The Books of Gender deal with the broader spectrum of what is commonly known as the First, Second and Third Waves, in Women's Rights or Feminism. There is conjecture as to just when each of these waves begins and ends, and the three Books of Gender is representative of a general view. The Awakening! The Assertion! and The Abrogation and Ascension!

Chapter III
Simone de Beauvoir created what is considered by many to be the most important book in the second wave, both because of its timing and its content.

Another general view is that Le Deuxième Sexe or The Second Sex is the beginning of the third wave.

One of her principle views, a form of which has been proven to be correct by our developing society, is one of the fundamental arguments in equality.

This view is Existence first, and substance or essence second. Meaning that the mind of a human is born and then becomes a woman or a man. Of course this is not an absolute and the form that society has proven to be true is a variation or form of the idea only.

WOMAN? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female - this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of a man the epithet female has the sound of an insult, yet he is not ashamed of his animal nature; on the contrary, he is proud if someone says of him: 'He is a male!' The term 'female' is derogatory not because it emphasises woman's animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery - a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermatozoan; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents posterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts - the tigress, the lioness, the panther - bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male.

Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased - man projects them all at once upon woman. And the fact is that she is a female. But if we are willing to stop thinking in platitudes, two questions are immediately posed: what does the female denote in the animal kingdom? And what particular kind of female is manifest in woman? Males and females are two types of individuals which are differentiated within a species for the function of reproduction; they can be defined only correlatively. But first it must be noted that even the division of a species into two sexes is not always clear-cut. On the respective functions of the two sexes man has entertained a great variety of beliefs. At first they had no scientific basis, simply reflecting social myths. It was long thought - and it still is believed in certain primitive matriarchal societies - that the father plays no part in conception. Ancestral spirits in the form of living germs are supposed to find their way into the maternal body. With the advent of patriarchal institutions, the male laid eager claim to his posterity. It was still necessary to grant the mother a part in procreation, but it was conceded only that she carried and nourished the living seed, created by the father alone.

Aristotle fancied that the foetus arose from the union of sperm and menstrual blood, woman furnishing only passive matter while the male principle contributed force, activity, movement, life. Hippocrates held to a similar doctrine, recognising two kinds of seed, the weak or female and the strong or male. The theory of Aristotle survived through the Middle Ages and into modern times.