The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  On the whole, the reform movement that develops in the nineteenth century seeks justice in equality, and is thus generally favorable to feminism. There is one notable exception: Proudhon. Undoubtedly because of his peasant roots, he reacts violently against Saint-Simonian mysticism; he supports small property owners and at the same time believes in confining woman to the home. “Housewife or courtesan” is the dilemma he locks her in. Until then, attacks against women had been led by conservatives, bitterly combating socialism as well: Le Charivari was one of the inexhaustible sources of jokes; it is Proudhon who breaks the alliance between feminism and socialism; he protests against the socialist women’s banquet presided over by Leroux, and he fulminates against Jeanne Deroin. In his work Justice, he posits that woman should be dependent on man; man alone counts as a social individual; a couple is not a partnership, which would suppose equality, but a union; woman is inferior to man first because her physical force is only two-thirds that of the male, then because she is intellectually and morally inferior to the same degree: she is worth 2 × 2 × 2 against 3 × 3 × 3 or 8/27 of the stronger sex. When two women, Mme Adam and Mme d’Héricourt, respond to him—one quite firmly, the other less effusively—Proudhon retorts with La pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes (Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times). But, like all antifeminists, he addresses ardent litanies to the “real woman,” slave and mirror to the male; in spite of this devotion, he has to recognize himself that the life he gave his own wife never made her happy: Mme Proudhon’s letters are one long lament.

  But it is not these theoretical debates that influenced the course of events; they only timidly reflected them. Woman regains the economic importance lost since prehistoric times because she escapes the home and plays a new role in industrial production. The machine makes this upheaval possible because the difference in physical force between male and female workers is canceled out in a great number of cases. As this abrupt industrial expansion demands a bigger labor market than male workers can provide, women’s collaboration is necessary. This is the great nineteenth-century revolution that transforms the lot of woman and opens a new era to her. Marx and Engels understand the full impact this will have on women, promising them a liberation brought about by that of the proletariat. In fact, “women and workers both have oppression in common,” says Bebel. And both will escape oppression thanks to the importance their productive work will take on through technological development. Engels shows that woman’s lot is closely linked to the history of private property; a catastrophe substituted patriarchy for matriarchy and enslaved woman to the patrimony; but the Industrial Revolution is the counterpart of that loss and will lead to feminine emancipation. He writes: “Woman cannot be emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has become possible only within a large modern industry that not only accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, woman was more shamefully exploited than workers of the opposite sex. Domestic labor constituted what the English termed the “sweating system”; in spite of constant work, the worker did not earn enough to make ends meet. Jules Simon, in L’ouvrière (The Woman Worker), and even the conservative Leroy-Beaulieu, in Le travail des femmes au XIXe siècle (Women’s Work in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1873, denounce loathsome abuses; the latter declares that more than 200,000 French workers earn less than fifty centimes a day. It is clear why they hasten to migrate to the factories; in fact, it is not long before nothing is left outside workshops except needlework, laundering, and housework, all slave labor paying famine wages; even lace making, millinery, and such are taken over by the factories; in return, job offers are massive in the cotton, wool, and silk industries; women are mainly used in spinning and weaving mills. Employers often prefer them to men. “They do better work for less pay.” This cynical formula clearly shows the drama of feminine labor. It is through labor that woman won her dignity as a human being; but it was a singularly difficult and slow conquest. Spinning and weaving are done under lamentable hygienic conditions. “In Lyon,” writes Blanqui, “in the trimmings workshops, some women are obliged to work almost hanging in a kind of harness in order to use both their feet and hands.” In 1831, silk workers work in the summer from as early as three o’clock in the morning to eleven at night, or seventeen hours a day,* “in often unhealthy workshops where sunlight never enters,” says Norbert Truquin. “Half of the young girls develop consumption before the end of their apprenticeship. When they complain they are accused of dissimulating.”1 In addition, the male assistants take advantage of the young women workers. “To get what they wanted they used the most revolting means, hunger and want,” says the anonymous author of La verité sur les événements de Lyon (The Truth About the Events of Lyon). Some of the women work on farms as well as in factories. They are cynically exploited. Marx relates in a footnote of Das Kapital: “Mr. E., manufacturer, let me know that he employed only women on his mechanical weaving looms, and that he gave preference to married women, and among them, women who had a family to care for at home, because they were far more docile and attentive than unmarried women, and had to work until ready to drop from exhaustion to provide indispensable means of subsistence to support their families. This is how,” adds Marx, “the qualities proper to woman are misrepresented to her disadvantage, and all the delicate and moral elements of her nature become means to enslave her and make her suffer.” Summarizing Das Kapital and commenting on Bebel, G. Deville writes: “Beast of luxury or beast of burden, such is woman almost exclusively today. Kept by man when she does not work, she is still kept by him when she works herself to death.” The situation of the woman worker was so lamentable that Sismondi and Blanqui called for women to be denied access to workshops. The reason is in part that women did not at first know how to defend themselves and organize unions. Feminine “associations” date from 1848 and are originally production associations. The movement progressed extremely slowly, as the following figures show:

  in 1905, out of 781,392 union members, 69,405 are women;

  in 1908, out of 957,120 union members, 88,906 are women;

  in 1912, out of 1,1064,413 union members, 92,336 are women.

  In 1920, out of 1,580,967 workers, 239,016 are women and unionized female employees, and among 1,083,957 farmworkers, only 36,193 women are unionized; in all, 292,000 women are unionized out of a total of 3,076,585 union workers. A tradition of resignation and submission as well as a lack of solidarity and collective consciousness leaves them disarmed in front of the new possibilities available to them.

  The result of this attitude is that women’s work was regulated slowly and late. Legislation does not intervene until 1874, and in spite of the campaigns waged under the empire, only two provisions affect women: one banning minors from night work, requiring a day off on Sundays and holidays, and limiting the workday to twelve hours; as for women over twenty-one, all that is done is to prohibit underground mine and quarry work. The first feminine work charter, dated November 2, 1892, bans night work and limits the workday in factories; it leaves the door open for all kinds of fraud. In 1900 the workday is limited to ten hours; in 1905 a weekly day of rest becomes obligatory; in 1907 the woman worker is granted free disposal of her income; in 1909 maternity leave is granted; in 1911 the 1892 provisions are reinforced; in 1913 laws are passed for rest periods before and after childbirth, and dangerous and excessive work is prohibited. Little by little, social legislation takes shape, and health guarantees are set up for women’s work; seats are required for salesgirls, long shifts at outdoor display counters are prohibited, and so on. The International Labor Office succeeded in getting international agreements on sanitary conditions for women’s work, maternity leave, and such.

  A second consequence of the resigned inertia of women workers was the salaries they were forced to accept. Various explanations with multiple factors have b
een given for the phenomenon of low female salaries. It is insufficient to say that women have fewer needs than men: that is only a subsequent justification. Rather, women, as we have seen, did not know how to defend themselves against exploitation; they had to compete with prisons that dumped products without labor costs on the market; they competed with each other. Besides, in a society based on the marital community, woman seeks emancipation through work: bound to her father’s or husband’s household, she is most often satisfied just to bring home some extra money; she works outside the family, but for it; and since the working woman does not have to support herself completely, she ends up accepting remuneration far inferior to that of which a man demands. With a significant number of women accepting bargain wages, the whole female salary scale is, of course, set up to the advantage of the employer.

  In France, according to an 1889–93 survey, for a day of work equal to a man’s, a woman worker received only half the male’s wages. A 1908 survey showed that the highest hourly rates for women working from home never rose above twenty centimes an hour and dropped as low as five centimes: it was impossible for a woman so exploited to live without charity or a protector. In America in 1918, women earned half men’s salary. Around this period, for the same amount of coal mined in Germany, a woman earned approximately 25 percent less than a man. Between 1911 and 1943 women’s salaries in France rose a bit more rapidly than men’s, but they nonetheless remained clearly inferior.

  While employers warmly welcomed women because of the low wages they accepted, this provoked resistance on the part of male workers. Between the cause of the proletariat and that of women there was no such direct solidarity as Bebel and Engels claimed. The problem was similar to that of the black labor force in the United States. The most oppressed minorities in a society are readily used by the oppressors as a weapon against the class they belong to; thus they at first become enemies, and a deeper consciousness of the situation is necessary so that blacks and whites, women and male workers, form coalitions rather than opposition. It is understandable that male workers at first viewed this cheap competition as an alarming threat and became hostile. It is only when women were integrated into unions that they could defend their own interests and cease endangering those of the working class as a whole.

  In spite of all these difficulties, progress in women’s work continued. In 1900, in France, 900,000 women worked from home making clothes, leather goods, funeral wreaths, purses, beadwork, and Paris souvenirs, but this number diminished considerably. In 1906, 42 percent of working-age women (between eighteen and sixty) worked in farming, industry, business, banks, insurance, offices, and liberal professions. This movement spread to the whole world because of the 1914–18 labor crisis and the world war. The lower middle class and the middle class were determined to follow this movement, and women also invaded the liberal professions. According to one of the last prewar censuses, in France 42 percent of all women between eighteen and sixty worked; in Finland, 37 percent; in Germany, 34.2 percent; in India, 27.7 percent; in England, 26.9 percent; in the Netherlands, 19.2 percent; and in the United States, 17.7 percent. But in France and in India, the high figures reflect the extent of rural labor. Excluding the peasantry, France had in 1940 approximately 500,000 heads of establishments, 1 million female employees, 2 million women workers, and 1.5 million women working alone or unemployed. Among women workers, 650,000 were domestic workers; 1.2 million worked in light industry, including 440,000 in textiles, 315,000 in clothing, and 380,000 at home in dressmaking. For commerce, liberal professions, and public service, France, England, and the United States ranked about the same.

  One of the basic problems for women, as has been seen, is reconciling the reproductive role and productive work. The fundamental reason that woman, since the beginning of history, has been consigned to domestic labor and prohibited from taking part in shaping the world is her enslavement to the generative function. In female animals there is a rhythm of heat and seasons that ensures the economy of their energies; nature, on the contrary, between puberty and menopause, places no limits on women’s gestation. Some civilizations prohibit early marriage; Indian tribes are cited where women are guaranteed a two-year rest period between births; but in general over the centuries, women’s fertility has not been regulated. Contraceptives have existed since antiquity, generally for women’s use—potions, suppositories, or vaginal tampons—but they remained the secrets of prostitutes and doctors; maybe the secret was available to women of the Roman decadence whose sterility satirists reproached.2 But the Middle Ages knew nothing of them; no trace is found until the eighteenth century. For many women in these times, life was an uninterrupted series of pregnancies; even women of easy virtue paid for their licentious love lives with frequent births. At certain periods, humanity felt the need to reduce the size of the population; but at the same time, nations worried about becoming weak; in periods of crisis and great poverty, postponing marriage lowered the birthrates. The general rule was to marry young and have as many children as the woman could carry, infant mortality alone reducing the number of living children. Already in the seventeenth century, the abbé de Pure protests against the “amorous dropsy” to which women are condemned; and Mme de Sévigné urges her daughter to avoid frequent pregnancies.3

  But it is in the eighteenth century that the Malthusian movement develops in France. First the well-to-do class and then the population in general deem it reasonable to limit the number of children according to parents’ resources, and anticonception procedures begin to enter into social practices. In 1778, Moreau, the demographer, writes, “Rich women are not the only ones who considered the propagation of the species the greatest old-fashioned dupe; these dark secrets, unknown to all animals except man, have already made their way into the countryside; nature is confounded even in the villages.” The practice of coitus interruptus spreads first among the bourgeoisie, then among rural populations and workers; the prophylactic, which already existed as an antivenereal device, becomes a contraceptive device, widespread after the discovery of vulcanization, toward 1840.4

  In Anglo-Saxon countries, birth control is official, and numerous methods have been discovered to dissociate these two formerly inseparable functions: the sexual and the reproductive. Viennese medical research, precisely establishing the mechanism of conception and the conditions favorable to it, has also suggested methods for avoiding it. In France contraception propaganda and the sale of pessaries, vaginal tampons, and such are prohibited; but birth control is no less widespread.

  As for abortion, it is nowhere officially authorized by law. Roman law granted no special protection to embryonic life; the nasciturus was not considered a human being, but part of the woman’s body. “Partus antequam edatur mulieris portio est vel viscerum.”5

  In the era of decadence, abortion seems to have been a normal practice, and even a legislator who wanted to encourage birthrates would never dare to prohibit it. If the woman refused a child against her husband’s will, he could have her punished; but her crime was her disobedience. Generally, in Oriental and Greco-Roman civilization, abortion was allowed by law.

  It was Christianity that overturned moral ideas on this point by endowing the embryo with a soul; so abortion became a crime against the fetus itself. “Any woman who does what she can so as not to give birth to as many children as she is capable of is guilty of that many homicides, just as is a woman who tries to injure herself after conception,” says Saint Augustine. In Byzantium, abortion led only to a temporary relegation; for the barbarians who practiced infanticide, it was punishable only if it was carried out by violence, against the mother’s will: it was redeemed by paying blood money. But the first councils issued edicts for the severest penalties against this “homicide,” whatever the presumed age of the fetus. Nonetheless, one question arises that has been the object of infinite discussion: At what moment does the soul enter the body? Saint Thomas and most other writers settled on life beginning toward the fortieth day for males and
the eightieth for females; thus was established a distinction between the animated and the non-animated fetus. A Middle Ages penitential book declares: “If a pregnant woman destroys her fruit before forty-five days, she is subject to a penitence of one year. For sixty days, three years. And finally, if the infant is already animated, she should be tried for homicide.” The book, however, adds: “There is a great difference between a poor woman who destroys her infant for the pain she has to feed it and the one who has no other reason but to hide a crime of fornication.” In 1556, Henry II published a well-known edict on concealing pregnancy; since the death penalty was applied for simple concealment, it followed that the penalty should also apply to abortion maneuvers; in fact, the edict was aimed at infanticide, but it was used to authorize the death penalty for practitioners and accomplices of abortion. The distinction between the quickened and the non-quickened fetus disappeared around the eighteenth century. At the end of the century, Beccaria, a man of considerable influence in France, pleaded in favor of the woman who refuses to have a child. The 1791 code excuses the woman but punishes her accomplices with “twenty years of irons.” The idea that abortion is homicide disappeared in the nineteenth century: it is considered rather to be a crime against the state. The law of 1810 prohibits it absolutely under pain of imprisonment and forced labor for the woman who aborts and her accomplices; but doctors practice abortion whenever it is a question of saving the mother’s life. Because the law is so strict, juries at the end of the century stopped applying it, and few arrests were made, with four-fifths of the accused acquitted. In 1923 a new law is passed, again with forced labor for the accomplices and the practitioner of the operation, but punishing the woman having the abortion with only prison or a fine; in 1939 a new decree specifically targets the technicians: no reprieve would be granted. In 1941 abortion was decreed a crime against state security. In other countries, it is a misdemeanor punishable by a short prison sentence; in England, it is a crime—a felony—punishable by prison or forced labor. Overall, codes and courts are more lenient with the woman having the abortion than with her accomplices. The Church, however, has never relaxed its severity. The March 27, 1917, code of canon law declares: “Those who procure abortions, the mother not excepted, incur excommunication latae sententiae, once the result has been obtained, reserved to the Ordinary.” No reason can be invoked, even the danger of the mother’s death. The pope again declared recently that between the mother’s life and the child’s the former must be sacrificed: the fact is, the mother, being baptized, can enter heaven—curiously, hell never enters into these calculations—while the fetus is condemned to perpetual limbo.6