A Letter to Simone de Beauvoir: Living Beyond The Second Sex

In this letter, I return to The Second Sex to sit with its tensions, and to ask what it still gets right and what it cannot fully hold. Consider this a book review turned letter, trying to grapple with the ambiguities and truths within the text.

Dear Simone,

I read what many call your ‘magnum opus’, The Second Sex, as a woman who comes after. What is perhaps most unsettling is that, to a certain degree, it still holds true. I do not wish to sit here, more than seventy years later, and pass judgment on your work; nor do I believe I possess the authority to do so. Rather, I want to speak to the tension and friction that exist within the text itself. Much has changed over the past seven decades, yet the human impulse to contradict oneself remains intact. I encounter this contradiction repeatedly in your writing, and I do not read it as a failure of thought. Infact, it feels like a raw and honest trace of a mind in motion. I would call it a reflection of how searching, and beautifully unsettled a woman’s thinking can be when it is allowed to roam freely.

Had we been friends, I imagine we would have spent hours circling the same question: what we think woman is, and what we think we are. Like you, I find myself uneasy with the language used to describe womanhood, as though it has been borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. I wonder, as you do, whether a frilled petticoat is enough to bring it back down to earth. These questions; I think about the likes of them daily. In my collared, oversized shirts, I ask myself whether I look like a fourteen-year-old boy. In my best lace dress, I wonder if I look too slutty. Draped in my mother’s saree, “have I suddenly become too much of an aunty”? Each version of myself seems to demand a different performance, or justification, and yet none feels entirely correct. Womanhood, as I experience it, is less a stable identity than it is a series of negotiations ; between clothing, gaze and the surveillance that persists adamantly through it all. 

When you admit to hesitating before writing this book, that’s when I find myself in you. I hesitate too; not to read you, but to respond. Not because your work feels irrelevant, but because it feels unfinished and hasty in the way all honest thinking often is. And perhaps it is this unfinished theme that makes your claim sound half true and half uninformed.“Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man”; a sort of universal truth, even now. I still remember being seven years old and arguing with my parents that I wanted my name to be followed by my mother’s name, because I saw more of myself there and could never understand why it had to end with something masculine-sounding. To be a woman feels like getting to know oneself through reference ; to a father, a partner, a surname that legitimizes you. We remain beings whose credibility is so often tethered to a man’s presence, as though our existence requires proof, which can be verified, only and only by a man. It reminds me of this Margaret Atwood quote,  “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

In that sense, being the Other becomes interminable. When you write that woman is “the sex,” the sexed being, while man is allowed the luxury of neutrality, I nod before I can object. I do feel myself encumbered by scrutiny, as masculinity moves unburdened by the need for explanation. Alterity, as you argue, is not an accident of history but a fundamental structure of consciousness itself. And that is exactly why it feels so arduous to escape. To be a woman is not just to be placed in opposition to man, but to grow up already fluent, and rooted in that opposition, already aware of oneself as relative beings. We wear Otherness like a second skin, like a bra ; so close to us that it sometimes becomes indistinguishable from ourselves. Misogyny seeps through the cracks of the mundane because we have grown accustomed to carrying it, or, and I think you will agree with this – because the labour of naming it, repeatedly, is very, very exhausting. And it is here that I begin to wonder whether your understanding of the Other leaves room for the “other” messier ways women live with. 

The category of women you go on to describe in your book, might not have much room for relatability, for the women who have experienced a life similar, or harder than mine. It is this clarity, within the two binaries you have created, that unsettles me as a woman of colour. The Other you describe often feels like a singular position, one that gathers all women into a shared condition of subordination. As blunt as this may sound, I do not find a lot of women fitting comfortably into that category. I deny oppression as do you, because each persons experience with it is layered in ways your framework, cannot account for. It feels a bit nascent, while speaking of non-white women. Even if I imagine you writing in the 1940s, and read with  an open mind, I cannot ignore that white women have never known caste-based or race-based discrimination in the way a lot of WOC have. Work, for instance, appears in your text as access denied and then fought for, whereas for many women across caste and class lines, labour was never a matter of exclusion but of compulsion. Work as you may know it, has brought exploitation, in place of liberation for most women of colour. 

In this sense, the binary your argument constructs feels potentially dangerous. I recognise this temptation of two solid divisions, because it is one I once internalised. There was a time when my own feminism shaped by a kind of girl-power certainty that led me to believe that women stood on one side and men on the other. Later, I realised how my own privilege within Indian society blinded me to the lives of women who are not only oppressed for being women, but also for being born into certain families, castes, bodies, colours. Your argument, powerful as it is, also turns a blind eye to what it means to live under that kind of compounded suffering. It also assumes a certain credibility to draw these divisions and universalise them.  I am no longer convinced that those binaries can hold its own across borders of history and geography, and can make space for itself in a country like mine. 

The urgency of your Introduction reads almost like an angry rant; one driven by  irritation, and fairly so. I say this without dismissal; if anything, I suspect you would have thrived on Twitter or Substack. Yet it is this very urgency that also pivots your framework so closely to man as the central and “absolute” reference point, as ironic as it is. Even as you dismantle male sovereignty, liberation continues to orbit around it, and to read that upsets me a little. Your history too, strides with a confidence that feels very European to me, as though liberation unfolds progressively and in a sort of linear manner. But history does not move forward for everyone in the same direction; for many women, it has frozen in time or even violently reversed many a times. And yet, I am grateful to be reading your work now, aware of how deeply it might have shaped the very language of feminism as I am seeing it today. Much of what you write still resonates with me. What troubles me is not your work itself, but the way it could often be treated as scripture ; absorbed uncritically, and universalised where it cannot apply. I read you, not to inherit your framework the way it is, but to revise it, and refuse to treat it as bible. This refusal is what feels to me, entirely in the spirit of the thinking you would have wanted for the women of today to inherit. 

Love,

Tanushree. 

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