Are You Born a Girl, or Do You Become One?
You aren’t born a woman — you become one
In 1949, a thick book landed in Paris bookstores. The author was Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), a French philosopher and writer. The title was The Second Sex. On the very first page she dropped a sentence that made people furious: “One is not born but becomes a woman.”
What could that possibly mean? Aren’t girls just born female? Beauvoir wasn’t denying biology. She was saying something deeper: the role called “woman” — the clothes, the feelings, the limits we learn to expect from girls — is not natural. It’s built by society. Think about when you were little. Maybe you were handed a doll while your brother got a truck. Nobody said you must play one way. But the options arrived as if they belonged to you naturally. Beauvoir would ask, why?
She was a brilliant student who, at twenty-one, became the youngest person ever to pass France’s most difficult philosophy exam. She saw that society treats men as the standard, the subject. Women get cast as the Other — a second kind of person, defined only in relation to men. And that, she argued, is a jail disguised as normal life.
How girls become “the Other”
Beauvoir used the idea of the Other to explain how a whole group of people can lose their claim to being fully human. The subject gets to make rules, invent projects, and name what matters. The Other is expected to follow, to please, to help. For centuries, women have been the Other to men.
This isn’t like one army conquering another. Women aren’t a separate tribe. They live scattered among men, in the same families, the same homes. So they rarely see themselves as a group that can rise up together. Instead, they often measure themselves by the men around them — as “white wives” or “working-class daughters” — rather than as sisters in the same struggle. The myth of the eternal feminine keeps them in place: an impossible, forever-shifting ideal of how a “real” woman should look and act. It’s a story that says women are naturally softer, less logical, made for care, not leadership.
Beauvoir called this a seductive trap. You can choose the safety of being the Other. If you accept the myth, you get protection, approval, and a clear script to follow. You trade freedom for comfort. That, she said, is bad faith — lying to yourself that you have to obey the script, because facing the anxiety of real choice is too hard. But the cage stays a cage, even if the bars are painted pink.
Freedom is always in a situation
Long before The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote about freedom itself. In her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity, she argued that human beings are ambiguous. You are a subject — you make choices, you have plans. But you are also an object — you are seen and judged by others. You can never be purely a “doer” or purely a “thing.” That messiness is your freedom, but also your burden.
The easy way out is bad faith: pretending you have no choice at all (“I’m just following orders”) or pretending your choices don’t affect anyone else (“It’s my life, who cares”). Both are ways to hide from responsibility. Real freedom, Beauvoir said, means owning your situation.
And your situation always includes other people. Your hopes get a future only if someone else takes them up. That’s the appeal — you call on others to join you. But for the appeal to work, the other person must be able to say yes or no freely. A person who is starving, terrified, or taught she has no voice isn’t really free to answer. So you have a duty to fight for conditions where everyone’s freedom can be real. That’s why violence, though sometimes impossible to avoid, is always a failure: it forces someone instead of inviting them.
Liberation: tearing down the myth
So how could women become free? Not just by winning the right to vote or getting a job — though both matter. Beauvoir said the whole myth of the eternal feminine had to be dismantled. Girls must grow up knowing they can act on the world, not just be looked at. Women need economic independence, so they aren’t forced to depend on men. But most of all, society must stop treating women as the Other.
That means refusing to accept the script. Beauvoir herself lived that refusal. She rejected the housewife role, wrote philosophy, and never married. Late in life she declared herself a feminist and co-authored the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971 — a public statement by 343 women who admitted to having had an illegal abortion, risking prison to demand change. She also spoke out against the torture of Algerian women by the French army. For Beauvoir, the appeal wasn’t just words in a book. It was a concrete call to action.
Women had to discover their own power, she argued — and men had to be willing to sacrifice the myth that gave them an unfair advantage. The goal wasn’t that women become exactly like men. It was that everyone gets to be a subject, and that differences don’t rank people as better or worse.
Why Beauvoir’s challenge still echoes
You’ve probably heard someone say, “That’s for boys” or “You throw like a girl.” These little phrases are the descendants of the myth Beauvoir named. Today, women around the world still fight for equal pay, full control over their own bodies, and a public space where their voices count. Her idea that one becomes a woman also echoes in conversations about gender identity: it suggests that the social role “woman” isn’t a simple fact of biology.
Critics have pointed out that Beauvoir’s analysis mostly described the lives of white, middle‑class European women. She didn’t deeply explore how racism and poverty shape the experience of being a woman. That’s an important limit. Still, her central insight — that our freedom is always shaped by our situation, and that changing that situation can free people — remains a sharp tool for fighting many kinds of injustice.
The next time you hear a rule about what someone can do because of who they are, you might ask: “Who wrote that rule?” Beauvoir would want you to notice the invisible scripts — and then decide for yourself whether to follow them.
Think about it
- Beauvoir said people sometimes choose comfort over freedom. Can you think of a time when going along with your friends felt easier than speaking your own mind? In that moment, were you really choosing freely?
- If being a “woman” is something you become, what does that mean for someone born with a male body who knows she is really a girl? Could Beauvoir’s idea support her? Why or why not?
- Imagine a school where only boys can join the robotics club, and the school says “it’s just tradition.” How would Beauvoir respond? Would she say the girls are free to ignore the injustice, or does the tradition need to change — and why?
