Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher, novelist, and essayist whose 1949 work The Second Sex became one of the founding texts of modern feminism. Her most quoted line — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — is among the most important sentences in twentieth-century thought. Understanding it fully requires understanding the philosophical tradition she was working within.
The Most Famous Line and What It Means
“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” The sentence opens the second volume of The Second Sex. De Beauvoir was arguing, in existentialist terms, that femininity is not a biological given but a social construction. Existentialism — particularly the version developed by Jean-Paul Sartre — held that existence precedes essence: there is no predetermined human nature; we define ourselves through choices and actions. De Beauvoir applied this framework to gender, arguing that what society presents as “natural” femininity is in fact a set of behaviors, roles, and dispositions that women are trained into from birth.
The line is often quoted as a statement about gender being socially constructed, which is accurate, but it is also an existentialist claim about freedom: if femininity is made, not given, then it can be remade, resisted, or transcended.
On Freedom and the Other
De Beauvoir’s analysis was grounded in the concept of “the Other.” She argued that man had historically defined himself as the subject — the universal human — while defining woman as the Other, the object against which man defined himself. This was not simply a social arrangement but a philosophical one with profound consequences for how women understood themselves and their possibilities.
Key Passages from Her Work
- “Woman is not born: she is made. And that which makes her is not nature, fate or chance, but civilization as a whole.” — Extended version of her foundational claim from The Second Sex.
- “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely.” — From her letters, revealing the personal dimension of her philosophical commitments.
- “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” — This is widely attributed to de Beauvoir; however, its exact source in her documented work has not been reliably established. It may be paraphrase or misattribution.
Her Influence on Feminist Thought
Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem all cited de Beauvoir as foundational to their thinking. Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, developed in Gender Trouble (1990), extends de Beauvoir’s insight into the constructed nature of gender identity, and Butler explicitly acknowledges her as a precursor. De Beauvoir’s prose is demanding, rigorous, and politically urgent — qualities that give her words a weight that soundbites rarely carry on their own.