Reading of the Introduction by Christina

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Introduction.

Beauvoir begins by asking ‘What is a woman?’ and swiftly moves into the discussion of femininity (p.3). She rejects (I think) the notion of the eternal feminine: clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex (4) [Hey, my second time around I got confused about this at the end, so have added some questions regarding this sentence there]. She concludes that the female function is not enough to define woman, so again, in a more concrete context (there are women on earth) she asks: what is a woman? The paragraph beginning on p. 5 then looks at men’s perceptions of women, and themselves. Humanity is regarded as male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being (5-6). Man does not determine himself in relation to a woman, he is the absolute. Woman as Other. In her discussion of Self and Other, which is not, in ancient as well as so-called primitive societies, necessarily gendered, de Beauvoir notes that it is a reciprocal relation, where both selves essentialise themselves and objectify the other, thus positioning themselves as subjects. However this reciprocity has not extended to the sexes: ‘that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the later as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty?’ (p.7), and submit themselves to the foreign, i.e. male point of view? This alterity between men and women, unlike that which characterises the alterity of minority groups, appears absolute, because it is not seen as historical. Another – and very important – difference is that in contrast to black people and proletarians, who position themselves as subjects, woman does not turn herself into an essential, but stays Other. This is due to the concrete means, the dispersal of women among men, to whom they are tied. ‘This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other’ (p. 9). This necessity, that is the biological need, has not brought about social liberation for women. Comparison with Master-Slave. The disadvantage for women is both legal, habitual, economic, and, I guess, she says, an entrapment, given that the alliance has advantages, or as she puts it, woman ‘often derives satisfaction from her role as Other (p. 10). The next pages argue that religion, literature and philosophy have justified male superiority and that this was taken to a whole new level in the nineteenth century, when women enter the labour force. She lists three reactions to women i) virulent attacks, ii) men who argue for ‘the good woman’ which knows her place and iii) the one that takes up the most room, men who affirm equality at a surface level, while denying the structural and symbolic inequality, which underlies and informs the surface level, to which they will resort under duress. De Beauvoir warns against these three reactions, but also against feminists’ arguments (15), which remains in the same rut as the discussions which preceded them. On page 15 below she then asks how to ask the question (I assume she means ‘What is a woman?’). Denying an objective stance, she argues that women are best positioned to address the matter, and presents the perspective that will govern her line of questioning: existentialist morality (17). Here we have two significant pairs of opposition, or three if we count the man/woman one: essential/inessential, which she has used throughout to elucidate the Self/Other distinction, and then a new one, transcendence/immanence, where transcendence seems to be the positive (I am assuming it has affinities with the Hegelian dynamic and the discussion of become on page 13, whereas immanence and facticity are connected with the bad faith reading of be also on page 13?). Woman is caught between the essential (fundamental claim of every subject) and the inessential (how she is constituted as Other); transcendence (the accomplishment of freedom by every individual) and immanence (the way of life men compel her to live through objectification, by freezing her as an object). The essential and the transcendence are thus connected to the subject as such, the human, no matter what gender, while inessential and immanence are also genderless, but are nevertheless used by man to curtail, control and dominate woman.  Am right now quite bamboozled by the sentence on page 4: clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. So does this mean that the woman who claims to be situated beyond her sex is acting out of bad faith, i.e. denial of freedom? That the eternal feminine is an instrument of immanence?

Anyway, I hope this is enough to get us started.