The Second Sex - The Other

The Other

In it Beauvoir argues that women throughout history have been defined as the "other" sex, an aberration from the "normal" male. Men have objectified women in a case of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Beauvoir's solution is for men and women to see themselves as both subjects and objects. Beauvoir wrote the book after attempting to write about herself. The first thing she wrote was that she was a woman, but she realized that she needed to define what a woman was, which became the intent of the book. She concludes The Second Sex with a picture of a future in which men and women are equals: "recognizing each other as subject, each will remain an other for the other...."