 In other parts of The Second Sex, however, de Beauvoir ignores the consequences of intersections of gender with class and race, and talks about women in general. In this regard, Spelman points to her contrast between women, on the one hand, and proletarians, aborigines, blacks and Jews, on the other, as well as to her ascription of women’s failure historically to reject their subordinate social position to the advantages they gain from their alliance with “a superior caste.” Here de Beauvoir seems to forget that many women are proletarians, aborigines, blacks and Jews and she writes as if all women shared the same relation to the cast of white bourgeois men she calls the “superior caste”(1953, xxi). Spelman also notes the contrast de Beauvoir sets up between men defined as citizens and women depicted as wives “shut up in the home;” the way she refers appreciatively to August Bebel’s comparison of women and the proletariat in his Women under Socialism; the use she makes of Hegel’s discussion of the relationship between master and slave to describe the relationship between men and women; and her comparison of “Negro slavery” with female slavery (Spelman 1988, 64–5). 