Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
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I’m arguing, then, that it’s not that Hegel’s prose better “fits” the man-woman relationship than the master-slave one; it’s that Hegel provides Beauvoir with the terms in which to conceive the man-woman relationship and, in turn, to let this conception shed light back on the dialectic itself. Precisely by noticing that the history of man-woman relations does not jibe perfectly with Hegel’s dialectic, Beauvoir finds herself in a philosophically productive position. She sees, for example, that “reciprocity” does not necessarily imply “symmetry”: a relationship can be reciprocal (e.g., two people can be mutually dependent) while grossly asymmetrical (as when a woman is dependent on man for her daily sustenance while man is dependent on woman only insofar as he has a general if marked and persistent fear of her powers of reproduction). I also read Beauvoir as figuring “reciprocity” as something that requires consciousness of whatever form of mutuality is extant. This would mean that on Beauvoir’s understanding of reciprocity the slave and the master in Hegel’s dialectic, while mutually dependent, do not have a reciprocal relationship, per se. For them to achieve reciprocity, I think she is claiming, requires that each become aware of their mutual dependence, something that Beauvoir claims took centuries in the case of historical slaves, so that the dialecticity of the master-slave relationship was, as it were, for a very long time on hold or stalled. In the case of women and men before the Bronze and Iron Ages, on the other hand, man’s and woman’s perceptions of each other as “other” (small “o”) allowed them to enjoy a certain reciprocity, however asymmetrical, apart from a need for either party to risk its life vis-à-vis the other. This would imply, in turn, that a new, symmetrical reciprocity, while requiring acknowledgment of mutual otherness, might come to be in the absence of the sort of fight to the death that is at the center of the master-slave dialectic.
As the “History” section of The Second Sex unfolds, Beauvoir argues that the inauguration of the institution of slavery is what precipitated the change in woman’s status from relative other to absolute Other. She posits that the invention of the tool and tool-driven agricultural practices spurred the development of the institution of private property. The master’s authority over the slave was intertwined with his claim to own the land the slave cultivated for him; and both of these things, Beauvoir argues, “exalted his pride” (78). This pride, she says, was “turned against women,” for the fecundity of the land could now be explained by the labor of the slave on behalf of the master, and thus its magical association with the fecundity of the woman was severed. No longer a venerated “other,” woman became simply another one of man’s possessions, along with his land and his slaves and his children.
And yet, Beauvoir argues, man still feared woman (see, e.g., pp. 79–80). To put the point in Sartrean terms that I imagine would be congenial to Beauvoir, he feared her precisely because his treatment of her as an absolute Other was in massive bad faith: her humanity betrayed itself with her every Look.31 Man’s fear of woman, Beauvoir says, thus came to manifest itself not in the form of veneration or awe—of an acknowledgement of otherness and difference—but in the guise of resentment and hatred, or what we nowadays call misogyny:
Of the ambivalent virtues [vertus] with which she was formerly invested, the evil aspects are now retained: once sacred, she becomes impure. Eve, given to Adam to be his companion, ruined the human race; when they wish to wreak vengeance upon man, the pagan gods invent woman; and it is the first-born of these female creatures, Pandora, who lets loose all the ills from which humanity suffers. The Other—she is passivity confronting activity, diversity that destroys unity, matter as opposed to form, disorder that resists order. Woman is thus dedicated to Evil. (80, TM; LDS 1:134–135)
Here we see Beauvoir adducing familiar myths of Woman as evidence for the depiction of the change in women’s status from other to Other, a change that on my reading she wants to assign to a historically specific moment. In the final section of book 1 of The Second Sex, “Myths”—the section that begins with the long passage from Hegel that I addressed in the first part of the present chapter—Beauvoir chronicles the persistence of figures of misogyny right up through her own era. Is it a coincidence that what launches this section of the book is her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic? Are we to understand her to be identifying the dialectic as another piece of mythology? Then does she mean to be positing some sort of relationship between mythology and philosophy? And how do mythology and philosophy, whatever their relationship may be, intersect, on her understanding, with the claims she has made about history? What is the philosophical or, particularly, ontological status, to put the question another way, of her claims about the history of the oppression of women? This question—the question of how Beauvoir finds a way, via her appropriation of Hegel, to philosophize about sex difference—will be the focus of the final chapter of this book.
CHAPTER 7
The Struggle for Self in The Second Sex
Women are still, for the most part, in a state of subjection. It follows that woman sees herself and chooses herself not insofar as she exists for herself [pour soi] but as man defines her. So we must first describe her as men dream her, since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex1
These three sentences, which close the “History” section of The Second Sex, are to be read, I want to argue, as a reminder of the precarious position from which Beauvoir authors her book. Unless we read her as wishing to exempt herself from being a woman—something that, in the light of my reading of her ambitions in chapter 2 I hope seems highly implausible—then the constraints on women Beauvoir is referring to here, summed up by the idea that their “being-for-men” is an essential part of their lives, are to be seen as constraints on Beauvoir herself. For her the particular character of women’s subjection is such that women’s existential choices, both how they regard themselves and how they choose to act, are constrained by the way that men regard them—that is, as I read her, by Man’s Look. And it is this set of constraints, constraints that Beauvoir is declaring herself to be laboring under even as she writes The Second Sex, that constitute what she calls “women’s situation.” Accordingly, the depiction of this situation takes two forms. The first is the form that constitutes the “Myths” section of book 1, the section (discussed at length in chapter 6) that begins with Beauvoir’s longest sustained invocation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and that explores the breadth and depth of men’s dreams, as Beauvoir puts it, of women. The second form structures book 2, which chronicles what Beauvoir calls women’s “lived experience” from birth to death: as little girls; teenagers; and young, middle-aged, and old women; and across the spectrum of choices currently open to them: as wives, lesbians, mothers, homemakers, “legitimate” wage-earners, and even prostitutes.
In identifying this chronicle as the “second form” of Beauvoir’s depiction of women’s situation, and by defining “situation” as consisting in significant part in the set of constraints placed upon women by Man’s Look, I am suggesting that Beauvoir is herself constrained in book 2 to rely upon resources she has inherited from men.2 She will, for example, help herself to Freud’s analysis of femininity—the very analysis she has argued in the first part of book 1 can neither explain nor justify women’s subjection—to explain how young girls become (or to their peril do not become) feminized as they develop. In the last section of book 2, entitled “Justifications,” Beauvoir sketches what she claims are three common strategies adopted by women in attempts to rationalize and even exalt their own subjection, namely, narcissism, amorousness, and mysticism; and her analysis suggests that in employing these strategies women attempt to live men’s fantasies of them and thus to rid themselves once and for all of the burdens of subjectivity. But where does one draw the line between what I’ve evasively characterized as “helping oneself” to men’s dreams and fantasies and capitulating to them? What could it mean to transc
end or otherwise overcome these fantasies, if it is indeed true that women are constrained and to a certain important extent concretely constituted by them? What is a woman?
We will of course misinterpret the point of Beauvoir’s question if we define her simply as a grown female instance of the species. And yet it is essential that we not overlook the fact that on Beauvoir’s analysis female physiology is another important part of women’s “situation.” Beauvoir is absolutely clear about this, as the following passage from the early “Biology” chapter of book 1 shows:
Biological considerations are extremely important. In the history of woman they play a part of the first rank and constitute an essential element of her situation. Throughout our further discussion we shall always bear them in mind. For, the body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another. This accounts for our lengthy study of the biological facts; they are one of the keys to the understanding of woman. (32)
And yet, Beauvoir immediately warns,
I deny that they establish for her [woman] a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever. (32–33)
Many readers, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin included, are inclined to doubt that this conclusion accurately represents Beauvoir’s considered view of the relationship between a woman’s biology and her destiny. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, it is Beauvoir’s commitment to understanding relations between the sexes in Hegelian terms that ultimately gives her work an “androcentric” cast, so that it “sometimes verges on being misogynist” (81): in validating Hegel’s investment in risking life as opposed to affirming it as it is, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, Beauvoir validates men over women. But of course this is true only if we rigidly associate the risking of life with men and the affirming of it with women—which is precisely what Lundgren-Gothlin believes Beauvoir, in her analysis of the anatomical differences between men and women, does.
In reading Beauvoir this way, Lundgren-Gothlin has in mind passages like this: Woman’s “misfortune,” Beauvoir writes in the “Biology” chapter, “is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, even when in her own eyes Life does not carry within itself its reasons for being and when these reasons seem more important than life itself” (64, TM; LDS 1:114). In the next paragraph Beauvoir claims that “certain passages” of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic are better applied to man-woman relationships, since women do not risk their lives but instead give life. But to say that woman is “biologically destined for the repetition of Life” does not imply that women are beholden to this destiny, that they cannot “risk their lives,” whatever this risking turns out to look like on Beauvoir’s account of it. Indeed, this possibility is explicitly affirmed by Beauvoir in the passage I quoted above on the importance she accords to biology. Furthermore, to insist on the importance of risking one’s life cannot be seen as in and of itself “masculinist,” even if it is true that men are biologically more inclined to do so than women. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s analysis the masculinism of this view appears to stem from its association with Hegel. As I read Lundgren-Gothlin, it is the fact that Hegel was a man, and a man who, at that, took an appallingly dim view of women (as the quotation from his Philosophy of Right that I cite in chapter 1 suggests), that leads him to value risking life over preserving, extending, or creating it. But this is also to suggest that Beauvoir simply adopts certain Hegelian tenets wholesale, that, to look at the matter from a broader perspective, there is nothing fundamentally interesting about Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic—which is, of course, just the reading of Beauvoir I’m attempting to contest.
When Beauvoir says that women are “biologically destined for the repetition of Life,” what she is referring to, of course, is woman’s child-bearing capacity. But this is all she is referring to. She is not arguing that women are psychologically destined to bear children, that they are naturally inclined to crave producing children more than they desire anything else. What she is emphasizing is the degree to which women are constrained, from puberty on, by the fact of their female biology: even if they do not desire to produce children, they are at the mercy of physiological processes connected with their capacity to give birth, such as menstruation and menopause. It’s not that these processes are inevitably crippling for women (to the contrary, I will argue, Beauvoir’s way of appropriating Hegel depends on her taking the view that they are not); it’s that they at best interfere with the goals she sets for herself. To make this point clear, Beauvoir distinguishes in the “Biology” chapter between what she calls the individual’s point of view and that of the species; she also speaks of the “interests” of the individual versus those of the species (see, e.g., 25 and 27). The interests of the individual are expressed in the goals he or she sets for himself or herself, and the interests of the species are expressed in his or her physiology. It is from the point of view of the species that woman’s role is to become impregnated and bear children and that man’s role is to impregnate women.
Now, man’s biological role in reproduction, Beauvoir wants to argue, is such that it does not interfere with his interests as an individual. Indeed, the two interests can coincide exactly. As Beauvoir writes,
From [puberty] on, the male has a sex life that is normally integrated with his individual existence: in desire, in coition, his surpassing [dépassement] toward the species blends with the subjective moment of his transcendence: he is his body. (26, TM; LDS 1:63)
By “surpassing toward the species” Beauvoir is referring to the fact of the man’s fulfilling the interests of the species in the act of heterosexual intercourse.3 Because the man (more or less, I suppose) chooses to engage in this act, his surpassing toward the species, his playing the role of impregnator, is coincident with his goals as an individual (whatever these may be: to impregnate, to feel or provide pleasure, to feel powerful or to inflict powerlessness). On the other hand, Beauvoir claims, “the individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species; it is as if she were possessed by foreign powers: alienated” (25, TM; LDS 1:62). Beauvoir even uses the notion of slavery in characterizing the woman’s relation to her female physiology (27). She argues that none of the physiological burdens of having a female body (menstruation; cyclical hormonal changes and the emotional and physical lability they often produce; pregnancy; menopause) are inherently desirable—are things women would choose to bring upon themselves—outside their purpose in making and sustaining babies. Furthermore, even in the most uncomplicated of circumstances the range of possible negative consequences of enjoying or otherwise exercising their sexuality is considerably broader for women than it is for men: until extremely recently a woman’s choice to have sexual intercourse with a man was inevitably a choice to risk becoming pregnant.4 While a man might engage in intercourse in circumstances that entail long-term complications for him (he might, for example, become infected with a venereal disease or provoke a woman to fall in love with him or despise him), the act itself is something from which he can simply walk away. For women, on the other hand, unless the circumstances under which she has intercourse are exactly right (she or the man is sterile, a form of birth control that works is used), she risks becoming pregnant, with all the ramifications (physical and almost always social and psychological) that pregnancy entails.
It will be argued here that the interests of woman as an individual and the interests of the species are not always at odds, that many women choose, for example, to become pregnant. Indeed, it is a frequent criticism of Beauvoir that she fails to appreciate the fact that many women are thrilled to become mothers and even sometimes enjoy the other physiological aspects of womanhood, such as its cyclical nature.5 As I read her, Beauvoir has two responses to this objection. First, no woman chooses to be incapacitated in the way that pregnancy and
the postpartum period or menstruation can be incapacitating. Whatever may be thrilling or satisfying about being a woman, it is not (for example) the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester of pregnancy or the pain of menstrual cramps. Second, Beauvoir is suspicious of celebrations of what she would call, following Sartre, women’s “immanence,” that is, her bodily being, what she is by virtue of being female. On Beauvoir’s view investing in one’s womanly immanence amounts either to a capitulation to the culture’s—that is, to men’s—expectations of women or to a revolt against the culture (as when, e.g., women celebrate their menstrual cycles), in which case it still constitutes capitulation to the culture’s way of figuring woman. But more important for Beauvoir, for a woman to choose immanence is, given her physiology, in effect for her to choose, as she puts it, to alienate herself, to allow herself to be colonized by what she calls “foreign powers.”
Beauvoir paints a vivid picture of this concept of alienation in, for example, the following passage:
It is during her periods that [woman] feels her body most painfully as an opaque, alien thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that each month constructs and demolishes [ fait et défait] a cradle within it; each month all things are made ready for a child and then aborted in the crimson flow. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself. (29, TM; LDS 1:67)