Conflict between the sexes

Conflict between the sexes in The Second Sex is a historically produced struggle, not an original curse of male and female biology. It arises when women are assigned the position of the inessential Other and denied recognition as equal subjects; as women seek freedom and transcendence, the struggle changes form, but it persists while the sexes remain caught in unequal roles and reciprocal distrust.

Historical Conditions of the Conflict

The conflict begins from a profound asymmetry in how the sexes are understood. In other relations between groups, Beauvoir notes, the meaning of the Other can become relative: people who appear central in one place may be outsiders elsewhere. Women, by contrast, have historically been treated as the inessential term while men present themselves as the essential one. The resulting conflict is not a meeting of equals from the outset, but a relation in which one side has the authority to define the other.

Beauvoir distinguishes women’s position from that of groups subordinated through identifiable historical events. Women are not a numerical minority, and their subordination cannot be traced to a single conquest or political turning point. Women have always existed, and their dependence has been treated as though it followed directly from physiology. That appearance of natural permanence makes their condition seem less changeable than an oppression created by a dated historical event, even though nature itself is not immutable.

This long history also helps explain why women have had difficulty acting collectively against male power. Unlike a class organized through shared labor or a community connected by its own institutions and space, women are dispersed among men and tied to particular men through homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions. A woman’s closest ties may be to her father or husband rather than to women as a group. Class and race divisions further complicate solidarity: bourgeois women may align with bourgeois men, and white women with white men, rather than with working-class or Black women.

The comparison with other oppressed groups is therefore illuminating but not interchangeable. Beauvoir relates the treatment of women to the reduction of Black people and Jewish people to abstract types used to justify subordination. Her account also emphasizes differences: women’s relation to men is bound up with an intimate social unit in which both sexes are necessary to one another. The couple is not simply a division between separate populations, and this connection has not by itself dissolved women’s subordination.

From Dependence to Open Conflict

Women’s economic position makes the contradiction especially visible. As women entered paid work, their demands acquired material grounds, but employers’ use of women as low-paid labor could turn them into cheap competition for male workers. In France, an 1889–93 survey found that a woman worker received half a man’s wages for a day’s equal work; an American comparison in 1918 likewise put women’s earnings at half men’s. Male workers’ initial hostility reflected a real labor conflict, rather than an automatic solidarity between workers and women. Beauvoir argues that women’s integration into unions made it possible for them to defend their own interests without remaining a threat to workers as a whole.

The emerging conflict was also shaped by the defenses used to preserve hierarchy. As women’s emancipation became more than a theoretical demand, defenders of the established order drew on claims about biology, psychology, religion, and tradition to portray women as naturally inferior. The language of separate but equal status could disguise continuing discrimination: Beauvoir compares it to the racial segregation enacted under Jim Crow laws. In both cases, the ruling group points to a condition it has helped create and then treats that condition as proof that the subordinated group is inherently suited to its lower place.

Such reasoning gives conflict a self-reinforcing structure. When a group is denied possibilities, its restricted situation can be mistaken for evidence of lesser ability; the inequality is then used to justify keeping the group restricted. Beauvoir’s emphasis is not that women’s present disadvantages are unreal, but that they cannot be made into a permanent verdict about what women can become. The central question is whether a historically produced inequality will be perpetuated.

The Changing Form of the Struggle

In the older pattern Beauvoir describes, a woman confined to immanence may try to draw the man into the same confinement. The mother, wife, or lover can appear as a jailer when she seeks to make the limits imposed on her into the limits of the shared world. This resistance may take the form of contradicting, dominating, or diminishing the man’s claims to truth and value. Beauvoir interprets these acts as defensive: the woman is trying to resist a position of inferiority imposed on her, not acting from an immutable female nature.

The struggle takes a different form when women aim to escape that confinement rather than extend it to men. They seek transcendence: the ability to act, work, think, and create as subjects. This movement meets resistance from men who wish to remain sovereign and decline to recognize their companions concretely as equals. The conflict then becomes an encounter between two claims to freedom, one newly asserted and the other defended as established privilege. Rather than mutually recognizing each other, each side may try to dominate the other.

Beauvoir traces this change in both sexual and intellectual relations. A woman trained for passivity may attempt to control a man by presenting herself as an object of desire, while an emancipated woman resists the passive role and insists on being active. The difference also appears in what women value: Beauvoir contrasts those who elevate convention and dependence with the modern woman who claims the right to think, work, act, and create on the same basis as men. She regards that claim as legitimate when it is made concretely, while identifying men’s refusal to treat women as peers as a central source of conflict.

Ambivalence and Mutual Misrecognition

The transition does not produce a simple contest between two consistently opposed camps. Women may seek the protections and advantages attached to conventional femininity even as they demand the esteem accorded to equal subjects. Beauvoir uses Mabel Dodge’s effort to dominate D. H. Lawrence through feminine allure and then assert spiritual authority as an example of this double demand. Men, too, may be duplicitous: they can expect women to comply with the established game while withholding the recognition and equality that would let women leave it.

This is why Beauvoir describes the struggle as difficult to make clear-cut. A woman is treated as an object while also being a subject; she is expected to inhabit a role defined by others and at the same time held responsible for asserting her own freedom. In such a situation, passivity and the demand for sovereignty can coexist. Beauvoir does not present this contradiction as a calculated trick: it is a response to a social path that directs women toward dependence while requiring them to struggle against it.

The result is reciprocal grievance without equal responsibility. A man may welcome a woman’s passivity when it confirms her role as a desirable object, then resent her when she claims autonomy. A woman may experience his resistance as an injury while also trying to secure the advantages attached to the old role. Each can feel deceived, but the conditions producing that feeling are unequal: women are contesting a subordinate position, while men may be defending the privileges that sustain it.

The Possibility of Recognition

The conflict will persist, Beauvoir argues, as long as men and women do not recognize one another as peers and femininity continues to function as a restrictive social role. Assigning blame to either sex alone does not break the cycle. Each side can become implicated in the other’s oppression: women may cling to resignation, while men seek to find themselves in women as fixed images of virility and sovereignty. Both evade the freedom of a genuinely independent other, and both then blame the other for the unhappiness produced by that evasion.

Beauvoir rejects the idea that male–female hostility is a timeless battle between fixed essences. Sexual difference does not itself dictate eternal antagonism; the conflict takes historically specific forms as social arrangements change. Its present form is shaped by women’s effort to emerge from imposed limits and men’s resistance to giving up the assumption that they alone are the essential subjects. The possibility of overcoming it depends on reciprocal recognition: not the absorption of one freedom into the other, but an equal relation in which neither is required to remain subordinate.