Historical subjugation of women

Historical subjugation of women, as analyzed in The Second Sex, is the long-standing construction of women as dependent and inessential in a world where men claim the position of the essential subject. Its force lies not only in explicit restrictions but in the organization of work, family, economic opportunity, and social ideals. The result is a conflict between women’s freedom to pursue projects and the conditions that confine them to repetition and dependence.

A historical relation made to seem natural

Women’s subordination differs from forms of oppression that began with a distinct historical rupture. The account contrasts women with groups such as the proletariat, whose formation can be explained by a historical development, and with oppressed peoples who share a remembered past, tradition, or culture. Women, by contrast, have always existed within the sex division and have been subordinated across recorded history. This continuity can make their position appear natural and unchangeable, although the argument rejects the idea that either nature or historical reality is immutable.

The numerical balance between women and men has not, by itself, produced collective power. Women are dispersed among men and bound to particular fathers and husbands through homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions. They do not possess the shared labor, common space, or unified interests that might allow them to organize as a group. Differences of class and race further divide them: bourgeois women may be aligned with bourgeois men rather than working-class women, and white women with white men rather than Black women. Their oppression therefore operates within intimate and social ties that are harder to break than a simple opposition between separate groups.

Dependence, work, and the unequal use of labor

The account links women’s historical position to material arrangements as well as inherited ideas. As women entered paid labor, their employment could threaten established gender roles, but employers also benefited from their lower wages. In France, an 1889–93 survey found that women received half the wages paid to men for a day’s equal work; a 1908 survey recorded very low hourly rates for women working from home. Such wage disparities left many women unable to live without charity or a protector.

This economic competition did not automatically unite women workers with male workers. Men could regard women’s cheaper labor as a threat, even as employers used it to their advantage. The account argues that women’s integration into unions enabled them to defend their own interests and made solidarity with male workers more possible. Paid work thus offered a route toward independence, but employment under unequal conditions could also reinforce women’s vulnerability.

The peasant woman’s day makes the double burden concrete. Alongside pregnancy and child care, she tended gardens and livestock, cleaned barns, spread manure, sowed and harvested, and often helped move loads in the fields. She also prepared meals, washed, mended, and managed the household. Rising at dawn, she moved between feeding animals, serving meals, caring for children, fieldwork, and evening chores. With little time for health or leisure, she could become prematurely worn down; while her husband might visit a café, play cards, hunt, or fish on Sundays and fair days, she remained on the farm. Her work sustained both household and production, but the account describes its conditions as those of a beast of burden.

Women’s paid work could not simply be separated from family obligations. Child care and housekeeping remained largely women’s responsibility, while the use of birth control was uneven and abortion was officially forbidden. The combined demands of work, pregnancy, and domestic care made it harder for women to reconcile family life with employment. The promise of work as a path to freedom was therefore constrained by the unequal distribution of care and the absence of reliable economic independence.

Repetition and the denial of open-ended projects

A central contrast is between work that opens a future and work that repeatedly maintains the present. The account treats childbirth and breastfeeding as biological functions rather than projects that, by themselves, confer a higher meaning on existence. When motherhood is paired with domestic confinement, women are assigned labor that repeats from day to day and produces no new world. In contrast, the figure of Homo faber makes and invents: even a simple tool extends human power, while building a canoe, dam, or skyscraper projects action beyond immediate survival.

The housewife’s labor gives this contrast its daily form. Dishes must be washed again, dust returns, and clothes that have been mended become dirty or torn. Even a woman who tries to make a poor home beautiful may find that her effort cannot overcome the conditions of the dwelling. The account describes a reporter’s example of Mrs. G., living with her husband and seven children in a soot-covered wooden shack. Her effort to make the main room pretty could not make the hovel cease to be a hovel; her frustration exposes the limits placed on domestic labor when the material conditions remain unchanged. Like the housework that begins again the next day, the effort offers no lasting victory.

This division also shapes women’s access to the future. A girl may experience herself in childhood as an autonomous individual, present in her studies, games, and family relations. At puberty, however, adulthood seems to approach as a plot already prepared for her; the present becomes a transition rather than a field of ends, and her youth is spent waiting for a man who is imagined as liberator and provider. Marriage is presented as a route to security and social advancement, while parents’ preparation of daughters for marriage can leave them less trained and less committed to a profession than their brothers. The expectation that a husband will provide an easier life thereby helps reproduce the very dependence that makes marriage attractive.

Ideology, self-definition, and resistance

Subordination is maintained by stories that recast imposed limitations as women’s nature or advantage. The ideal of the “true woman” praises dependence, frivolity, and irresponsibility, while the language of protection presents restrictions as care. The account compares this reasoning with justifications of racial subordination: a group is kept in an inferior position, and that condition is then offered as proof of its inferiority. Calling the outcome natural or happy disguises the circumstances that produced it.

Women’s status as the Other is also reinforced through their relation to men. Men define women as a category, and women are often required to understand themselves through that definition rather than posit themselves collectively as subjects. The account argues that women have generally received concessions rather than secured change through unified political power. Their ties to men—as fathers, husbands, employers, and members of the same class or racial group—complicate the formation of common interests and a common political “we.”

Yet the conditions that restrict women are social and historical, not an immutable destiny. The book’s existentialist framework treats each person as an autonomous freedom whose existence is realized through projects and movement toward an open future. When women are forced to assume the role of the Other, their transcendence is obstructed and they are confined to immanence; that imposed confinement is oppression, rather than evidence that women are naturally unsuited to freedom. Historical subjugation thus names both the structures that limit women’s possibilities and the conflict generated when those structures deny their claim to exist as equal subjects.