Beauvoir on Woman as Other

BEAUVOIR ON WOMAN AS OTHERPrepared by Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, Ph.D.

Philosophy Department, De La Salle University

Double Secret by Rene Magritte (1927)

Key points

Beauvoir’s framework: Existentialism Woman as Other

Remarks by male philosophers about women

Gendered dualisms/dichotomies (Illustrative case: Ethic of justice vs. ethic of care)

Four main points of the feminist critique of discourses

Beauvoir’s framework: Existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir, c. 1946

Beauvoir was an existentialist thinker and writer. Existentialism, a term coined by Sartre, refers to a 20th-century philosophical movement which emphasized individual freedom and responsibility


Since the human being is pure nothingness, I do not have a fixed or pre-given nature or essence

Rather, I continually create my own essence through my actions and choices

Existence precedes essence!


Based on an existentialist framework, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is a comprehensive account of women’s situation, ranging from a discussion of biology, history, and myths to the specific formative years, situations and “justifications”


Due to her philosophical analysis of otherness/Woman as Other, Beauvoir’s views marked the beginning of the “Second Wave” of feminist thought


Whereas First Wave feminism (18th-19th century) was about equality, Second Wave feminism (20th century onwards) focused on a critique of gender roles

Woman as Other

“But first we must ask: 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 get the notion of writing 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.”

--Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

Woman as Other

“Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.... 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.”


Woman as Other

“If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change.... The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit.... They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no solidarity of work and interest.... 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.”


Male philosophers on women

There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.

Pythagoras

Of those who were born as men, all that were cowardly and spent their life in wrongdoing were transformed at the second birth into women.... Such is the origin of women and of all that is female.

Plato


The husband hath by law power and dominion over his wife, and may keep her by force, within the bounds of duty, and may beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner.

Francis Bacon

As between male and female, the former is by nature superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject.

Aristotle


The husband and wife, though they have but one common concern, yet having different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too. It therefore being necessary that the last determination (i.e., the rule) should be placed somewhere, it naturally falls to the man’s share as the abler and the stronger.

John LockeJean Jacques Rousseau

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.


Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but only because it is ugly.... Nothing of duty, nothing of obligation!.... They do something only because it pleases them.... I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.

Immanuel Kant

In an uncorrupted woman the sexual impulse does not manifest at all, but only love; and this love is the natural impulse of a woman to satisfy a man....

Johann Gottlieb Fichte


Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long.

Arthur Schopenhauer

With regard to sexual relations, we should note that in giving herself to intercourse, the [unmarried] girl renounces her honour.... Girls have their essential destiny in marriage and there only.

GWF Hegel


The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’”

Jean-Paul Sartre

The being of woman.... is rightly described as charm, an expression which suggests plant life; she is a flower, the poets like to say, and even the spiritual in her is present in a vegetative manner.Søren Kierkegaard


Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.Woman [should be conceived]

as a possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for service and achieving her perfection in that.

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution—it is called pregnancy.

Guess who?

Some gendered dualisms*

man/woman culture/nature

mind/bodyrational/irrational

public sphere/private spherepolitical/personal

justice/carecivilized/uncivilized (savage)

white (race)/black (race)

* The terms on the left are privileged, while the terms on the right are othered or devalued

Illustrative case: Ethic of justice vs. ethic of care

Feminist Carol Gilligan, in her book In a Different Voice (1980), critiqued psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s findings about children’s moral development as biased against girls

Kohlberg’s levels of moral reasoning


Gilligan argued that girls scored low in Kolhberg’s scale not because they were morally deficient, but that the moral paradigm (the ethics of justice) was biased for males

Thus she suggested an alternative, the ethics of care


Four main points in the feminist critique of discourses

The predominance of men and the general absence of women

The application of male standards in “universal” accounts of life and human nature

The denigration of women’s nature and experience by male writers, historians, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, etc.

The persistence of gendered dualisms wherein the masculine-identified terms are privileged at the expense of the feminine-identified terms

Documents

Beauvoir on Woman as Other