Simone De Beauvoir’s Impact on the Discourse of Gender and Embodiment

In 1949, a French philosopher sat down to ask herself a deceptively simple question: “What is a woman?” The result was The Second Sex, a work that shook the intellectual foundations of the twentieth century. Simone de Beauvoir’s answer – that womanhood is not a biological destiny but a social condition – permanently altered how scholars, activists, and everyday people think about gender, the body, and the self. Nearly eight decades later, her ideas remain the starting point for some of the most important conversations in sociology and feminist thought.

Who was Simone de Beauvoir? 🔗

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and feminist activist. Trained rigorously in philosophy, she moved in the same intellectual circles as Jean-Paul Sartre and contributed original thinking to existentialism and phenomenology – fields concerned with human freedom, consciousness, and lived experience. Though she initially resisted the label “feminist,” her 1949 masterwork The Second Sex made her one of the most consequential feminist thinkers in history. The book was so controversial upon publication that the Vatican placed it on its Index of Prohibited Books. In a 1974 interview, Beauvoir recalled that men accused the book of vulgarity – largely because they were furious at its central argument: that women deserved equality with men.

The foundational claim: gender is made, not born 🔗

The most quoted line in all of feminist philosophy comes from The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This single sentence encapsulates a radical departure from conventional thinking. Before Beauvoir, gender was largely treated as a straightforward extension of biological sex – to be female was simply to be a woman, with all the roles and limitations that entailed. Beauvoir rejected this entirely.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Beauvoir, this phrase was the first clear articulation of what scholars now call the sex-gender distinction – the idea that biological sex and the social construction of gender are two separate things. Being born with a female body does not, in itself, determine a person’s identity, capabilities, or role in society. Instead, Beauvoir argued, those identities are imposed through culture, history, and social convention. In her framing, gender is not something a person has – it is something a person is made to become through a lifetime of conditioning.

The body as a lived situation 🔗

One of Beauvoir’s most original contributions was her treatment of the body – not as a biological given, but as a lived situation. Drawing on phenomenology, she argued that we do not simply have bodies; we experience and inhabit them in ways shaped by the society around us. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, for Beauvoir the body is both a material fact and an experientially constituted reality. What it means to have a female body is not fixed by anatomy – it is co-determined by cultural assumptions, patriarchal norms, and the everyday attitudes of the society one lives in.

This insight had enormous implications. Beauvoir examined how women’s bodily experiences – menstruation, pregnancy, menopause – carry no inherent meaning in themselves. As Philosophy Now notes, these experiences only come to feel like burdens or disadvantages when a hostile, patriarchal society assigns those meanings to them. A woman does not naturally experience her body as limiting or inferior; she is taught to do so. The distress is social, not biological.

The male gaze and the objectified body 🔗

Beauvoir was among the first major philosophers to systematically analyze what later theorists would call the male gaze – the way women’s bodies are observed, judged, and objectified by a masculinist culture. She argued that women are forced to see themselves through this external lens, internalizing judgments about their appearance, desirability, and reproductive function. As Philosophy Now describes it, there is often no room for women to experience their own bodies through their own gaze, because the male gaze permeates everywhere. Women do not freely choose to think negatively about their bodies – they are conditioned to do so by the society in which they are embedded.

Woman as “the Other” 🔗

Central to The Second Sex is the concept of Otherness. Beauvoir argued that in Western society, man is positioned as the universal subject – the norm, the default human being – while woman is constructed as his Other: the deviation, the secondary, the defined. As she put it, “humanity is male, and man defines woman not herself, but as relative to him.” This is not a natural arrangement, but a historical and political one, sustained by institutions, myths, and ideology.

Importantly, Beauvoir observed that this dynamic has a psychological dimension as well. Women are not simply oppressed from the outside – they are often complicit in their own subjugation, having internalized the idea that their subordinate position is natural or inevitable. As Philosophy Now explains, in existentialist terms, women internalize the male gaze and the expectations of the gender, striving to live up to what Beauvoir called the “eternal feminine.” They become what they are expected to become – a free being trapped in a role defined entirely by others.

Beauvoir was also careful to note that gender-based Othering is not unique. As the Wikipedia entry on Beauvoir points out, she recognized that similar hierarchies of oppression operate around race, class, and religion – where one group becomes the standard and another becomes the marginalized Other. But she argued that the gendering of women as Other was among the most pervasive and historically entrenched of all such systems.

Existentialism, freedom, and agency 🔗

Beauvoir’s analysis of gender oppression was grounded in existentialist philosophy – the belief that human beings are fundamentally free and responsible for creating their own meaning. This created a productive tension at the heart of her argument. On one hand, she documented in exhaustive detail how social structures constrain women’s freedom. On the other, she insisted that those structures are historical – made by human beings at a particular time – and can therefore be changed.

As the Open University explains, Beauvoir saw women as having been conditioned to accept their situation as an inescapable condition – to treat social destiny as natural necessity. This is what existentialists call “bad faith”: living in self-deception, surrendering one’s freedom by treating it as though it doesn’t exist. The liberatory potential of Beauvoir’s work lay in naming this process, exposing it as a choice (even if a constrained one), and thereby opening the door to resistance.

The legacy: second-wave feminism and beyond 🔗

The Second Sex became the foundational text of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. As ReviseSociology notes, Beauvoir’s claim that “One is not born a woman: one becomes one” paved the way for a full reappraisal of gender roles in society and helped ignite the women’s liberation movement. Thinkers like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer all acknowledged debts to Beauvoir’s arguments.

Perhaps the most direct intellectual heir is philosopher Judith Butler, whose landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble built explicitly on Beauvoir’s framework. A peer-reviewed article in Philosophies (MDPI) shows how Butler extended Beauvoir’s idea that gender is “becoming” – arguing that gender is not just socially constructed but continuously performed through repeated acts, gestures, and behaviors. Where Beauvoir held open the possibility of a distinction between biological sex and social gender, Butler pushed further, arguing that even sex itself is interpreted through social norms. The body, for Butler as for Beauvoir, is not a pre-social fact but a site of meaning, power, and potential transformation.

Intersectionality and the limits of Beauvoir’s framework 🔗

Subsequent scholars have also engaged critically with Beauvoir’s work, particularly around race. As an essay in the Apollon Undergraduate Journal argues, Beauvoir’s framework of Otherness is most useful when treated as a method for understanding varied experiences of marginalization, not as a fixed ontological category. Black women, for instance, are gendered differently from white women and racialized differently from Black men – their experience of Otherness is shaped by the intersection of race and gender simultaneously. Beauvoir’s analysis, which focused primarily on gender and largely assumed a white European subject, required expansion to account for these intersecting axes of oppression. This critical engagement with her work is itself evidence of her enduring centrality to the field.

Why Beauvoir still matters 🔗

Beauvoir’s core insight – that the body is not a neutral biological object but a socially shaped experience – remains as relevant as ever. Contemporary debates about body image, gender identity, and reproductive rights all echo the questions she raised in 1949. When society tells people how their bodies should look, what roles they should play, or which identities are legitimate, it is enacting precisely the kind of social construction of embodied gender that Beauvoir spent her career analyzing. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, what began as a phenomenological investigation of women’s lived experience became a liberatory tool – one that opened the door to the consciousness-raising that defined second-wave feminism and continues to validate the injustices experienced by women and gender-nonconforming people today.

Her work also set a methodological standard: that any serious study of gender must take seriously the lived, embodied experiences of those it studies – not just abstract theory, but the texture of real life as it is actually experienced in the body and in society.

What do you think? Beauvoir argued that gendered experiences are produced by society, not biology – but how much do you think biological factors still shape gendered embodiment today? And if gender is socially constructed, what would it take to meaningfully reconstruct it on more equal terms?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
2. https://iep.utm.edu/simone-de-beauvoir/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir
4. https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Becoming_A_Woman_Simone_de_Beauvoir_on_Female_Embodiment
5. https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/The_Second_Sex
6. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/simone-de-beauvoir-and-the-feminist-revolution/content-section-2.2
7. https://revisesociology.com/2025/02/24/judith-butler-gender-and-performativity/
8. https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/6/137
9. https://www.apollonejournal.org/apollon-journal//simone-de-beauvoir-and-the-other-woman