Feminism
Most
philosophers agree that Beauvoir’s greatest contribution to philosophy is her
revolutionary magnum opus, The Second Sex. Published in two volumes in
1949 (condensed into one text divided into two “books” in English), this work
immediately found both an eager audience and harsh critics. The Second Sex
was so controversial that the Vatican put it (along with her novel, The Mandarins)
on the Index of prohibited books. At the time The Second Sex was
written, very little serious philosophy on women from a feminist perspective
had been done. With the exception of a handful of books, systematic treatments
of the oppression of women both historically and in the modern age were almost
unheard of. Striking for the breadth of research and the profundity of its
central insights, The Second Sex remains to this day one of the
foundational texts in philosophy, feminism, and women’s studies.
The
main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman has
been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man through her
relegation to being man’s “Other.” In agreement with Hegelian and Sartrean
philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self needs otherness in order to define
itself as a subject; the category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in
the constitution of the self as a self. However, the movement of
self-understanding through alterity is supposed to be reciprocal in that the
self is often just as much objectified by its other as the self objectifies it.
What Beauvoir discovers in her multifaceted investigation into woman’s
situation, is that woman is consistently defined as the Other by man who takes
on the role of the Self. As Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman “is
the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the
Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the Other.” In addition, Beauvoir maintains
that human existence is an ambiguous interplay between transcendence and
immanence, yet men have been privileged with expressing transcendence through
projects, whereas women have been forced into the repetitive and uncreative
life of immanence. Beauvoir thus proposes to investigate how this radically
unequal relationship emerged as well as what structures, attitudes and
presuppositions continue to maintain its social power.
The
work is divided into two major themes. The first book investigates the “Facts
and Myths” about women from multiple perspectives including the
biological-scientific, psychoanalytic, materialistic, historical, literary and
anthropological. In each of these treatments, Beauvoir is careful to claim that
none of them is sufficient to explain woman’s definition as man’s Other or her
consequent oppression. However, each of them contributes to woman’s overall
situation as the Other sex. For example, in her discussion of biology and
history, she notes the women experience certain phenomena such as pregnancy,
lactation, and menstruation that are foreign to men’s experience and thus
contribute to a marked difference in women’s situation. However, these
physiological occurrences in no way directly cause woman to be man’s
subordinate because biology and history are not mere “facts” of an unbiased
observer, but are always incorporated into and interpreted from a situation. In
addition, she acknowledges that psychoanalysis and historical materialism
contribute tremendous insights into the sexual, familial and material life of
woman, but fail to account for the whole picture. In the case of
psychoanalysis, it denies the reality of choice and in the case of historical
materialism, it neglects to take into account the existential importance of the
phenomena ,it reduces to material conditions.
The
most philosophically rich discussion of Book I comes in Beauvoir’s analysis of
myths. There she tackles the way in which the preceding analyses (biological,
historical, psychoanalytic, etc.) contribute to the formulation of the myth of
the “Eternal Feminine.” This paradigmatic myth, which incorporates multiple
myths of woman under it (such as the myth of the mother, the virgin, the
motherland, nature, etc.) attempts to trap woman into an impossible ideal by
denying the individuality and situation of all different kinds of women. In
fact, the ideal set by the Eternal Feminine sets up an impossible expectation
because the various manifestations of the myth of femininity appear as
contradictory and doubled. For example, history shows us that for as many representations
of the mother as the respected guardian of life, there are as many depictions
of her as the hated harbinger of death. The contradiction that man feels at
having been born and having to die gets projected onto the mother who takes the
blame for both. Thus woman as mother is both hated and loved and individual
mothers are hopelessly caught in the contradiction. This doubled and
contradictory operation appears in all feminine myths, thus forcing women to
unfairly take the burden and blame for existence.
Book
II begins with Beauvoir’s most famous assertion, “One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman.” By this, Beauvoir means to destroy the essentialism which
claims that women are born “feminine” (according to whatever the culture and
time define it to be) but are rather constructed to be such through social
indoctrination. Using a wide array of accounts and observations, the first
section of Book II traces the education of woman from her childhood, through
her adolescence and finally to her experiences of lesbianism and sexual
initiation (if she has any). At each stage, Beauvoir illustrates how women are
forced to relinquish their claims to transcendence and authentic subjectivity
by a progressively more stringent acceptance of the “passive” and “alienated”
role to man’s “active” and “subjective” demands. Woman’s passivity and
alienation are then explored in what Beauvoir entitles her “Situation” and her
“Justifications.” Beauvoir studies the roles of wife, mother, and prostitute to
show how women, instead of transcending through work and creativity, are forced
into monotonous existences of having children, tending house and being the
sexual receptacles of the male libido.
Because
she maintains the existentialist belief in the absolute ontological freedom of
each existent regardless of sex, Beauvoir never claims that man has succeeded
in destroying woman’s freedom or in actually turning her into an “object” in
relation to his subjectivity. She remains a transcendent freedom despite her
objectification, alienation and oppression.
Although
we certainly can not claim that woman’s role as the Other is her fault, we also
cannot say that she is always entirely innocent in her subjection. As taken up
in the discussion of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir believes that
there are many possible attitudes of bad faith where the existent flees his or
her responsibility into prefabricated values and beliefs. Many women living in
a patriarchal culture are guilty of the same action and thus are in some ways
complicitous in their own subjugation because of the seeming benefits it can
bring as well as the respite from responsibility it promises. Beauvoir
discusses three particular inauthentic attitudes in which women hide their
freedom in: “The Narcissist,” “The Woman in Love,” and “The Mystic.” In all
three of these attitudes, women deny the original thrust of their freedom by
submerging it into the object; in the case of the first, the object is herself,
the second, her beloved and the third, the absolute or God.
Beauvoir
concludes her work by asserting various concrete demands necessary for woman’s
emancipation and the reclamation of her selfhood. First and foremost, she
demands that woman be allowed to transcend through her own free projects with
all the danger, risk, and uncertainty that entails. As such, modern woman
“prides herself on thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same
terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their
equal.” In order to ensure woman’s equality, Beauvoir advocates such changes in
social structures such as universal childcare, equal education, contraception,
and legal abortion for women-and perhaps most importantly, woman’s economic
freedom and independence from man. In order to achieve this kind of independence,
Beauvoir believes that women will benefit from non-alienating, non-exploitative
productive labor to some degree. In other words, Beauvoir believes that women
will benefit tremendously from work. As far as marriage is concerned, the
nuclear family is damaging to both partners, especially the woman. Marriage,
like any other authentic choice, must be chosen actively and at all times or
else it is a flight from freedom into a static institution.
Beauvoir’s
emphasis on the fact that women need access to the same kinds of activities and
projects as men places her to some extent in the tradition of liberal, or
second-wave feminism. She demands that women be treated as equal to men and
laws, customs and education must be altered to encourage this. However, The
Second Sex always maintains its fundamental existentialist belief that each
individual, regardless of sex, class or age, should be encouraged to define him
or herself and to take on the individual responsibility that comes with
freedom. This requires not just focusing on universal institutions, but on the
situated individual existent struggling within the ambiguity of existence.
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