James George Frazer

James George Frazer appears in The Second Sex as a cited scholar whose accounts of agricultural customs illuminate the association between women and fertility. His material contributes to the book’s analysis of how social meanings assigned to women can be mistaken for evidence of an inherent feminine nature.

Agricultural fertility and women

Frazer’s examples connect women’s reproductive capacity with the perceived fertility of crops. Among Indigenous peoples along the Orinoco, men left sowing and planting to women because their ability to conceive and bear children was thought to make seeds and roots more productive. The passage presents this belief as one among numerous examples Frazer collected of women’s supposed affinity with seeds.

Other customs in the same discussion reinforce that symbolic connection. In Borneo, women selected and preserved seeds, and some spent nights in rice fields while crops were growing. In India, women were said to push the plow through fields at night. The examples show women associated with agricultural fertility through different practices, but the book presents them as evidence of cultural beliefs, not proof of a universal biological power.

Kinship and the exchange of women

Frazer is also invoked in a discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s account of exogamy: marriage outside one’s clan is presented as socially beneficial because it establishes relations between groups. The argument distinguishes this social function from an innate property of women or a biological danger supposedly attached to marriage within the clan. In this framework, women are treated as possessions and as a means of communication between clans; marriage links men through the exchange of women.

The contrast between these uses matters to the book’s larger analysis. Women’s association with fertility may appear to grant them distinctive power, while kinship customs place them within systems organized by male groups. Frazer’s ethnographic examples help document the symbolic association; the book’s argument is that such meanings do not, by themselves, amount to women’s equality or autonomous authority.

Significance in the argument

Frazer’s citations serve as historical and ethnographic illustrations within a broader account of women’s social position. The agricultural examples show how reproductive capacity could be made culturally significant, while the account of exogamy describes how women could be assigned a role in exchange between groups. Read together, these passages distinguish symbolic importance from power over social arrangements: being associated with fertility, or serving as a link between clans, does not necessarily make women independent subjects in those systems.