Simone De Beauvoir, (1908-1986)

"Woman is made, not born".

 Existentialist and Feminism

Biography:
- born in France, educated at top universities
-met Sartre, 1928, life partners
-identified as existentialist
-taught philosophy
-public intellectual for most of life

Books:
 THE SECOND SEX

Review of Sartre

a. existentialism means life is arbitrary, absurd, no defined rules or determination
b. condition of life is being forced to make decisions & suffer consequences, w/ incomplete information
c. bearing responsibility for choices is human burden
d.meaning we give our lives is based on choices made
e. choices reflect our value structures/actions, which reflect identity
f. authentic life means not evading our choices, or self-deceiving ourselves that they do not exist
g. concept of alienation
    1. never really possible to connect with another person
    2. always see as object in relation to self, not other equal human (OTHER)
    3. submission or domination, (master-slave) relationship

DeBeauvoir:

1. Similarities w/ Sartre
  a. takes ideas of existentialism and adds gender differences
  b. agrees w/ Sartre that life is limited to time on earth- as far as we know
  c. agrees that life is constructed & meaning comes from choices made

2. argues that freedom to choose is different for men than for women
  a. sees society as reflecting male power (patriarchy)
  b. women defined as OTHER
  c. women given less choice about how to live life than men, more constrained by structures of society

'Now, woman has always been man’s dependent, 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'.

3. women are defined in opposition to men
   a. reflects  concept of alienation
   b. male power creates master-slave along gender lines
   c. not biological as much as cultural, situational- therefore open to change

"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.’

"What does it mean to be a woman?"
   a. not essentially different
   b. women are shaped by & must grow into society's expectations
   c. equates it with race, being Jewish
      1.if we argue against racial/religious inferiority, cannot accept gender differences as natural
      2. sees it as a fundamental contradiction of male theorists

"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".

4. dichotomy between genders:

male/culture----- female/nature
male/rationality--  female/emotion
male/competitive----female/cooperative
male/politics-----women/home/family
male/strong-- female/weaker

5. explores what the impact of these divisions means for both men and women  ll
   a. constrains both males/females to behave differently
   b. changes venues of society to reflect masculine/feminine realms
   c. limits choice, mostly of women
      1. if scientists are rational, & women viewed as emotional, does it prevent them from being accepted as scientists?   bm
       2. does it also define science as conforming to "masculine" vs "feminine" behavior?

  d. Aren't men also constrained by cultural expectations of what "male" is supposed to mean? ex
     1. is her analysis limited to the mid- 20th century? Have things changed? teach  tech

How do women choose to live, given these different cultural expectations?

  A.  Women get power by embracing & living out the gendered expectations
    1. ultra-feminine women, girly girls 
    2. invest in power of femaleness 
    3. maternal power- "ultra- mother" 8

'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-the-sovereign 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'.

Potential Problem:
   3.  not all women can do this
   4. divides women from each other
   5. power exercise become manipulative, not direct   games
   6. reinforces stereotypes
 
  B. women get power by becoming surrogate males

"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".

potential problem:
   1. always seen as the exception- doesn't change gendered expectations
   2. these women pay a price for not being "feminine"
   3. tradeoff between power and acceptance

Is this Hillary Clinton's situation? Nancy Pelosi's?  hc

How can transformation from patriarchy to gender equality occur?

C. explore the obsolete ideas about male power in philosophy based on technology changes

"Betty Friedan’s book for one, was published before 1968. In fact, the American women were well on the move by then. They, more than any other women, and for obvious reasons, were most aware of the contradictions between the new technology and the conservative role of keeping women in the kitchen. As technology expands – technology being the power of the brain and not of the brawn – the male rationale that women are the weaker sex and hence must play a secondary role can no longer be logically maintained. Since technological innovations were so widespread in America, American women could not escape the contradictions".

    1. in this scenario, as women become as capable of operating technology as men, w/ each generation, these beliefs will fade.

Potential Problem: 
   2. is this happening or has a new set of expectations of gender developed?
   3. are women constrained from exploring technology because of gender expectations?

D. expose the contradictory expectations of each gender through political movements
   1. gender struggle similar to class struggle  (Marxist analogy)
   2. work towards classless society- human beings, not masculine or feminine

"But it was within the anti-imperialist movement itself that real feminist consciousness developed. Whether in the anti-Vietnam War movement in America or in the aftermath of the 1968 rebellion in France and other European countries, women began to feel their power. Having understood that capitalism leads necessarily to domination of poor peoples all over the world, masses of women began to join the class struggle – even if they did not accept the term “class struggle.” They became activists. They joined the marches, the demonstrations, the campaigns, the underground groups, the militant left. They fought, as much as any man, for a nonexploiting, nonalienating future. But what happened? In the groups or organizations they joined, they discovered that they were just as much a second sex as in the society they wanted to overturn. Here in France, and I dare say in America just as much, they found that the leaders were always the men. Women became the typists, the coffee-makers of these pseudorevolutionary groups. Well, I shouldn’t say pseudo. Many of the movement’s male “heavies” were genuine revolutionaries. But trained, raised, molded in a male-oriented society, these revolutionaries brought that orientation to the movement as well. Understandably, such men were not voluntarily going to relinquish that orientation, just as the bourgeois class isn’t going to voluntarily relinquish its power. So, just as it is up to the poor to take away the power of the rich, so it is up to women to take away power from the men".

 
Potential problem:
2.women prevented from pursuing real sexual revolution by closeness to men
     a. easier for working class to "demonize" and attack upper class- no personal contact or empathy
     b. women live w/ men, empathize w/ their situation, care about them- difficult to pursue 'no holds barred' fight