not a neutral description of difference: man posits himself as the essential subject, while woman is defined in relation to him and assigned the position of the inessential. Its significance lies in the explanation it offers for a persistent asymmetry. Unlike groups whose shared history can be marked by a distinct past or a decisive event of subordination, women have been subordinated across recorded history while remaining bound to men in the intimate and social structures of everyday life. The result, in Simone de Beauvoir’s account, is a group denied the conditions for becoming a collective subject of its own.

Meaning and Structure

The idea begins with a general account of how one consciousness establishes itself against another. Two groups may recognize a reciprocal relation, whether tense or cooperative; but when one claims the position of the essential term, it can cast the other as pure alterity. The crucial issue is not that difference exists, but that one party claims the right to define what the difference means. Woman does not spontaneously designate herself as inessential. She is made the Other when man establishes himself as the One and she is induced to accept his point of view as the measure of her identity.

That arrangement differs from ordinary relations between groups because women are not a numerical minority. Nor, in the comparison developed here, does their position begin with a single historical event that can be dated and remembered as a before and after. Women have always been present in the historical record and have, as far back as it can be traced, been subordinate to men. The continuity makes subordination appear to follow from nature rather than from changeable social arrangements. Yet the argument rejects the conclusion that a condition that seems natural must therefore be immutable: what matters is the history and organization through which a group is prevented from altering its position.

Why Women Do Not Form a Collective Subject

The account identifies the absence of collective organization as a central reason women have not reversed the relation. Proletarians can say “we,” as can Black people in the comparisons invoked here, and can therefore posit themselves as subjects in opposition to a ruling group. Women, by contrast, generally refer to themselves through the category men have named for them. Apart from limited and abstract gatherings such as conferences, they do not ordinarily establish a shared “we” through sustained collective action. Their demands have consequently won what men were willing to concede rather than what women could claim through an organized power of their own.

The obstacles are material as well as political. Women have no independent shared past, history, or religion in the sense described here, and they do not possess the solidarity of labor or interests that can unite a class. They are dispersed among men and attached by home, work, economic interests, and social circumstances to particular fathers or husbands. Those divisions persist among women themselves: bourgeois women may be aligned with bourgeois men rather than working-class women, and white women with white men rather than Black women. The category “woman” therefore does not automatically overcome differences of class and race or produce a common political interest.

The relation is also distinct because the sexes are bound within a shared social and intimate unit. The couple is described as a fundamental unit whose two parts depend on one another; society cannot be divided by sex in the same way that a subordinated class or a people can be imagined as separate from its oppressors. Women are thus the Other within a whole whose members are necessary to one another. This proximity does not itself guarantee reciprocity. Instead, it can make the ties to individual men stronger than the solidarity women might build with one another.

Historical and Cultural Mechanisms

The argument distinguishes women’s symbolic association with power from actual sovereignty. Accounts of early social life describe women’s labor in cultivation, domestic production, pottery, weaving, and barter, as well as the centrality of their work to the maintenance of the clan. Their connection to fertility and the renewal of life could inspire fear and reverence. Feminine divinities, including the Great Mother, came to represent powerful forces of nature, and surviving myths and traditions preserve memories of periods in which women appear to have held elevated positions.

But divine prominence is not evidence that women governed as men’s peers. The supposed golden age of women is treated as a myth: whether woman appears as Earth, Mother, or Goddess, she is still positioned as the absolute Other, outside the human order in which political authority belongs to men. Social reciprocity is established between male groups, while women become possessions and means of exchange between them. In the formulation attributed to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the relationship that marriage makes possible is not established between men and women but between men through women. Woman mediates a relationship and its rules without possessing the law that governs it.

The same distinction applies to systems of descent. Patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or less clearly differentiated arrangements do not by themselves determine a woman’s concrete status. In a matrilineal system, authority may still pass through her father or brother; a female chief or queen does not establish the sovereignty of women as a group. The account points to the contrast between a ruler such as Catherine the Great and Russian peasant women, whose circumstances were not transformed by her reign. Women’s frequent residence under a husband’s roof is offered as evidence of a continuing asymmetry beneath variation in descent rules.

Myth and law give that asymmetry a hostile moral vocabulary. Stories of violent victory, including the cosmology in which Bel-Marduk kills Tiamat and the drama in which Orestes kills Clytemnestra and is absolved, represent patriarchal order as triumphing over maternal right. These narratives give symbolic form to the establishment of man as subject and the conversion of the Other into a threat. Once men write the codes, woman is associated with disorder, passivity, and evil; religious and legal traditions can cast her as unclean or subordinate while also praising the obedient wife or devoted virgin. The contradiction is functional: woman is treated as dangerous in herself, yet admitted into society when she submits to an order defined by men.

Analogy, Difference, and Material Dependence

Comparisons with other subordinated groups clarify the structure but do not make their histories interchangeable. The argument finds a parallel between women and Black people in the way a ruling group praises the submissive, childlike figure it has itself produced, then treats that imposed condition as proof of inferiority. The same circular reasoning appears when women are praised as frivolous, infantile, and irresponsible so long as they remain subject to men. In both cases, a situation imposed from above is represented as an inherent quality of the people held in it.

The comparison also has limits. Women, Black people, Jews, and proletarians occupy different historical positions, and antisemitism is described as distinct in its treatment of the Jew as enemy rather than merely as an inferior. Women’s dispersion across families and social classes further complicates the possibility of a unified political identity. A parallel between women and workers is most useful where it identifies that neither is a numerical minority; it cannot erase the difference that women have always been subordinated as a sex and are interwoven with men in the couple and household.

Economic relations reinforce this division. The account notes that employers welcomed women workers for the low wages they accepted, while male workers could see those wages as cheap competition. It therefore rejects any automatic solidarity between the cause of the proletariat and that of women. Women’s integration into unions is presented as a practical condition for defending their interests and for turning competition into the possibility of coalition. The Other is not maintained by an idea alone: wages, work, household ties, and access to organization help reproduce it.

Consequences for Women’s Bodies and Possibilities

The imposed position can reach into women’s understanding of their own bodies. In its discussion of puberty and menstruation, the account argues that a girl’s bodily experience is shaped by the perspective through which it is interpreted. When her body is treated as suspect, she may watch it anxiously and regard it as ill; psychic anguish can intensify physical distress, and the chapter describes a reciprocal relation between endocrine secretions and the nervous system. The point is not that bodily differences are unreal, but that their meaning and consequences cannot be separated from a social situation that makes them grounds for embarrassment and limitation.

The same distinction informs the argument about ability. Physical differences do not, on their own, prevent women from entering professions or undertaking many forms of work; the significance of a bodily characteristic depends on the demands of the activity and the wider opportunities available. Athletes who measure themselves through their own achievements can feel less handicapped by comparison with men. When women are denied ways to act in and explore the world, however, physical differences can acquire a disproportionate weight, confirming an inferiority that has already been socially cultivated.

The expression thus links representation to institutions and lived circumstance. Women become the Other not merely because men describe them in limiting terms, but because family, work, law, tradition, and unequal access to collective organization give those terms practical force. The relation is enduring, yet not a natural destiny: its apparent absoluteness is one of its effects, and changing it requires women to gain the concrete means to act and recognize themselves as subjects.