Childhood

Childhood is the opening stage of the account of feminine formation in The Second Sex, but it is not presented as a natural preparation for passivity. The child is already an autonomous individual, curious about the world and eager for activity; what changes her prospects is the education that teaches her to please, to make herself an object, and to anticipate a future defined by others. Beauvoir’s central distinction is between what a girl is capable of becoming and the restricted role society trains her to accept.

Childhood as a Formative Stage

The book’s second volume follows women’s lived experience through girlhood, puberty, sexual initiation, maturity, and old age. Childhood therefore establishes the conditions whose consequences later chapters trace. The girl’s future passivity begins as an expectation, not an accomplished fact: in childhood she can experience herself in the present as a subject engaged in games, study, family life, and relations with friends. Only as puberty approaches does the future role become more immediate, making the present seem like a transition rather than a period with purposes of its own.

This distinction reflects Beauvoir’s wider existential framework. A subject realizes freedom through projects and movement toward an open future; when a person is forced into immanence, that restriction becomes oppression. A girl’s development matters in this account because she, like every human being, begins as an autonomous freedom, yet encounters a world that would have her assume the position of the Other. Childhood is thus both a time of genuine initiative and the beginning of a conflict over who is permitted to act as a subject.

Learning to Become an Object

Beauvoir describes feminine passivity as something formed from the earliest years, not a biological given. A boy’s play is ordinarily directed toward physical independence and engagement with the outside world: climbing, fighting, testing strength, and undertaking challenges allow him to experience his body as an instrument of action. His activity for others can coincide with self-affirmation; in doing things, he makes himself be.

The girl is taught a different relation to herself. She is told, implicitly or explicitly, that she must please and make herself pleasing, and is treated as a living doll. This training creates a vicious circle: when she has fewer opportunities to exercise freedom, explore the world, and discover what she can do, she has less reason to trust her ability to act as a subject. Beauvoir emphasizes that this narrowing is not evidence of lesser potential. If encouraged, the girl could display the curiosity, initiative, exuberance, and courage attributed to boys.

The contrast is not absolute or inevitable. Beauvoir notes that girls sometimes receive a more boy-like upbringing, which can spare them some of the effects of prescribed femininity. A father may encourage a daughter’s freedom, although his influence is often secondary to that of women relatives, companions, and teachers. Social custom can quickly counteract his example: in one village, girls as young as three or four were challenged for wearing trousers, and other children’s reactions led them to plead for dresses. The episode shows how gender expectations are enforced not only by parents but also by the surrounding community.

Family Authority and Resistance

The family is one of the first settings in which a girl’s autonomy meets a more intimate form of authority. Beauvoir contrasts a boy’s relatively quick departure from his mother’s sphere with the expectation that a girl be integrated into a feminine world. Mothers and other women may transmit the conventions that constrain girls, even when those conventions also reflect their own difficult relation to feminine roles. Colette’s affectionate portrait of her mother, Sido, stands as a rare example of a mother who is understanding and discreet.

A passage from Colette Audry presents a more ordinary girl’s resistance to maternal authority. The daughter does not necessarily believe that her mother’s rules are too strict or that the mother lacks the right to issue them; what she resents is the effort to subjugate her. Her anger is joined to fear and shame, revealing how resistance can be experienced as both an assertion of self and a source of guilt. The episode gives concrete form to the conflict Beauvoir identifies: the girl’s desire to remain an autonomous person clashes with an authority that seeks to define her place.

Imagined Futures and Socially Directed Desire

Games and dreams also orient girls toward a future of passivity, but childhood desire is not simply a willing acceptance of that future. The girl is still a human being before she is made to understand herself as a woman. She may sense that accepting the role assigned to her means renouncing something in herself, even while the prospect of adult life can exert its own attraction. In the present, she wants activity and autonomy like her brothers; she may also experience the maternal circle as narrow and seek escape from its familiar authority.

As the transition to puberty draws near, Beauvoir describes a shift in the girl’s sense of time. The boy is actively directed toward adulthood, whereas the girl is made to anticipate a future whose plot seems already prepared. Her present becomes a waiting period, and she is taught to look toward a man as a figure of fulfillment and escape. The future lover is imagined as powerful and protective, a Prince Charming who can provide happiness and security. This expectation is socially reinforced by male economic privilege and the prestige attached to marriage; it is not merely a private fantasy detached from material circumstances.

The expectation of marriage also divides a girl’s attention and weakens her investment in her own development. Parents continue to raise daughters for marriage rather than encouraging their full personal and professional formation. A girl may consequently be less thoroughly trained and less committed to a profession than her brothers, making her more likely to seek a husband, which in turn reinforces the original inequality. Beauvoir argues that a woman’s work does not automatically resolve this conflict: independence remains harder to choose when marriage offers the apparent relief of economic support and social approval. What the woman seeks, she writes, is a way to reconcile family life and work without exhausting effort.

Childhood’s Place in the Larger Argument

The chapter’s account of childhood belongs to a book that rejects biological explanations as sufficient accounts of women’s position. Beauvoir gives biological data an important place in the analysis, but insists that the body is lived through consciousness, action, and society. The body alone cannot explain why woman becomes the Other; the question is how human beings have shaped the meanings attached to female biology. This distinction prevents childhood socialization from being mistaken for an inevitable expression of nature.

The book’s account of reproduction and domestic labor extends the contrast between imposed repetition and purposeful action. Childbirth and breastfeeding, treated as natural functions rather than projects, do not by themselves provide women with a socially recognized claim to transcendence. Housework, meanwhile, can confine women to repetitive labor that renews the present without producing a new future. Beauvoir’s example of the French peasant woman makes the burden concrete: she may tend animals, clean the cowshed, spread manure, sow and harvest, prepare meals, manage the household, and care for children, beginning work at dawn and continuing with mending and cleaning into the evening. This later adult burden clarifies what is at stake in the childhood training that narrows a girl’s access to projects beyond domestic life.

The same pattern appears in the description of housework as a task that begins again each day. Washing dishes, dusting, and mending do not yield a lasting conquest: the work must be repeated because the household becomes dirty, dusty, and worn again. Against that circular time, the girl’s childhood wish to explore, act, and discover represents a possibility of a more open future. The significance of childhood lies in the tension between that capacity and the social process that attempts to redirect it toward waiting, dependence, and repetition.