What comes first the Female or the Feminine?

“If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine. The contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth.” (Beauvoir 41)
I picked this passage because I feel it begs a few questions the first and most interesting is how do we define “a woman”. I chose this question instead of, how do we define femininity, because it is my impression from the readings that it has been the practice of society and literature to consistently define the latter whilst hardly if ever concerning itself with the former. To me this seems somewhat counterintuitive.
As we all grow and learn there seems to be a natural process of association between organisms and behavior. This system of assembling a complex definition of the things around us through observing it’s behavior is natural to the point that we do not need to be scientific empiricists to see it’s simplicity. For example, we all know that a dog barks, a cat meows, a fish swims, and a bird flies. It is my opinion that these attributes were observed and added to the identity after the initial identification was made. In other words I find it hard to believe that human beings got together and decided it was the duty of every dog to bark and then called all mute dogs failures. At the same time human beings, being the cleverest predators and at the top of the food chain were in a very powerful position and could easily look at all other animals as subservient and tasty. Why not use this power the same way we used the societal power of the patriarch. Surely those that would argue the relevance of the patriarch would agree that the societal dependency formed under it was formed just as naturally as, and could be seen as a function of, the “natural order”.
The only solution I see is to embrace a definition based on the attributes of the subject observed. Therefore the woman can be seen as the purest distillation of behaviors and real capabilities rather than a sum of demands placed upon them by the system that requires the stagnancy of the “fairer sex” in order for it to continue to function.