Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that.
     —Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), p. 92

     Are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its disciples; they whisper, "Even in Russia, they [elles] are still very much women"; but other well-informed people--sometimes, it's the same people--lament: "Woman is losing herself, woman is lost." ... What is a woman? "Tota mulier in utero: a woman is a womb," says one person. And yet speaking of certain women, the connoisseurs decree, "Those aren't women," even though they have a uterus just like the others. Everyone agrees to recognize that there are females in the human species... and yet we are told that "femininity is in peril"; we are exhorted, "Be women, remain women, become women."

     —Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), pp. 3-4 (trans. modified)

     As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.

     Women aren’t women anymore. ...

     Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

     If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

     —Suzanne Venker, "The War on Men," foxnews.com, 24 November 2012 (<---this date is not a typo)

Or in the words of another pundit: sisters are doing it to themselves.

Let's overlook for the moment Venker's curious decision to end an article that presumably intends to console single men with a metaphor that compares them to vermin being smoked out of a building--I guess they were hiding in that woodwork from all the scary single ladies?

And I'll even keep my cool in the face of the glorious good news of gender surrender, though I can't promise there won't be subcultural celebrations of the armistice later on: I can't think of anything that I and my long-embattled brothers-in-arms would rather do than surrender to our masculinity together. 

What I find irresistible, even more so than snapping up copies of The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know--and Men Can't Say (2011, with a foreword by Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who saved women from the ERA)  and How to Choose a Husband (2013) from Amazon while supplies last... 

What I find irresistible here is the chance to praise Venker for discovering that women just aren’t women anymore, and that they (therefore?) must become women. This ranks with Pierre Ménard’s authorship of Don Quixote, the Insane Clown Posse’s discovery of miracles, and my finding my glasses this morning as one of the great achievements of the human mind this past century.

It’s not easy to discover for the first time in 2012 something that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in 1949. Nor was Beauvoir the first to discover that gender norms could function ideologically, as imperatives to become what you already are so that “we” can go about our business undisturbed: that would have been news neither to Woolf nor to Wollstonecraft nor to François Poulain de la Barre (see pages 10-11) writing in the late 17^th century.

The Second Sex: Philosophical Context

Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir’s originality lies rather, first, in her understanding of how these norms have held sway and of the responses they require, and second in the originality of her writing itself: in The Second Sex's fluid movement from Beauvoir's first-person accounts of her own experience through evidence drawn, sometimes anecdotally and representatively, sometimes rigorously and systematically, from a rather stunning variety of intellectual disciplines, on its way to establishing its philosophical claims. Beauvoir's book is a work of philosophy, of theory, but it sometimes doesn't feel like one -- a challenging work to understand, it isn't really difficult to read in the way that, say, Judith Butler or Amanda Anderson can be, nor is it confined to an abstract discussion of concepts. And so Beauvoir's way of doing philosophy has sometimes made it hard for readers with different expectations about what philosophy looks like to recognize it as such. (I'm borrowing a lot already, in this discussion, from Toril Moi's understanding of Beauvoir).

Beauvoir's philosophical thinking is most importantly in conversation with--influenced by, responsive to, sometimes arguing against--that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. I'll try to introduce just a few basic ideas and key terms important to the sections of The Second Sex that we're reading. 

The key terms are especially useful for you to be aware of: some of Beauvoir's philosophical terms, like "existent" and "transcendence," are easily recognizable as philosophical, but others, like "situation" (and its relatives, situate, situated, etc) and "other" are ordinary words that have particular philosophical senses for Beauvoir.

Woman as "Other"
The first few pages of Beauvoir's introduction to The Second Sex build up to the claim that woman "is the Other" (6). That capital "O" signals a socially constructed asymmetry in the relations between men and women.

Understood as one consciousness relating to another, a man is an other for a woman in the same way that a woman is for a man--in the same way that any one person is for another. Yet Beauvoir understands this fundamental relation between persons in a particular way, influenced by Hegel's description of the master-slave dialectic (in Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]). For Hegel, she explains,

a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself; the subject posits itself only in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object. (7)

For Hegel, whose philosophy became central to French intellectual life for Beauvoir's generation thanks to the lectures of Alexandre Kojève (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 2nd ed., 1947), consciousness comes to know its own freedom through a kind of regulated violence. I think I'm free, but I need to test that freedom to be certain, and so I test it by risking my life in struggle with another consciousness, another person. Nothing less than total risk, the risking of my life, will suffice to establish total freedom; Lacan describes this feature of the existentialist reading of Hegel critically when he writes (with Sartre in mind) that in it "a consciousness of the other ... can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder" (from "The Mirror Stage," N 1168).

I can know myself as free only by compelling another other person to recognize me as free. This is, of course, unsatisfying in the end, because the very fact that recognition is forced will make it inauthentic; the forcing of recognition is an error, then, but one that has taken on reality in human history. Hegel's speculative story of the struggle between two persons is a way to narrate in miniature the interpersonal, social construction of human freedom, which has historically been established as the freedom of one group at the expense of others. Within the dominant group, recognition can be mutual, reciprocal. Between the dominant group and dominated groups, the positions of (free) self and other become rigid; we lose sight of their constructedness. And so one group will appear not just to have been made inferior, but to be inferior. That group is constituted as Other.  For Beauvoir, the two groups in question are men and women.

Beauvoir is interested in the effects that living out a role marked as Other has on the consciousness of a woman. And so her starting point, since this is a problem that she cannot study either wholly from the outside or wholly from the inside--no man or woman could--is to notice that her project of writing a book on the specificity of a gendered self is one that a man would be much less likely to undertake. It seems more normal to ask 'what is a woman?' than to ask 'what is a man?', and it seems for Beauvoir a necessary part of asking 'who am I?' to ask 'what is a woman?', as it wouldn't seem necessary--as it historically hasn't seemed necessary for philosophers like Descartes or Hegel--to ask 'what is a man?' in order to arrive at an answer to the question 'who am I?'

"If I want to define myself, I first have to say, 'I am a woman,'" writes Beauvoir (5)--and it's important to see the necessity in that statement ("I have to say") as constructed and not essential. It's something Beauvoir is curious about, something she sees as requiring explanation: why does she have to say this, and why doesn't a man have to say 'I am a man' to define himself?

Existence and essence; freedom and necessity; transcendence and immanence
The binaries just above are (very) roughly parallel to one another in Beauvoir's thinking (as in that of Sartre or Merleau-Ponty). She articulates a central tenet of existentialist philosophy in the following passage when she says that "essence does not precede existence": 

The fact is, deciding who she is would be quite awkward for her; the question has no answer, but not because the hidden truth is too fluctuating to be discerned: it's because in this area there is no truth. An existent [i.e. an existing being] is nothing other than what he does; the possible does not exceed the real, essence does not precede existence: in his pure subjectivity, the human being is nothing. He is measured by his acts. (N 1269, trans. modified)

It's crucial for Beauvoir that human beings are able to, and responsible to, fashion themselves, to act freely in the world--we should be judged by what we do; that's our truth. (Keats described a similar idea in a letter to his brother when he said that for each of us, earthly life is a "vale of soul-making.")

Yet it's not the case that we're all free to the same extent or in the same ways--the social and political world that we've freely made limits the freedoms that we have, and limits them for some more than for others--in most ways, for women more than for men. We can all transcend the given world to some extent, but we're also constrained by that given world; Beauvoir will often call the set of given conditions a person faces a dimension of "immanence." Immanence in her vocabulary is opposed to transcendence and freedom.

One thing we might discuss tomorrow is the relationship between Beauvoir's emphasis on existence and Butler's on performance: these emphases appear (and are) similar in many respects, yet in other ways the philosophical styles and and concerns of Butler and Beauvoir diverge.

Situation
While every human consciousness is free, it's also particular and embodied--it's freedom takes place and time, and is constrained by its historical moment.

Even before this, consciousness is conditioned by the body in which it finds itself. This is Merleau-Ponty's starting point in his Phenomenology of Perception: the body isn't an object of consciousness, but a condition for the possibility of consciousness. (Kant had earlier reasoned in a similar way when he argued that space and time are not objects of consciousness, but the conditions for the possibility of all consciousness and all perception).

Phenomenology, as a mode of philosophical inquiry, begins with a description of experience. (Hegel's original title for the Phenomenology of Spirit was Science of the Experience of Consciousness). Beauvoir builds on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy by thinking about the body as a sexed body. For a woman, consciousness inhabits a biologically female human body, and of course that body is marked in particular ways by the society and culture in which it lives--and so a woman comes to know herself, by no means entirely but significantly, in relation to the biological givens of her body (female anatomy, menstruation, the possibility and for many the actuality of pregnancy, etc) and to how others perceive her body.

The body itself, then, is for Beauvoir a situation. This doesn't mean that having a female body should or does determine any particular outcomes for a woman's life, and she'll say quite explicitly in later sections of the book that there is no reason that female biology should have differential sociopolitical consequences in modern society. That the body is a situation also means, though, that one can't do feminist philosophy without taking into account the particularities of the female body for women, and so she writes quite skeptically about those would argue that women are 'just' human beings without taking the body into account.

Pay careful attention, then, to "situation" and related words when they come up in Beauvoir's writing--this ordinarily bland word is weighted with consequence in her thinking.

A note on translations
The two sections of The Second Sex that we're reading are from two different translations: the Norton anthology uses H.M. Parshley's translation, while the text of the introduction is from the 2009 translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Parshley's earlier translation was somewhat abridged, mostly at the behest of the English-language publisher, and so the 2009 translation is significant as the first complete translation of the book into English. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier are sometimes more faithful to Beauvoir's philosophical vocabulary, but (like Parshley) neither of them are actually philosophers. Both translations make some mistakes--if you want to learn more about these, the best place to start is Toril Moi's review of the 2009 translation from the London Review of Books.