Vienna is a recurring geographical reference in The Second Sex, associated with accounts of sexual initiation, psychiatric care, and gendered identity. The city does not receive an independent description: it enters the argument through the lives of women whose experiences illustrate how private bodily events acquire wider social and psychological consequences.

Vienna in the Accounts of Sexual Initiation

One account follows a young Viennese woman whose recollections trace the uneven movement from adolescent courtship toward adult sexual experience. At sixteen she began office work; at seventeen and a half, during her first holiday, she was courted by several men. Her early encounters involved uncertainty, resistance, and discomfort. Recounted as a sequence of episodes rather than a single decisive transition, her history shows how initiation could be abrupt and distressing rather than a gradual extension of childhood experience.

The account also follows what came after. She continued to see a colleague, sometimes went with him to a hotel without having intercourse, and later slept with a wealthy young man she hoped to marry, though the experience brought her no pleasure. She returned to the colleague, became distressed by competing attachments, and lost weight. A period in a sanitarium and later relationships did not immediately resolve her difficulties. After treatment, she eventually consented to a relationship with a man who loved her and married him; the book reports that her sexual frigidity disappeared in marriage. Vienna thus frames a history in which the effects of early experience persist, and in which later circumstances alter the outcome.

Psychiatric Cases and the Interpretation of Experience

The book also presents a young woman who, after traveling to Italy with a friend, fell into a severe depression. She withdrew to her room, stopped speaking, and was taken to a nursing home, where her condition worsened; after returning to her parents’ home, she remained motionless in a corner. The account connects her crisis to an undisclosed sexual history: her fiancé admitted that he had followed her to Rome, where she yielded to him after prolonged resistance, and she later said that she had never experienced pleasure with him. She recovered after finding a lover who satisfied her and marrying him. The episode makes the consequences of an intimate relationship legible through its effects on a woman’s health and capacity to rejoin ordinary life.

A different case concerns a young woman described as exiled by the Nazis from Vienna. She was intersex, loved men, and regretted that she could appeal neither to heterosexual nor homosexual partners. Her story complicates any simple alignment between bodily sex, gender presentation, and the direction of desire: the book uses her situation to distinguish bodily variation from a person’s chosen or experienced erotic object. Vienna is mentioned in connection with her displacement, while the interpretive emphasis falls on the limits of treating anatomy as a complete explanation of sexuality.

Vienna and Gendered Identity

The discussion of Sandor brings Vienna into an account of upbringing, bodily constitution, and sexual identity. Sandor was not psychoanalyzed, but the author draws attention to her sense of herself as a man, her father’s inclusion of her in his trips and life, and her active, dominating manner of loving women. The book interprets her aversion to men and attachment to older women through a psychoanalytic account of her relation to her mother, while presenting this interpretation as an explanation of the case rather than a general rule about lesbian women.

These examples make Vienna less a backdrop than a point of entry into a broader inquiry. Across the sexual and psychiatric histories, the book resists treating bodily characteristics as destiny and instead places experience within relations, institutions, and social expectations. Its accounts also distinguish what women undergo from the ways those experiences are interpreted: a clinical label or a claim about anatomy does not, by itself, explain a life. In that sense, Vienna belongs to the book’s effort to describe women as situated subjects whose possibilities are shaped, but not exhaustively defined, by bodily and social conditions.