Woman As A Woman In The Second Woman By Beauvoir

“What is Woman?”

You can say that a woman is a woman because she has ovaries, but does this really inhibit everything that it means to be a woman. All cultures since the dawn of time had defined women in terms of procreation. The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman has been apprehended in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man through her relegation to being man 's Other. The roles we associate with women are not given to them in birth; therefore, women are told what they’re supposed to be in life and what kind of roles they can or can’t perform. When Other is used in the book it describes the female’s secondary position in society. Beauvoir argues that man declare themselves as the one or self, and woman Other. The failure of defining woman either by her biological operations or by some broad understanding of the

Beauvoir finds that the self needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject. The category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as a self. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Woman is consistently stated as the Other by man who takes on the role of the self. Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman "is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute-she is the Other” (Beauvoir 6). For an individual to describe itself, it must also describe something in opposite to itself. There is also a negative undertone when you refer to yourself as a woman, whereas when you refer to a man it is positive because man represents the entirety of human beings. Women are thought of as the Other when compared with men who are seen as the Absolute. Therefore, one becomes a woman as defined by a man because of her existence. In other words, one becomes a woman by existing as a woman and living as a woman. The category of the Other is as ancient as