Throughoutthis course you will read scholarly work on questions of diversity, exclusion and inclusion. You will write a weekly blog reflecting upon those issues, but rather than offering an unsubstantiated opinion on these matters, you’ll be expected to offer a unique but informed opinion supported by scholarly research and empirical evidence.
You will have freedom to choose the topic and the particular angle of the issue as you wish to explore it, but there are some clear parameters you’ll need to follow.
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The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
Introduction
For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating,
especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over
feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for
the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to
illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women,
really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will
whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are women’; and other erudite persons –
sometimes the very same – say with a sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One
wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they
should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has become
of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.
But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’.
But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although
they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females
exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And
yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women,
become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a
woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known
as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence,
a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to
earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable.
It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from
the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an
essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy
But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the
existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those
ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any characteristic as a reaction
dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed.
But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those
who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to
them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many
American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for
woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise
her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern
Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has
written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman … My idea is that all of
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us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather
inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women
simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is
abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate
individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the
Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does
not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years
ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of
photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the
men. But in order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women
who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine consideration and respect.
I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and getting
ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine
weakness; but it was for love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude
of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their
femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that
humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits,
interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial,
perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain
her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women
do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?
To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask
it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation
of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on
this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as
an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine
and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In
actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man
represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to
designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined
by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to
hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only
defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective
self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary
because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A
man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this:
just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique
was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a
uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits
of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the
fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete
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hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he
believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance,
a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a
certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with
a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect
man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from
what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.
Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is
not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And
Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite
apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man
can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is
simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears
essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is
defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the
incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute –
she is the Other.’
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. 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; it was
not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on
Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element
was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and
Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices,
right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.
Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other
over against itself. 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. In
small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; 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, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists,
proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.
Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies,
reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is
marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality,
alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not
so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social
reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a
Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on the
contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards
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every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself
up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.
But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling
abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of
neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests
among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense
and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the
reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognised
between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying
any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it
that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the
object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes
the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the
Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept
this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?
There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able to dominate
another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends upon inequality of numbers
– the majority imposes its rule upon the minority or persecutes it. But women are not a
minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth.
Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have
been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each other’s
autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the
stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests
of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the
memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion
or a culture.
The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever
formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical
event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and
accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not
always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their
anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men,
and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change – it was
not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute
is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition
brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Negroes of Haiti
and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of
change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all,
than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the
essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’;
Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites,
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into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar
formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to
themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have
accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for
it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic
agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken
nothing, they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit
which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no
religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the
proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates
community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of SaintDenis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached
through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men –
fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the
bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they
are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose
to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting
sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman
cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is
not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in
human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has
not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the
cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of
woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one
another.
One could suppose that this reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation of woman. When
Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her spinning, his desire for her held him
captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea
killed their children; and this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have
obtained a formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata
Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social ends through
the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women,
the latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth
woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire
for offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female.
Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does
not liberate the slave. In the relation of master to slave the master does not make a point of
the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying this need
through his own action; whereas the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is
quite conscious of the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally
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urgent for both, it always works in favour of the oppressor and against the oppressed. That
is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.
Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never
shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her
situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and
frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the
abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic
sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal,
the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success
than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions
and they monopolise the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional
prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present
enshrines the past – and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time,
when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that
belongs to men – they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to
be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all
the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-thesovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral
justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the
metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance.
Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there
is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for
he who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will,
frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one
avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman
the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity.
Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite
resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of
reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.
But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the duality of the
sexes, like any duality, gives rise to conflict. And doubtless the winner will assume the status
of absolute. But why should man have won from the start? It seems possible that women
could have won the victory; or that the outcome of the conflict might never have been
decided. How is it that this world has always belonged to the men and that things have
begun to change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal
sharing of the world between men and women?
These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the very fact that
woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the justifications that men have ever
been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s interest. A
little-known feminist of the seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that
has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge
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and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed their satisfaction
in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God … that He did not make me a
woman,’ say the Jews in their morning prayers, while their wives pray on a note of
resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who created me according to His will.’ The first among the
blessings for which Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not enslaved;
the second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully unless
they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they sought to make the fact
of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who have made and compiled the laws
have favoured their own sex, and jurists have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote
Poulain de la Barre once more.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the
subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions
invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men
have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the
quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times satirists and
moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of women. We are familiar with the
savage indictments hurled against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for
example, follows the tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at
times be well founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully conceals
a desire for self-justification. As Montaigne says, ‘It is easier to accuse one sex than to
excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough. For instance, the Roman law
limiting the rights of woman cited ‘the imbecility, the instability of the sex’ just when the
weakening of family ties seemed to threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to
keep the married woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to
the authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither decisive nor
constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable of managing her property.
Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women
are not in the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men
make these rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did
not go so far as to champion their cause.
It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men began to view
the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show that woman is, like man, a
human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently to her defence. But these philosophers
displayed unusual impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a
quarrel of partisans. One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of
women into productive labour, and it was just here that the claims of the feminists emerged
from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis, while their opponents became the
more aggressive. Although landed property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung
to the old morality that found the guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family.
Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her emancipation became a
real menace. Even within the working class the men endeavoured to restrain woman’s
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liberation, because they began to see the women as dangerous competitors – the more so
because they were accustomed to work for lower wages.
In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not only upon religion,
philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science – biology, experimental
psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant ‘equality in difference’ to the other sex.
That profitable formula is most significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula
of the Jim Crow laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called
equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination. The similarity
just noted is in no way due to chance, for whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that
is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal
feminine’ corresponds to ‘the black soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish
problem is on the whole very different from the other two – to the anti-Semite the Jew is not
so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be granted no place on earth, for
whom annihilation is the fate desired. But there are deep similarities between the situation of
woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism,
and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen
for them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the
virtues of ‘the good Negro’ with his dormant, childish, merry soul – the submissive Negro – or
on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible
the submissive woman. In both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of
affairs that it has itself created.
As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American white relegates the black to the
rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but
shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is met with in all analogous circumstances; when an
individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is
inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad
faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of ‘to have
become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords
them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The conservative
bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of women a menace to their morality and their
interests. Some men dread feminine competition. Recently a male student wrote in the
Hebdo-Latin: ‘Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He
never questioned his rights in this world. And economic interests are not the only ones
concerned. One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most
humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South can console
himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the more prosperous whites
cleverly exploit this pride.
Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. It
was much easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero when he faced women (and
women chosen for his purpose) than when he was obliged to act the man among men –
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something many women have done better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948,
in one of his articles in the Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is
admired by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We listen on a tone [sic!] of polite
indifference … to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit reflects more or
less luminously ideas that come from us.’ Evidently the speaker referred to is not reflecting
the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one knows of his having any. It may be that she reflects
ideas originating with men, but then, even among men there are those who have been
known to appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude Mauriac
might not find more interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes, Marx, or Gide rather than
himself. What is really remarkable is that by using the questionable we he identifies himself
with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur
looks down disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on a
footing of equality. In truth, I know of more than one woman who would refuse to suffer
with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.
I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here displayed with
disarming ingenuousness. But men profit in many more subtle ways from the otherness, the
alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for those afflicted with an inferiority complex,
and indeed no one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the
man who is anxious about his virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of their
fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature in woman; but even to
these the myth of Woman, the Other, is precious for many reasons. They cannot be blamed
for not cheerfully relinquishing all the benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize
what they would lose in relinquishing woman as they fancy her to be, while they fail to
realize what they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as the
Subject, unique and absolute, requires great self-denial. Furthermore, the vast majority of
men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman as inferior, for today they
are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognise all human beings as
equals.
In the bosom of the family, woman seems in the eyes of childhood and youth to be clothed
in the same social dignity as the adult males. Later on, the young man, desiring and loving,
experiences the resistance, the independence of the woman desired and loved; in marriage,
he respects woman as wife and mother, and in the concrete events of conjugal life she
stands there before him as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as
between the sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is
an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most important being
unfitness for the professions – he attributes these to natural causes. When he is in a cooperative and benevolent relation with woman, his theme is the principle of abstract equality,
and he does not base his attitude upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in
conflict with her, the situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he
will even take it as justification for denying abstract equality.
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So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the equals of man and
that they have nothing to clamour for, while at the same time they will say that women can
never be the equals of man and that their demands are in vain. It is, in point of fact, a
difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which
seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so
profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The most sympathetic of men
never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And there is no reason to put much trust
in the men when they rush to the defence of privileges whose full extent they can hardly
measure. We shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence
of the attacks launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies
bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s destiny
manifested by men who would not for the world have any part of it.
We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion, however, for very
often their controversial aim deprives them of all real value. If the ‘woman question’ seems
trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarrelling one
no longer reasons well. People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior,
inferior, or equal to man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a
secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God
succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve. Woman’s brain
is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger. Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his
greater humility. Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious.
If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague
notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of
the subject and start afresh.
Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who are we to
propound it at all? Man is at once judge and party to the case; but so is woman. What we
need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one? Still, the angel
would be poorly qualified to speak, for an angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in
the problem. With a hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most
peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination of a whole man and a whole
woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to me as if there are, after
all, certain women who are best qualified to elucidate the situation of woman. Let us not be
misled by the sophism that because Epimenides was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is
not a mysterious essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad faith, it is
their situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many of today’s
women, fortunate in the restoration of all the privileges pertaining to the estate of the human
being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we even recognise its necessity. We are no
longer like our partisan elders; by and large we have won the game. In recent debates on
the status of women the United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the
sexes is now becoming a reality, and already some of us have never had to sense in our
femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle. Many problems appear to us to be more pressing
than those which concern us in particular, and this detachment even allows us to hope that
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our attitude will be objective. Still, we know the feminine world more intimately than do the
men because we have our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it
means to a human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such knowledge. I
have said that there are more pressing problems, but this does not prevent us from seeing
some importance in asking how the fact of being women will affect our lives. What
opportunities precisely have been given us and what withheld? What fate awaits our younger
sisters, and what directions should they take? It is significant that books by women on
women are in general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an
effort towards clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of excessive
controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to confirm that statement.
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias.
The way in which questions are put, the points of view assumed, presuppose a relativity of
interest; all characteristics imply values, and every objective description, so called, implies an
ethical background. Rather than attempt to conceal principles more or less definitely implied,
it is better to state them openly, at the beginning. This will make it unnecessary to specify on
every page in just what sense one uses such words as superior, inferior, better, worse,
progress, reaction, and the like. If we survey some of the works on woman, we note that one
of the points of view most frequently adopted is that of the public good, the general interest;
and one always means by this the benefit of society as one wishes it to be maintained or
established. For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the private
good of the citizens; we shall pass judgement on institutions according to their effectiveness
in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we do not confuse the idea of private
interest with that of happiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not
women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than
the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less
what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others,
and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them.
In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the
pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is
that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits
or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a
continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence
other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back
into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the
brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence.
This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him,
it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual
concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to
transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous
being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men
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compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as object and to
doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever
transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of
woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who
always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the
inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are
open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of
dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome?
These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means
that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but
in terms of liberty.
Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to believe that
woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological, psychological, or economic forces.
Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology,
psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept
of the ‘truly feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other – and
what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from woman’s point of
view I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to
envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere
hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.