The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Isabel Hilton: The book that changed my life

A book that changed my life? At first, I thought there must have been several: a childhood spent in rural Aberdeenshire, where the weather can be harsh and terrestrial television stopped a hundred miles south, made for plenty of reading time. Tunnelling through the available material - the school library, the parents' bookshelves, the bookish second sister's collection - made for an eclectic range of influences, from A Pattern of Islands, Arthur Grimble's memoir of his time as resident commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the 1920s, and Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet (both from parental shelves), to my sister's complete works of Dickens. After my family moved, when I was 13, my reading horizons widened to accommodate novelists (Russian, French and American, mostly), whose styles I imitated in school essays for a week or two, to philosophers whom I thought it smart to read, without, in truth, finding much in them that moved me.

Life-changing moments tend to come early, while life is still ours to make. There were books which influenced my ideas about the world and how it worked, or which fed a fascination with faraway places at a time when there were still places that were unimaginably far away. But life-changing in the sense that how I saw the world, or my place in it, was never the same afterwards? There was really only one.

I first read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in my final year at university. It was the early 1970s and I was still smarting from an interview with the careers office that was meant to help me follow a postgraduate career. The man on the other side of the desk, a Scot in his late forties, had, he acknowledged, never been called on to advise anyone studying Chinese, and he was not rising to the challenge. He recommended that I learn to type. With my language skills, he said, I could earn a premium as a secretary.

It was de Beauvoir who transformed rage into clarity of purpose. The Second Sex, even in bad, incomplete translation, offered a cool, forensic dissection of how women came to be as they were. No one is born a woman, she said; we become women, constructed by a culture in which the norm is assumed to be male, a cage that extends from the highest plane of philosophy to the domestic intimacy of the couple. "The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another."

De Beauvoir laid bare the intellectual, emotional and cultural structures that confined women's lives, structures we had been taught to read as common to all humanity, rather than built in the service of half of it. I can still recall the sense of relief, of grasping hold of an account that made sense of years of inchoate frustrations.

The fog lifted. The landscape and the figures in it stood out clearly under the brilliant light of de Beauvoir's intelligence. By illuminating not only the personal and the professional, but also the intellectual - all those ideas and theories consumed like small narcotic doses on the long educational road - she offered the tools with which to dismantle the cage. Without her insight, the remedies of thought, of reflection, of intellectual curiosity with which we interrogate the world and our place in it, were false friends: we were absorbing a culture in which the male was the universal, the One, the norm against which women were measured and were eternally found to be Other. Or, as she put it, with much greater elegance:

Things become clear . . . if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed - he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

What about the world of other possibilities that my generation had the luxury of imagining for ourselves? What women could become, if they could imagine themselves free, they would have to define for themselves. What mattered was that de Beauvoir laid bare the constraints and left us pointers for how to try to negotiate the future, and a compelling instruction to do so.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the en-sois - the brutish life of subjection to given conditions - and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases, it is an absolute evil.

Now that's a life-changing challenge.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website