St. Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas appears in The Second Sex not as a character in a narrated life but as a theological authority whose account of woman helps expose how patriarchal hierarchy acquired the force of doctrine. Beauvoir cites his characterization of woman as an incomplete, incidental, or inessential being and places it within a wider history of arguments that define women in relation to men rather than as autonomous subjects.

Identity and Intellectual Role

Beauvoir invokes Saint Thomas Aquinas in her critique of inherited accounts of sexual difference. His importance here lies in the authority attached to his theological judgments: rather than treating women’s subordination as a changeable social arrangement, the tradition she describes presented it as grounded in an enduring order. His statements therefore serve as evidence of how philosophical and religious language could make a historically unequal relation appear natural and permanent.

Woman as Incomplete and Inessential

In Beauvoir’s account, Saint Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in representing woman as deficient in relation to man. Beauvoir groups his description of woman as an incomplete man and an incidental being with the broader claim that humanity is treated as masculine: man stands as the essential subject, while woman is defined relative to him. This is not merely a difference between two equivalent categories. It makes the male body the unmarked human standard and renders the female body a particularity that supposedly limits women’s standing.

The same argument recurs when Beauvoir examines philosophical explanations of sexual difference. She notes that Saint Thomas Aquinas calls woman an inessential being, a formulation that, from a masculine point of view, makes sexuality itself seem accidental. The underlying asymmetry remains: man is imagined as self-sufficient, while woman’s meaning is assigned through her relation to him.

Theology, Myth, and the Authority of Hierarchy

Beauvoir places Saint Thomas Aquinas within a long process by which male writers and institutions turned supremacy into a right. Lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers, and scholars, she argues, sought to establish that women’s subordinate condition was both divinely intended and socially useful. In this account, theology did not stand apart from social power: religious authority supplied arguments through which male dominance could be presented as part of an absolute order.

The story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s extra bone provides Beauvoir with a symbolic counterpart to the doctrine of woman as an incomplete man. She links this reading of the creation story with Saint Thomas Aquinas’s formulation, showing how theological interpretation could reinforce the idea that woman derives from man and lacks independent status. Across these examples, women are not represented as reciprocal subjects; they are made secondary within a structure whose terms men define.

Historical Significance in Beauvoir’s Argument

Saint Thomas Aquinas’s statements belong to the intellectual history Beauvoir uses to explain the persistence of women’s subordination, not to an account of one thinker acting alone. Her larger claim is that women’s history has been written by men, who shaped values, customs, and religions and then used those systems to justify the position they had assigned women. His authority exemplifies how an unequal social relation could be recast as a timeless truth.

Beauvoir’s discussion also resists treating such doctrine as a neutral description of women. In her analysis, the category of woman as naturally deficient helps conceal the interests served by male control. Saint Thomas Aquinas consequently functions as a consequential example in her critique of the tradition that identifies the masculine with the universal and relegates women to the status of the dependent, inessential Other.