Adolescence

In The Second Sex, adolescence is the decisive passage in which a girl’s imagined future becomes an immediate social and bodily problem. The child has understood herself as an individual able to act in the present; the adolescent is told, in effect, that her future depends on accepting a role prescribed for her. This transition makes adolescence a period of waiting, conflict, and often symbolic rebellion, but it can also become a point from which a girl develops independence and questions the values around her.

From childhood autonomy to an assigned future

The girl’s childhood, in the book’s account, does not simply prepare her for womanhood. Although she may be bullied and constrained, she can still experience herself in family life, friendship, study, and play as an autonomous person whose future passivity remains only an idea. Puberty changes that relation to time: the future draws close and is felt in the body, while the present seems to offer occupations rather than meaningful ends. Her youth is therefore consumed by waiting for a life that appears to have been plotted in advance.

That waiting is gendered. A boy may desire women, but they do not define his destiny in the same way that men are made to define a girl’s anticipated adulthood. The girl is encouraged to imagine a man as liberator, protector, and bearer of happiness: the figure of Prince Charming concentrates the promise of security and escape. The marriage ideal can thus shape her aspirations before she has the training or independence needed to pursue a future on her own terms. Adolescence becomes a threshold at which a formerly imaginable future narrows toward a socially assigned role.

The central dilemma is not a simple choice between childhood and adulthood. The adolescent claims the position of subject, activity, and freedom, yet is pressed to become an object whose value depends on being desired. She may want a man while fearing dependence on him; she may desire passivity while recoiling from the loss of self it entails. Oscillating between hope and disgust, invitation and refusal, she encounters a conflict between her claim to be essential and the social demand that she accept herself as inessential. The book’s image of unripe fruit names this unsettled interval: she has left childhood but has not yet committed herself to the life expected of a woman.

The body and the social meaning of puberty

The book treats bodily change as real and consequential, but rejects the idea that biology fixes a woman’s fate. Its account of menstruation describes how the body can feel alien and opaque to the person living in it. At a girl’s first period, this experience can be intensified by silence and shame: she may not have been warned, may fear that the blood signals an illness, and may try to hide or wash her soiled clothing. One cited survey found that, among 125 American high-school students, 36 knew nothing about menstruation at its onset and 39 had only vague ideas. Such evidence illustrates how a bodily event is shaped by what girls are told—or not told—about it.

The author places these experiences within a wider account of reproductive life. Menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth can impose significant burdens, and the body may be experienced as subject to processes that are not under individual control. But these facts do not, by themselves, explain women’s subordinate position or establish a hierarchy between the sexes. The body has a lived meaning within consciousness, action, and society; biological characteristics take on social value through customs and institutions. Adolescence matters, then, not as proof that girls are destined for passivity, but as the point at which physical change is interpreted through a world already organized by gendered expectations.

Sexual initiation extends the transition beyond puberty. It may follow gradually from childhood experience, but the book emphasizes that it can also arrive as an unexpected rupture, gathering the girl’s conflicts into an urgent new experience. The way she responds can have lasting consequences for her life. Her earlier history matters, yet the encounter is not treated as a mechanical outcome of that history: it is a new situation to which she reacts. In this account, adolescence is therefore neither a purely biological stage nor a fixed psychological script; it is an apprenticeship shaped by circumstances and by the possibilities available to the girl.

Rebellion, concealment, and divided desire

The adolescent’s resistance often takes indirect forms because she has limited power to change the conditions around her. Laughter at romantic stories, flirtation, love, or the body can defuse embarrassment and deny the force of sexuality even as the girls discuss it. The book describes schoolgirls visiting lovers’ lane in the Luxembourg Gardens to laugh, and others making jokes at the Turkish baths. Obscene language and risqué stories similarly serve not simply as expressions of desire, but as ways to turn troubling images into jokes and to defy adult authority.

Other gestures of protest can be self-defeating. A girl may deliberately make herself look unkempt, then resent the awkwardness this produces; she may want to claim a future while fearing the break with childhood, or long to possess a man while resisting the prospect of becoming his prey. The account describes this divided refusal as a form of bad faith: she does not wholly accept the destiny assigned to her, but she does not yet enter a direct struggle against it. Instead, her resistance can remain symbolic, tangled with the desires and rules it contests.

Secrecy is another consequence of that situation. By sixteen, the girl may have passed through puberty, menstruation, new sexual feelings, passions, fear, and disgust without having a space in which to speak openly about them. Concealing sanitary napkins and menstrual periods can make concealment itself habitual. The adolescent is then reproached for lying or deviousness, although the book argues that secrecy is partly imposed by the requirement that she present herself as a desirable object while concealing her bodily uncertainty. Cosmetics, styled hair, and padded clothing are read as part of a performance of composed femininity: the girl is expected to appear available and self-assured even when she experiences herself as unsettled.

That performance makes approval precarious. If her worth is measured through reputation and the attention of others rather than through her own projects, criticism can easily unsettle her, and other girls can appear as rivals. The book argues that this instability should not be mistaken for inherent feminine weakness: it reflects a condition in which a young person’s ambitions are awakened while avenues for pursuing them are restricted, and her future seems dependent on men’s good offices.

Education, labor, and unequal freedom

The social pressure shaping adolescence reaches into education and work. From puberty, girls may lose ground in intellectual and artistic pursuits not because they lack ability, but because they receive less encouragement and are expected to add domestic duties to study or paid work. A professional-school headmistress describes the exhaustion of a girl who comes home from work only to be sent on errands, take up unfinished household tasks, and care for her own clothing, while her brother has no comparable duties. During the war, students at the school in Sèvres were similarly worn down by family work added to their studies; two became seriously ill.

These arrangements restrict more than time. Girls are often expected to remain at home, their outside activities watched, and are not encouraged to organize their own recreation. A young woman may therefore have fewer chances to test her independence through travel, sport, or shared activities beyond the household. The book connects this narrowing of experience to an inferiority complex that is socially formed and then weighs on intellectual achievement. The apparent result—less confidence or commitment—can reinforce the very expectations that helped produce it.

The problem continues into adult life. A woman who works may still be expected to succeed at conventional femininity, dividing her attention between professional projects and appearance, love, or marriage. If marriage remains a more socially rewarded route to security, she may invest less fully in work and education; then, when she marries and gives them up, that choice can be misread as proof that she lacked ambition in the first place. The book describes this as a vicious circle, sustained by unequal economic conditions and customs that preserve the promise of passive success through a fortunate marriage.

Domestic labor makes the contrast between open and repetitive time especially sharp. The rural woman described in the book works from dawn through meals, children, animals, fields, and housework, with evening tasks continuing after the day’s labor. Her work is essential to the household, yet it leaves little leisure and can wear down her health. Elsewhere, the housewife’s repeated washing, dusting, and mending are compared to Sisyphus’s labor: the work must begin again because it never achieves a lasting victory. These examples show how the future available to girls is structured not only by ideals but also by the distribution of labor, time, and freedom.

Outcomes and significance

The book does not present adolescence as having one inevitable outcome. Some girls’ rejection of the expected role can become a starting point for authentic freedom: dissatisfaction and solitude may serve as a springboard rather than merely a retreat. The adolescent’s attention to inner life can deepen her understanding of her own desires, while irony and rebellion may expose conventional morality and reassuring values as restrictive. The book’s discussion of Maggie in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss offers a literary example of a young woman who challenges an immobilized moral order and seeks a freedom beyond it.

That possibility is unevenly sustained. The exceptional woman may carry a passionate project into adult life, but the account stresses that most girls face an unequal struggle. If rebellion remains confined to dreams or symbolic gestures, the adolescent often yields. The rebellious girl may be found a few years later calmer and ready to accept the life expected of her; this transition is likened to mourning, as she gradually buries the autonomous child she had been. The change can look like maturity while also marking accommodation to social constraint.

Adolescence is thus a critical stage in the book’s larger argument about freedom and situation. A girl is not born with an unalterable destiny; she becomes a woman within a world that directs her toward dependence, domestic repetition, and definition through men. The body is one important part of that situation, but not a complete explanation of it. By placing bodily experience alongside education, work, custom, and unequal expectations, the account makes the adolescent’s divided behavior legible as a response to social limits—and keeps open the possibility that she may turn that conflict into a project of her own.