AUTHOR: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
DATE: 1949
With The Second Sex, French philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir wrote a keystone of Second Wave feminism and arguably the single most impactful work of feminism ever. In it, she laid out her thesis that women have been historically trapped into a subservient role to men and argued how they might break free of their shackles to live more fulfilling lives.
As an existentialist, de Beauvoir believed that existence is characterized by a fundamental ‘nothingness’ and that it falls to the individual to create ‘meaning’ through the choices that they make. In other words, each human life lacks intrinsic value or merit at the cosmological level and it is beholden upon the individual to give their own life value.
For women, de Beauvoir argued, this challenge has been made harder by the constraints imposed upon them by human society that has ascribed them a secondary role to men. It is an argument she built in the book’s first volume, Facts and Myths, in which she cited countless historical examples to back up the claim. Man, she said, has traditionally been considered the default mode of ‘Self’, with Woman as ‘the Other’.
Since prehistoric times, she set out to prove, Man has imposed his will on the world, defining himself through action. In contrast, Woman has been defined in opposition to Man, weak where Man is strong, inward-looking where Man strikes out into the world, and relying on Man’s action to be ‘saved’. This imposition of ‘Otherness’, she says, has not only ensured Woman’s subjugation but has denied her fundamental humanity.
She sought to show how this sense of ‘Otherness’ had been created through various social discourses. Medicine, for instance, and disciplines such as psychoanalysis have traditionally considered women as ‘the weaker sex’, physiologically and mentally. History and literature, too, have reinforced notions of the dominant ‘Man’ and the secondary ‘Woman’, incapable of forging her own independent essence. Women, she suggests, have been trapped in the male-created myth of the ‘eternal feminine’, by which the feminine identity is tied to women’s reproductive roles. While Woman as giver of life has been celebrated, her identity is also tied up with the inevitability of death that life brings, while her sexuality unnerves the patriarchy. The ‘eternal feminine’ has thus served to trap women in a socially constructed view of what it means to be a woman and has denied women the right to forge individual identities.
De Beauvoir also points out how, from a young age, girls are encouraged to become complicit in perpetuating this myth, conforming to a vague notion of femininity that forbids true realization of their own potential. As she memorably put it: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ She is urged to embrace a ‘maternal instinct’ that, de Beauvoir says, is not innate, and is encouraged to imagine a future life as a support figure to a man, putting up with unfulfilling sexual relations and giving up on pursuing her own talents and ambitions – accepting the role of Other as Man seeks to realize his Self.
In volume two, Lived Experience, de Beauvoir describes how the traditional roles of women – wife, mother and also ‘entertainer’ – equate to ‘holding away death but also refusing life’. Woman is left to be satisfied with mediocrity, compelling her towards complacency and passivity. De Beauvoir’s suggested solution is to address the underpinning financial inequality between men and women. Women, she suggests, must undertake work that provides them with the financial wherewithal to support themselves and make possible a kind of liberation from the constraints of the ‘eternal feminine’ – a course that she recognizes is littered with obstacles. De Beauvoir also suggests that women should actively participate in more intellectual activities than tradition has allowed, transforming themselves from the ‘objects’ of tradition into the ‘subjects’ of their own lives.
The Second Sex is often seen as marking the transition from the First Wave of feminism (that which, broadly, sought to overturn obvious legally enshrined inequalities between the sexes such as unjust property and voting rights) to the Second Wave. This Second Wave, which went through to the 1980s, looked to debate wider issues of inequality in relation to, for example, the home, the work place, reproductive rights and sexual liberation. In de Beauvoir’s own words: ‘The free woman is just being born.’
The Second Sex was an instant phenomenon, selling tens of thousands of copies in its first weeks of release, and being translated into dozens of languages. It is difficult to imagine vital Second Wave works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics or Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch if de Beauvoir had not led the way. Inevitably, though, the work has not been without its critics. The Vatican was among those to ban it (the book deals in some detail with the question of a woman’s right to abortion). But some feminist critics have also taken issue with aspects of the book, not least what some have suggested is de Beauvoir’s underlying disappointment with women themselves – the suspicion that she thinks virtually all women have ‘failed’ in bringing meaning to their lives throughout history. But The Second Sex succeeded in reconfiguring the debate about women and feminism, compelling society to re-examine its expectations of womanhood and how each woman should be free to realize her full potential.
EXISTENTIALISM’S POWER COUPLE
It is one of those curious quirks of fate that de Beauvoir should so often find her name attached to that of a man – existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she had a relationship from the late 1920s until his death in 1980. Theirs was not a traditional relationship, though. Both openly took other lovers (de Beauvoir was bisexual) and they never married, had children or lived together. It was an attempt at what de Beauvoir called ‘authentic love’ and she considered it the great success of her life. However, her diaries suggest that their partnership brought its own emotional strains. Not least, it raised the question of how painful even a mutually agreed infidelity can be?