Eighteenth century

The eighteenth century is a revealing point of comparison in The Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir presents it as a time when men’s recognition of women as peers made possible relationships and literary characters less burdened by the myth of the feminine mystery. It is not offered as a complete liberation, but as evidence that the meanings assigned to women shift with social relations. Set against the book’s account of repetitive domestic labor and women’s restricted futures, the period also helps illuminate the distinction between a life organized around recurrence and one open to projects and change.

Historical and Intellectual Context

The book resists treating femininity as an immutable essence. Its account argues that supposedly fixed characteristics are better understood as responses to particular situations; in the same way, women’s historical position must be explained through social and material circumstances rather than a physiological or psychological destiny. The eighteenth century therefore matters not as a timeless ideal, but as a historical instance in which relations between men and women could take a different form.

That contrast belongs to a longer history of male authority. The book describes how men made laws, customs, and religious ideas that justified women’s subordinate position, while women’s history was largely written by men. It traces changing conditions—from patriarchal institutions and property relations to technical and economic developments—without presenting feminism as an entirely autonomous force or history as a simple sequence of progress. Against this background, the eighteenth century’s relative recognition of women as peers becomes a significant comparison rather than a claim that inequality had disappeared.

Women as Peers in Literature

Beauvoir identifies the eighteenth century as a period when women were most sincerely cherished not because they were wrapped in courtly or gallant idealization, but because men regarded them as peers. The distinction is central: equality does not drain relations between the sexes of romance or dramatic force. Rather, it allows the woman to appear as a human being with particular motives and actions, instead of as a fixed symbol created to satisfy a masculine fantasy.

The literary examples make that argument concrete. Beauvoir points to the heroines of Laclos and Stendhal, and also to Hemingway’s fiction, as compelling figures who possess no mysterious essence. Their appeal does not depend on remaining unknowable. By placing them beside the collective clichés of femininity, the book argues that lived human variety offers richer material than a supposedly eternal feminine ideal.

Myth, Equality, and Experience

The contrast between peerhood and myth extends beyond literary representation. Myths of Woman, the book argues, convert lived relations into static images—such as the fatal woman, the mother, or the figure of harmony—and thereby replace an encounter with an autonomous person with contemplation of a symbol. Such images can help justify social customs by making group expectations seem natural and eternal. The eighteenth-century example shows what becomes possible when that symbolic distance recedes: women can be approached as particular companions and equals.

This argument does not reject poetry, love, adventure, or the intensity of relations between the sexes. It rejects the use of myth as a substitute for truthful experience. The period’s literary examples support a broader claim: acknowledging a woman as a human being need not impoverish anyone’s experience of her; it can preserve difference and intensity while grounding passion and conduct in the reality of the people involved.

Gendered Time and Freedom

The historical comparison also clarifies the book’s account of freedom. In its existentialist framework, a person’s existence is realized through projects that reach beyond the present; when a person is confined to repetitive immanence, freedom is obstructed. The eighteenth century’s importance as a moment of peer recognition thus connects to a wider question: who can act toward an open future, and who is expected mainly to maintain the present?

That question becomes especially concrete in the book’s descriptions of women’s labor. A French peasant woman may share her husband’s responsibilities and property, yet her day can run from feeding animals and preparing meals to fieldwork, childcare, washing, and evening mending. Housework, repeated each day and undone again, is described as a Sisyphean burden: it perpetuates the present without securing a lasting achievement. Women’s access to work, birth control, and other conditions of independence can open alternatives, but economic inequality and the lure of marriage as an escape continue to complicate that freedom. Against this pattern of recurrence, the eighteenth century’s image of women regarded as peers marks a change in relation—and a reminder that women’s circumstances, rather than an eternal feminine nature, shape the futures available to them.