United States

The United States occupies several connected roles in The Second Sex: it is a place where Simone de Beauvoir encountered racial oppression firsthand, a comparison for understanding women’s subordination, and a society whose labor, marriage, and social customs illustrate the material conditions that shape women’s lives. Across these discussions, the country is not a single, uniform example. Its racial and gender hierarchies illuminate one another, while their differences remain consequential.

An encounter that sharpened the comparison

During a 1947 trip to the United States, de Beauvoir met Nelson Algren, who encouraged her to expand her essay on women into a book. He introduced her to Chicago’s underside, and they explored the United States and Mexico together that year and the next. Her firsthand encounter with racism, alongside her friendship with Richard Wright, helped her clarify the relation between sexism and antisemitism, which she had witnessed but had not openly challenged with Jean-Paul Sartre. She came to understand that Black people, Jews, and women could all be reduced to abstract types that rationalized their subjugation, even though the histories and forms of their oppression were not identical.

The United States also serves as a setting for a broader comparison between groups denied the ability to assert themselves as subjects. De Beauvoir distinguishes women from racial minorities in one important respect: women are not numerically outnumbered by men, but, unlike groups whose shared past and distinct communal spaces can support collective identity, they have been dispersed among men and bound to fathers and husbands. She notes that Black communities in the United States, Jewish ghettos, and workers’ communities have had forms of shared space unavailable to women as a sex. Women’s social positions also divide them: bourgeois women may align with bourgeois men rather than working-class women, and white women with white men rather than Black women.

Race, violence, and the limits of analogy

De Beauvoir uses the racial order of the United States to explain how power can deny a group the means to express its agency. In the South, she writes, a Black person could not use violence against white people; this imposed passivity, in her account, shaped how Black people experienced themselves in a white world. She compares that restriction with the position of French people during the Occupation who had resolved not to answer provocation with violence: when people cannot act against those who control their situation, their ability to assert subjectivity is curtailed. The comparison concerns the constraint on action, not an equivalence between the histories involved.

Her account likewise identifies both a parallel and a difference between anti-Black racism and women’s subordination. In the United States, she argues, appeals to “separate but equal” status could serve as a pretext for discrimination, much as claims about a supposedly “true woman” could present imposed subordination as natural or desirable. The dominant group, in each case, points to conditions it has helped create as proof of the subordinated group’s inferiority. Yet de Beauvoir expressly distinguishes antisemitism from these cases: the Jew is treated more as an enemy than as an inferior, and is denied a recognized place. The comparison is therefore a way to expose recurring mechanisms of domination, not to erase differences among race, class, religion, and sex.

Work, class, and the struggle to organize

The American racial comparison recurs in de Beauvoir’s analysis of labor. Employers could welcome women workers because they accepted low wages, while male workers saw this cheap labor as a threat. She compares the resulting division to the use of Black labor in the United States against the interests of other workers: groups subjected to greater oppression can be made instruments of the powerful, producing hostility between potential allies. In her account, women’s integration into unions offered a way to defend their interests without continuing to endanger those of the working class as a whole. The comparison locates solidarity not in identity alone but in the practical capacity to organize and resist exploitation.

The book also gives specific American wage comparisons within its wider account of unequal pay. In 1918, women in the United States earned half the salary of men. De Beauvoir sets this figure beside evidence from France and Germany to show that women’s entry into paid work did not by itself secure economic equality. Employment could provide a route toward independence, but low pay and the unequal organization of domestic responsibilities constrained what that route made possible.

Social expectations and domestic life

The United States appears in the discussion of marriage as a society in which sexual conventions could preserve the expectation that a bride prove her virginity. De Beauvoir cites the Kinsey Report’s account that, in some regions, first-generation immigrants still sent a bloodied sheet to relatives in Europe as proof that a marriage had been consummated. The example shows how a private marital expectation could extend beyond the couple into family surveillance and the maintenance of social norms.

American women also appear in de Beauvoir’s account of social visiting and leisure. Where French women might perform the etiquette of calling, American women could replace conversation with bridge, a change she treats as an alternative form of social occupation rather than evidence of independence in itself. More broadly, these visits and gatherings reveal the narrowness of social life when women lack common interests and their public identities remain tied to their husbands’ positions. In a different economic register, de Beauvoir describes an American reporter’s account of a poor white woman who struggled to make a soot-darkened, cockroach-infested wooden shack livable for her husband and seven children. The woman’s effort could not overcome the poverty of the dwelling, making visible the difference between domestic labor and control over the material conditions that labor is expected to improve.

Bodies, agency, and the book’s argument

The United States is also one setting in which de Beauvoir discusses the effects of gendered restrictions on physical agency. She invokes the prohibition on Black people using violence against white people in the South as an example of how enforced passivity can shape a group’s experience of the world. In her separate discussion of girls’ puberty, she argues that anxiety and shame about bodily changes can intensify physical distress, while emphasizing that a body’s limitations become obstacles through the perspective and social situation in which it is experienced. The argument links bodily experience to a wider question: who is permitted to act, test limits, and make a future through projects of their own?

Taken together, the American examples help give material and historical force to the book’s account of women as autonomous subjects constrained by arrangements that define them as subordinate. They connect racial hierarchy, wage competition, marital convention, and domestic labor without reducing these experiences to one another. The United States is thus both a site of de Beauvoir’s changed understanding and a comparative lens for tracing how imposed conditions can be presented as natural facts, while remaining open to collective challenge and change.