America matters in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis both as a place she encountered firsthand and as a setting for comparisons among gender, race, labor, and freedom. Her travels there helped her understand how different groups could be made into social Others, while the book’s examples also reveal how women’s opportunities and constraints varied across national contexts.

Travel and Intellectual Context

In 1947, de Beauvoir met the novelist Nelson Algren during a trip to America. Algren encouraged her to expand an essay on women into a book; he also introduced her to Chicago’s less privileged side. The two traveled through the United States and Mexico in 1947 and 1948. De Beauvoir’s direct encounter with racism, together with her friendship with Richard Wright, helped sharpen her understanding of sexism and its relation to antisemitism, which she had witnessed before and during the war.

The comparison that emerged was not that racism, antisemitism, and sexism were identical. Rather, de Beauvoir argued that each could reduce people’s particularity to a ready-made group identity, making that stereotype seem to justify subordination. Her American experience thus became part of the intellectual route by which she examined how a dominant group defines another as essentially different and inferior.

The Other and the Limits of Comparison

America also provides a point of comparison in de Beauvoir’s account of collective identity. She distinguishes women from groups such as American Black people and Jews, who, despite their different histories and circumstances, could identify themselves as a group and posit themselves as subjects. Women, she argues, are not a numerical minority, but their dispersed lives and close economic and familial ties to men have made it difficult to organize as a unified opposition.

That contrast is complicated by divisions among women themselves. Class and race can align women with men in their own social group rather than with women across those divisions: bourgeois women may share interests with bourgeois men, while white women may be aligned with white men rather than Black women. The American example therefore illuminates both the possibilities of collective resistance and the obstacles that prevent a general solidarity among the oppressed.

De Beauvoir identifies an analogy between the treatment of women and Black people in the United States: dominant groups describe the subordinated as naturally suited to their assigned position, then point to the effects of that position as evidence of inferiority. Yet she also marks a limit to the comparison. In her account, antisemitism casts the Jew more as an enemy than as an inferior, and denies him a recognized place; the mechanisms and histories of oppression cannot simply be collapsed into one another.

Work and Economic Relations

American examples help make visible the economic tensions between women’s employment and workers’ interests. Employers welcomed women’s labor in part because women accepted lower wages. Male workers could consequently view women as cheap competition, rather than as allies in a shared struggle. De Beauvoir argues that organizing women into unions offered a way to defend their interests without making them a threat to workers as a whole.

Wage comparisons further demonstrate the material inequality at stake. In 1918, women in America earned about half the salaries men received. The figure supports the book’s broader argument that access to paid work does not itself secure economic equality: the conditions under which women enter the labor force can reproduce their dependence even as employment expands their possibilities.

Sexual Freedom and Social Judgment

America is also contrasted with France in the discussion of women’s sexual autonomy. De Beauvoir says that American society recognized a degree of freedom in women’s sexual activity that she regarded as favorable to women. In France, by contrast, men’s contempt for women who had multiple sexual partners could discourage women from acting on their desires, even when the men themselves benefited from their relationships with them.

The distinction does not mean that sexual freedom removes every practical risk or grants women equal standing. De Beauvoir describes women’s sexual choices as constrained by social judgment and unequal conditions, and argues that a woman’s freedom can be misread as sexual availability. America functions here as a comparative case: it shows that norms differ by society, while reinforcing her larger claim that women’s experience cannot be explained by biology alone.

Work, Independence, and Unequal Possibilities

The book’s discussion of American women’s professional lives likewise separates having a job from being free to pursue work on equal terms. De Beauvoir observes that women may take satisfaction in demonstrating that they can perform their work properly without becoming absorbed in the work’s substance. She links this limitation to women’s insecure position in a male-dominated world: a career can be treated as proof of personal worth rather than as an open-ended project pursued with confidence.

This account belongs to a wider argument about the conditions of independence. Women are encouraged to work, but marriage and the prospect of material support can still appear as an easier route out of economic insecurity. De Beauvoir’s American examples consequently contribute to a comparative picture, not a simple national verdict: women’s opportunities depend on social arrangements that shape wages, professional confidence, sexual reputation, and the freedom to choose a future.