Simone de Beauvoir's Sentence Everyone Misquotes
De Beauvoir wrote that one is not born a woman — she meant it as a factual claim about how society produces femininity.
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was published in France in 1949, and its most quoted sentence appears near the start of its second volume: 'On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.' One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
The sentence is often taken as the seed of all later gender theory, and in a structural sense it is. But what de Beauvoir actually meant by it was specific and grounded in existentialist philosophy, not cultural constructivism as later theorists would develop it.
Her argument was that 'woman' is not a biological fact but a social role — a set of behaviors, expectations, and modes of being that a female human is trained into from birth. Femininity, in her analysis, is not the expression of a natural essence; it is a condition imposed by a society organized around male subjectivity. The female child is shaped, restricted, and directed until she fits the mold of the woman her culture requires.
The existentialist core is this: de Beauvoir believed human beings are not born with fixed natures. We become who we are through choices and circumstances. What she observed was that women's becoming was systematically constrained in ways men's was not — not because of biology, but because the social world was built for and by men.
The Second Sex was translated into English in 1953. The Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1956. Sales increased. Simone de Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt for fiction in 1954, the year after the translation, for a different book — she remains one of the few people to have won it.
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