De Beauvoir and some Marx on feminism

Bellow is an essay I wrote as the major requirement for one of my courses. I normally do not use jargon like this, but you sort of have to for school work. I’m posting it here because it says a lot about my politics and because I have been thinking a lot about feminism and sexism for the past few months trying to get a handle on the issues. It does not touch on what is probably the most important one–the sexual objectification of women–but it is a start and it helped me to pin down on paper some contradictory notions that have been swimming in my head.

I edited it slightly and did not include the citations. If there are some terms that don’t seem to make sense (or if you know more about Philosophy than I do and have discovered that I have misused some) and it seems important enough to motivate you to leave a comment–then do so. Or leave a comment about anything at all.

Anyhoo

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In the beginning of Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction to The Second Sex she reflects on the significance of asking the question “what is a woman?”. Posing the question, she says, suggests that womanhood is a phenomenon that needs explaining—a peculiarity that must be studied. No such thing is true, she says, in the common discourse about men. For de Beauvoir, Man represents—not merely linguistically but as an actual matter of perception—“both the positive and the neutral”.

According to this perception, Man is what it is to be human in essence whereas, in as much as womanhood is not considered a subspecies altogether, to be a woman is at worst an infirmity at best it is accidental to their nature as humans.

De Beauvoir points out that the Woman (as opposed to the merely biological ‘female’) is a gender category which is constructed historically not by women but by men. It is for precisely this reason that Woman is the Other: man is not in any position to understand female sexuality, socio-economic differentiation puts them in a separate sphere, and their reproductive functions were and continue to be a source of mystery and mystification. But women should only have had otherness in reference to men—in reference to women it is man that ought to be seen as other. It is this lack of reciprocity that makes of Man always the subject, or ego, recognizing in Woman not a substantive consciousness but a consciousness subject to Man. Girls and women of course are normalized into these gender roles—they learn to see themselves as Man makes them.

De Beauvoir’s explanation of how this happened comes from her existentialist ethics—and because humanity is as it does, answering the question “how is it then … that one contrasting term is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness?” also answers the question, ‘what does this mean?’

She begins by noting the degree to which females are alienated from their own bodies. Menstruation, pregnancy, menopause are all processes which are largely out of a woman’s control—or as she puts it, “Woman, like man is her body; but her body is something other than herself.” Because of her reproductive functions woman is enslaved to the species and “her individuality [is] the prey to outside forces”. But she refuses to call these purely physiological, in her account of maternity she claims that “Constipation, diarrhoea, and explosive efforts always represent the same mixture of desire and anxiety,” and, “almost all spontaneous miscarriages are of psychic origin.” and a woman’s psyche is at least in part formed by the demands and contradictions entailed by patriarchal society. If women are alienated from themselves, if they see in their bodies something which impinges upon their humanity—defined no doubt by men who have no such doubts about the separation of their minds from their bodies—if they see in themselves otherness it is because the patriarchate has laid claim to those bodies, has exaggerated and encouraged the degree to which they are enslaved to them—has even said of their reproductive system, ‘that is all you are,’ a “womb, an ovary”.

But, of course, a woman cannot be merely defined as or by her uterus, she cannot even be defined by her body as a whole—a woman exists within a society and it is only in relation to her society that it is possible to define her. Females, for example do not have the same physical strength as males, but “the ‘weakness’ is revealed as such only in light of the ends men propose, the instruments he has available, and the laws he establishes.” In a society sufficiently primitive or advanced, production would not be limited by strength, it would therefore be irrelevant to define woman as ‘the weaker sex’.

But in the interim where his strength and tools are what enable Man to strive towards transcendence, woman is relegated to immanence. To quote de Beauvoir at length:

It is because man is a being of transcendence and ambition that he projects new urgencies through every new tool … Woman’s incapacity brought about her ruin because man regarded her in the perspective of his project for enrichment and expansion

De Beauvoir makes liberal use of Marx and Engels throughout The Second Sex and so we might put this in another way. We might say that woman’s body denied her entry into man’s species-being, first because she could not take part in the economic production of the species and because man—who both makes humanity through his productive life and enters into humanity as taking part in its production—could not therefore see woman as belonging to his species. Woman becomes merely that thing by which more men are created. But if her materialist interpretation—which draws heavily upon Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State—can be couched in Marxist terms, she insists that Marxism is not sufficient to understand why the economic position of the woman should have resulted in her subjugation, “this phenomenon,” she says, “is a result of the imperialism of the human consciousness, seeking always to exercise its sovereignty in objective fashion.”

This notion ties back to an observation she made in the introduction:

We find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards 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.

It is perfectly true that sunk into immanence as women have been—and to a much lesser degree continue to be today in spite of their entry into the workforce—women have lacked the wherewithal to set up a reciprocal claim to this. It is perfectly true that because women do not have the group solidarity of a class or a race that they have not had the ability to say ‘We’ in a manner that sets themselves up as the subject and makes everyone outside of that grouping into the other (19). What is curious, even inconsistent, is that a woman who approaches the issue from an existentialist perspective—that believes that existence comes before essence and that we are radically free—should be able to say that man’s consciousness possesses a ‘fundamental hostility’ or that man is necessarily a ‘being of transcendence and ambition’. If man is as such then it must be because man has behaved as such—you cannot say the reverse, that man has behaved as such because he is as such.

In any case, it is certainly untrue to say that all men pose Man as the subject and oppose women as objects. Men are no more a class or a race than women. It has surely happened furthermore that women have become the priestesses of their own oppression. De Beauvoir cannot deny that there are women who accept, even enjoy their position as women, and there are female misogynist writers (and mothers and teachers) that are very glad to market the ideologies of their own enslavement. This is true along lines of class and race but with one crucial note. A bourgeoisie has comfort and luxury to compensate for her immanence, a working class woman has only the dubious joy of surrendering the responsibility for her person to a wage slave whose future is decidedly not “indefinitely open” and whose projects are not “freely chosen”.

De Beauvoir sees the issue of womanhood going beyond class lines because sexism exists in every class—in every class, woman is defined in relation to men. We may add, a proletariat man is not dominant over every woman but over the women of his class (naturally since the women of the ruling classes are attached to the men of that class). She therefore does not accept the Marxist analysis that to free the working class—by abolishing private property—is to free the working class woman[1]. Firstly because she does not see that private property “must necessarily have involved the enslavement of women[2].” and secondly because looking at the Soviet Union she sees that woman was not freed—de Beauvoir did not have the advantage of later Marxists in understanding the Stalinized USSR as an extreme form of State Capitalism, but it is odd that in noting that woman was not freed in Russia she failed to note that neither was man!

Nevertheless de Beauvoir affirms that for as long as woman is materially chained to man she cannot be expected to make herself more than what he would have her made into. It is not even sufficient to be admitted into the workforce: “only those women who have political faith, who take militant action in the unions, who have confidence in their future, can give ethical meaning to thankless daily labor.” In doing this she begins to define herself and claims more and more a stake in what has previously been exclusively man’s world. As she slowly wins changes in her economic condition, which both “promises and requires” a “moral, social, cultural” change the “new woman” can appear.

In other words, Woman is the inessential other only for so long as she is economically and biologically hampered in her transcendence and she submits to her objectification. When this is done away with woman shall find herself, and man can find in her a correlative that is equal and form relations (I do not mean necessarily erotic relations, otherwise I should have had to stipulate heterosexual man and woman) with her in both good faith and good will.

To appropriate Marx, the social emancipation of Woman is the emancipation of the society from Womanhood. We might add that this would be the emancipation of the world from Manhood as well. We might add that this could be a world so free that men and women would be able to express their sexuality in any way they chose, without being hampered by gender expectations.