IMAGINING OTHER
Political Philosophy
Part 2
Feminism: Simone de
Beauvoir (1908
– 1986)
Updated March 2010.
Links: Imagining
Other Homepage
Political Philosophy Contents Page
For other aspects of feminism,
see:
Notes on feminism Feminism:
extracts (a small selection of quotes) Feminism: statistics on
inequality
Feminism and Postmodernism (not
completed yet…) Feminism Today (miscellaneous notes on various topics, taken from the press etc).
The
Women's Movement (a historical account of the activities of women in the
movement for liberation).
Contents:
A.
Introduction – life and works
B. de
Beauvoir’s philosophy:
1.
#what is a woman? How does one become a woman?
2.
#existentialism - being and becoming -
"along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective
existence, there is also the temptation to forego
liberty
and become a thing" - "transcendence" and authenticity
3.
#rejection of the argument that biology, or economics,
or psychology, determine people's lives/identities
4.
woman as #other - sense of "other-ness"
fundamental to human existence, but need not prevent authenticity
5.
from early times, men have appropriated those activities which allowed #transcendence and allocated women to activities
which did not allow it
6.
#the solution: women must become subjects "through
exploits or projects that serve as a model for transcendence"
7.
#comments on de Beauvoir's viewpoint.
A. Introduction: brief summary, and
sources for more information on her life and works:
Simone de Beauvoir was born in
In the 1970s she organised
pro-abortion demonstrations, was president of the Ligue Francaise pour le droit
des femmes, founded a feminist newspaper Nouvelles feminism (sic, according to Maggie Humm 1992), and
journal of feminist theory Questions feministes.
She made ‘careful distinctions between sex and gender’ (Humm 1992) and
‘her claim that women’s social functions are interdependent with our maternal
and natural functions but not dependent on biological gives had an enormous
impact on later writers’ (e.g. Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy
Dinnerstein, Susan Griffin).
Other works:
The Ethics of Ambiguity 1947 – an accessible introduction to existentialism
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 1958
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre 1981 – she was buried alongside Sartre in
‘She lived her life as a project…’ said the
philosopher Kate Soper.
Sadly, much that is written
about de Beauvoir has to do with details of her relationship with Sartre, and
is often prurient. However, as Bea Campbell says: she ‘exemplifies the emergence of a revolutionary idea: that women’s
subjectivity and their subordination was neither natural nor fixed, but the
creation of social structures in which gender was invented, reinvented and
polarized. De Beauvoir gives to our political thinking the idea that woman is
not born she is made, as a relationship of service and subordination.’
Agnes Poirier has a piece at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/09/100yearsyoung
on the centenary of de Beauvoir’s birth.
Lisa Appignanesi says: ‘she put woman’s body and experience at the
very centre of the way we think about the world. [Her books] underline the
importance of self-invention’.
There is an interview – never
broadcast, because Radio
www.archives.radio-canada.ca/400d.asp?id=0-18-366-2015-11
(according to Diary in Guardian).
There are
See also: http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search=Toril+Moi&sitesearch-radio=guardian
for an article by Toril Moi on The Second Sex.
NB Pashley’s original
translation – the only available – is faulty: 15% of the text (300 pages) is
missing, including portrayals of fifty leading French women, who have
demonstrated that women can achieve as much as men. There are philosophical
errors in the translation, but Random House have just commissioned a new
translation.
‘The free woman is just being
born’ de Beauvoir declares.
B. Outline of De Beauvoir’s
philosophy, as in The Second Sex:
‘Women are different’ – how?
Note that we wouldn’t ask ‘what is a man?’ And, while it is common to say: ‘you
only say that because you are a woman’, we wouldn’t say: ‘You only say that
because you are a man…’
In other words, masculine and
feminine are not symmetrical – note how historically women have been defined in relation to men: Aristotle – that
women lack something,
So we can see that, as things
stand, ‘man is the universal, woman the particular…’ ‘He’ is the Subject, the
Absolute, the One – She is ‘the other’… (see below). She also shows how
dualisms (culture/nature, production/reproduction) have been created which keep
women in an inferior position. (Humm 1992)
Women’s biology is used against
them – they
are trapped by ‘menstruation and maternity’. Women they are therefore faced
with the ‘choice’ of being trapped in ‘femininity’ or ‘being obliged to
masquerade as an abstract genderless subject.’
‘Identity is an effect of
choices and actions in specific situations.’ This is an existentialist approach
– though Maggie Humm also notes the possible influence of situationism. One is
not born a woman (despite the
biological characteristics of women). One becomes
a woman – how does this happen?
The question then is: why are
women a subordinated other? Perhaps
this is because women have never formed a ‘collective’ (as has the ‘working
class’ for example). Women don’t talk of themselves as ‘we’, have no past, no
solidarity of work etc.
2.
Existentialism (see Notes on existentialism):
As noted, Simone de Beauvoir
seems to me, in The Second Sex, to base her ideas on existentialism. The basic
starting point of this philosophy, as Sartre set it out, is that humans have an
‘existence’ before they have an ‘identity’ (or ‘essence’ or ‘nature’).
“Existence precedes essence”. The fact that we are born without any
pre-determined ‘nature’ means that living is a process of becoming. And we are (in theory at least) free to choose what we
want to become. That is, although there are bound to be physical obstacles to
certain choices, there is nothing in our nature as humans that determines that
we must become any particular kind of being. “… there is no justification for
the present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open
future.”
However, “along with the ethical
urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the
temptation to forego liberty and become a thing." In fact existentialists
constantly stress the angst – anxiety, pain – of being ‘thrown into existence’:
we do not choose to be born, but once here we are forced to choose almost
everything about our lives. Unless we are going to sink into a kind of
object-like existence, we have no choice but to try to “transcend” our
situation.
If we refuse to do this, and if
we make excuses such as “I had to become X because of my family background” we
are being “inauthentic”.
Many people will do whatever
they can to avoid the strain of “authenticity” – by denying they have a choice,
or by attributing their lack of choice to outside factors. This seems to make
life easy – but is it worthy of respect? Is it making the most of life?
Existentialists would call it “bad faith” (mauvaise foi).
The importance of this to de
Beauvoir, in her examination of the relationship of woman to man, is that this
relationship is traditionally one of dependence; and this also ‘easy’ in the
sense that it avoids the risks associated with economic and personal freedom.
It is also (some would add!) understandable, given the pressures that a
male-dominated society exerts over women. When women do strive to liberate
themselves, men will either try to make them get ‘back into the home’ or will
grant them ‘equality in difference.’
3. The
rejection of Marxist and Freudian theories:
De Beauvoir rejects the argument
that biology, or economics, or psychology, determine
people's lives/identities – however, the woman’s body does act as a burden – her sex is at war with her existence as a person… She believes that
this need not always be the case, as humans are “for ever in a state of change,
for ever becoming”. Biology (and science generally) has meaning in a social context – and science, psychology, even
economics, have been permeated with the assumption that women are inferior.
With regard to economics –
although Engels identifies women’s original exclusion from property-ownership
as at the origins of patriarchy, even he does not explain how this came about
historically.
With regard to psychology, and
Freud, she is also critical: you cannot ‘reduce’ the individual to e.g. sex
drives – again these get their meaning in a social context and in the context
of human activity. Freud is too ready to see biological drives as determining
our behaviour. (On the other hand, some feminists would say that de Beauvoir
underestimates the power of the subconscious, an insight that is central to
Freud). However, (existentialist) psychology does tell us the subject is
anxious when faced with freedom. We therefore need to study ‘women’ in “an
existential perspective with due regard to her total situation.”
A sense of
"other-ness" is fundamental to human existence, ‘as primordial as
consciousness itself’ ‘a fundamental category of human thought’ (she says). ‘In
the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the
expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not
originally attached to the division of the sexes…’ Pairs such as Sun-Moon,
Day-Night, Uranus-Zeus, right and left, God and Lucifer had nothing to do with
a male/female distinction.
In words which are (at first
glance!) similar to Sartre’s ideas (I am thinking of Huis Clos, where three
people are trapped in a room for eternity – soon, when they find that they
cannot be honest and open with each other, and each has a guilty secret, but
that they also need each others’ approval, then ‘hell is other people’) she
says: ‘If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is
enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers
on the train.’ ‘… to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries
are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, negroes are
‘inferior’ for American racists…’ ‘Only the intervention of someone else can
establish an individual as an Other.’
There are also important links
to be made with the ideas of Hegel: the conscious subject can be posed only in being
opposed, and more recently Levi Strauss used the concept, and ‘structuralism’
is built on it. (See Notes on Hegel and Marx,
and Notes on Structuralism and Postmodernism
[latter not completed yet] )
On a
personal note, of course, these ideas are close to my heart, and these notes
are ‘imagining other’… See: ‘imagining other'…
Simone de Beauvoir’s own account
of how ‘civilization as a whole [has produced] this creature, intermediate
between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine’ goes along these
lines: from early times, men have appropriated those activities which allowed
"transcendence", and they have allocated women to activities which
did not allow it. Among early humans: men controlled tools, and hunting and
risked their lives (in hunting and war) whilst women were tied to reproduction
and the maintenance of children. My impression of her argument is that this
happened ‘naturally’ – based on biological characteristics – but became fixed;
and of course once trapped in a role which in itself prevented ‘transcendence’
women were destined to stay in this role for centuries.
She therefore compares women’s
experience with that of children: their world is ‘given’, and they are not able
to imagine another one.
Broadening
out beyond the question of male-female relationships, de Beauvoir analyses
different stances taken by men in regard to the possibility of transcendence:
she says that sometimes men can exist in a state of ‘infantilism’, allowing
themselves to become ‘sub-men’ e.g. in a lynch-mob. Others are (too) ‘serious’
i.e. they accept their role and don’t question it – their enthusiasms are
‘things detached from themselves’. Another kind of person is (too) ‘passionate’
– they “take the object of their enthusiasms to have an absolute value”
ignoring the ultimately subjective nature of their passions. In doing this they
may trample on the subjectivity of others. A fully free person recognises each
person’s subjectivity – “Only the
freedom of others can keep each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of
facticity”. “To will oneself free is
also to will others free.” [Notes from
6.
Simone de Beauvoir’s solution:
Women must become subjects
"through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of
transcendence." This is clearly a
plea for women to be no longer excluded from ‘productive’ areas of life – and
Maggie Humm (1992) says that this puts de Beauvoir in the ‘first wave’ of
feminism. My impression is that the idea goes further, since (i) we can
transcend our objectivity in many ways – creative arts, politics, writing and
philosophy for example – and (ii) above all, since it is ‘Only the intervention
of someone else [that] can establish an individual as an Other’, then what must change is the attitude of men towards women,
the deeply-rooted assumptions that she describes that go through philosophy,
politics, social policies, and even science.
On this last point, for an
account of the patriarchal origins and nature of science, I recommend the books
by Brian Easlea: Witch-Hunting Magic and the New Philosophy especially. (I hope
to write more on this in notes on The Enlightenment).
7.
Comments on de Beauvoir's viewpoint:
Some have criticised de Beauvoir
for a too negative stance in regard to the (female) body. Given what modern
technology can achieve, in birth-control, artificial fertilization and
abortion, some feminists have argued that men need have less importance in
reproduction, or conversely that they can have more of a role in childcare. Is
de Beauvoir herself in danger of ‘biological determinism’ with her emphasis on
‘menstruation and maternity’?
Some (not necessarily
feminists!) might ask: is a woman’s social and familial role not one that
enables ‘transcendence’? There is of course endless debate to be had on the
issue of the ‘best’ way of parenting, whether children need both a mother and a
father – and it has to be said that the hostility to the traditional nuclear
family that some feminists expressed may have led to a neglect of the needs of
the child.
Finally there is the question:
must women ‘transcend’ in the same way that men have (hunting, war, work)? If
this is what de Beauvoir means, then she is – says Maggie Humm – in the first wave of feminism. Moreover,
societies where women have been expected to do the same as men – the Soviet
Union for example – have not succeeded in emancipating women: many women simply
ended up with ‘two jobs’, one in and one outside the house!
END