Simone de Beauvoir on Becoming: You Are Not Born Into a Role, You Are Trained Into One

Simone de Beauvoir's most famous claim is also one of her most misunderstood. In The Second Sex, she writes, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The line is often repeated, but its force is easy to miss. Beauvoir is not saying that the body is unreal, nor is she making the simple point that society influences people. Her argument is stronger than that. She is saying that much of what people take to be natural femininity is actually the result of social formation, repetition, expectation, and constraint.