Otherness

In The Second Sex, Otherness describes the structure by which men establish themselves as the essential subject and define women in relation to that standard, as the inessential and relative term. Simone de Beauvoir’s argument is that women are not inherently Other: they are made to occupy that position through history, institutions, material dependence, and inherited representations. The concept explains both why women’s subordination persists and why liberation requires more than changing ideas about femininity: women must gain the concrete means to act and recognize themselves as subjects.

The Subject and the Other

De Beauvoir begins from a general account of human relations: a subject posits itself as essential by setting another as the Other. Between peoples, classes, and groups, this relation can be reciprocal. A traveler may be a foreigner elsewhere; political and historical struggles can unsettle which group claims the position of the One. De Beauvoir asks why this reciprocity has not taken hold between the sexes, and why women have been made to accept the perspective that defines them as inessential.

Women’s subordination differs, in her account, from the position of groups whose oppression is tied to a distinct historical event. Women are not a numerical minority, and their presence is not the outcome of a particular conquest or rupture that left them with a separate past to reclaim. They have always lived within a shared society with men, while being subordinated across the historical record. This can make their Otherness seem absolute, as if it arose from nature rather than from arrangements that could change.

The intimate structure of the sexes’ relation further complicates resistance. Women are dispersed among men and bound to particular fathers and husbands through home, work, economic interest, and social condition. They do not form an independent community with a common space or solidarity of labor. Divisions of class and race also pull women into alliances with men of their own group rather than with women across those divisions. Unlike a class that can organize itself against another class, women cannot simply separate from men: the sexes are joined in the couple, a fundamental unit in which both are necessary to one another. This dependence makes the woman Other at the heart of a shared whole.

History, Myth, and Male Authority

De Beauvoir examines the apparent power of women in ancient fertility myths and the worship of female divinities. In early cosmologies, woman could represent the mysterious forces of nature; goddesses associated with fertility held immense symbolic power, and myths and traditions preserve traces of women’s former prominence. But she rejects the inference that this amounts to a historical golden age of female sovereignty. Being revered as Earth, Mother, or Goddess did not make woman man’s equal: her power was imagined as supernatural and placed outside human political authority. The exalted Other remained the inessential Other.

The distinction matters because idealization can serve exclusion. When women are praised as mysterious, sacred, or essentially different, that praise may deny them recognition as human peers. De Beauvoir notes that periods which treat women as absolute Others are also those that most harshly refuse to integrate them into society as human beings. Antifeminists can celebrate women’s supposedly irreducible difference precisely to keep them outside shared human life. In this account, symbolic elevation and material subordination are not opposites; the first can help naturalize the second.

Material Dependence and Everyday Life

The concept takes concrete form in the distribution of work and the possibilities it opens. De Beauvoir contrasts childbirth and breastfeeding, which she describes as natural functions rather than projects, with activities through which men invent tools, pursue ends, and extend their action into the future. When motherhood and housework confine women to repetitive domestic labor, the result is not simply a difference in tasks: it is a division between restricted, recurring activity and projects recognized as transcendence. The household keeps life going, yet its repeated work can leave the woman without a publicly valued conquest or an independent future.

Economic dependence perpetuates this arrangement. De Beauvoir notes that women’s lower wages made their labor attractive to employers but also provoked hostility among male workers, who saw women as cheap competition. The interests of women and workers did not automatically coincide; only organization in unions could enable women to defend their interests without being cast as a threat to the working class. The example shows why formal inclusion in work is not enough: unequal conditions can preserve subordination within the very sphere that might offer a route out of it.

The burdens also appear in the daily life of rural women. A peasant woman may share her husband’s responsibilities and property and sometimes possess considerable moral authority at home, yet she undertakes field labor alongside cooking, washing, mending, household management, pregnancy, and child care. Her day begins with feeding animals and serving the men’s first meal, moves between the children, fields, garden, and household, and ends with further domestic work. Men may take leisure in town, at the café, or in hunting and fishing; she generally remains on the farm. Her recognized importance within the household therefore coexists with exhaustion, little leisure, and limited power to direct her life.

The same structure shapes the prospects offered to girls and women seeking independence. Girls are often raised for marriage rather than for personal development, and the promise of a wealthy husband can divide their efforts and weaken their professional training. Work may provide a means of emancipation from marriage, but it does not necessarily confer social dignity or economic autonomy when it remains poorly rewarded and family responsibilities stay with women. De Beauvoir argues that the woman who hopes to combine profession and family must negotiate obstacles that men do not face on equal terms; the apparent option of a fortunate marriage also acts as a temptation that can keep independence out of reach.

Lived Experience and Existential Freedom

Otherness is not only an external social label; it becomes part of how a woman encounters her own body and future. In the account of girlhood, childhood contains moments in which the girl experiences herself as an autonomous individual, present in study, play, and family relations. Puberty changes the meaning of time: adulthood settles into the body as a future already prepared for her, while the present appears as transition and waiting. The girl is encouraged to look toward a man as liberator and provider of happiness. Her future is thus organized around another person’s action rather than her own projects.

The bodily consequences are likewise described through the surrounding social perspective, not as a self-sufficient biological destiny. De Beauvoir links anxiety about menstruation and puberty to the girl’s learned suspicion of her body, which can intensify distress and contribute to physical disorders. She also argues that physiological differences do not in themselves bar women from professions. The decisive issue is the wider situation in which bodily difference is interpreted as evidence of inferiority and women are denied outlets for action and risk. Otherness is sustained when social limits turn difference into a verdict on what a woman can become.

De Beauvoir’s existentialist framework gives this diagnosis its measure. Every subject seeks to justify existence through projects and an open future; freedom is realized by reaching beyond the given toward other freedoms. When transcendence is forced back into immanence, existence is reduced to facticity. A subject may consent to that fall, or have it imposed as frustration and oppression; the woman’s situation is distinctive because she is an autonomous freedom who is nevertheless pressed to assume herself as Other while men treat their own consciousness as essential and sovereign. Her central conflict is between her claim to act as a subject and a condition that assigns her the role of object.

Collective Recognition and the Limits of Analogy

De Beauvoir compares women’s situation with the subordination of Black people, Jews, colonized peoples, and the proletariat, while stressing that these histories are not interchangeable. Racism, antisemitism, class hierarchy, and sexism can all reduce people to fixed abstractions that justify their subjugation. Her account of Simone de Beauvoir’s encounter with racism in the United States, and her friendship with Richard Wright, helped clarify for her how the Black person and the woman could each be made into an abstract Other. Yet different groups have different histories, forms of separation, and political possibilities; comparison identifies a shared mechanism, not an identical experience.

The analogy also illuminates the importance of collective self-definition. Proletarians and Black people can say “we” and posit themselves as subjects in opposition to those who have defined them. Women, de Beauvoir argues, have generally lacked the concrete means to organize as a unit, and their political actions have often secured only what men were willing to concede. The obstacles are structural: women have no distinct shared space or solidarity of labor, and their ties to men divide them by class and race. Without collective power, the dominant group’s description of women can pass for women’s own account of themselves.

The issue is therefore not whether women should be valued as a separate, mysterious kind of being, but whether they can participate as peers in shared human life. De Beauvoir’s concept of Otherness exposes how reverence, protection, and claims of difference may conceal unequal power; it also connects that power to wages, household labor, political organization, and bodily experience. Liberation requires altering the conditions that make women dependent and inessential, so that they can pursue projects and recognize one another as subjects rather than accepting the identity assigned to them.