 The claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” signals a distinction between sex, comprising physical and biological aspects of bodies, and gender, comprising learned behaviors, attitudes and aspirations. While this distinction is complex and controversial enough (see the entry on  feminist perspectives on sex and gender)  de Beauvoir’s claim also raises what are now termed intersectional issues. Spelman notes that in parts of The Second Sex de Beauvoir recognizes that if one is not born but rather becomes a woman, it is not the same to become a white woman as it is to become a black one, for example, and not the same to become a bourgeois woman as it is to become a proletarian one. Indeed, de Beauvoir bemoans the effect this difference has for women’s struggles for freedom and equality. Women “live dispersed among the males,” she writes, “attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women” (1953, xix). Not only are women’s allegiances class and race bound but their classes and races can lead to tensions and conflicts. Among other observations De Beauvoir makes, Spelman notes, are that bourgeois women can be hostile to their working class male and female servants; that upper-class girls are brought up to believe in their superiority to working class men and that during the American Civil War white Southern women defended slavery even more fiercely than their male counterparts. 