With a population depleted by war France needed citizens – so Beauvoir was accused of being a traitor to her sex and her nation. After the war, French industry needed revitalization, and so in addition to more births they also needed more women to enter the workforce.26 Beauvoir’s language was and still is shocking in places, and in hindsight there are passages that seem ill-judged given the political context and the experience of women who did not feel ‘enslaved’ by motherhood. Beauvoir referred to pregnant women as hosts to ‘parasites’ and slaves to the species. (So did Schopenhauer, but for some reason he did not provoke the same reaction.) Beauvoir was interested in pregnancy as it is experienced by women subjectively, ‘from within’ – with their loss of bodily autonomy, and the anxiety they experienced about who they would become when they became mothers. She claimed that women should not be reduced to their reproductive function. She also said (though few seemed to notice) that this was not a rejection of motherhood altogether. Beauvoir wanted to show that even pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for the young – supposedly the epitome of uniquely female embodied experience – was experienced differently depending on a woman’s situation.
Clearly, Beauvoir was not a mother herself, and she acknowledged this, drawing on other women’s voices, including letters, diaries and novels, to show that, ‘Pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in very different ways depending on whether they take place in revolt, resignation, satisfaction, or enthusiasm.’27 She wanted to address two dangerous misconceptions about being a mother: (1) that it was ‘enough in all cases to fulfil a woman’ and (2) that a child was ‘sure to find happiness in his mother’s arms’.28 Her research showed that while many women enjoyed motherhood they did not want it to be their life’s only project. Children were unlikely to be happy, she thought, if their mothers were frustrated and unfulfilled; ‘it would obviously be better for the child if his mother were a complete person and not a mutilated one’.29
But many men objected: How dare she approach that sacred subject when she wasn’t a mother herself?
It had never stopped them, she said.
In addition to accusing society of bad faith with respect to motherhood, Beauvoir returned to the theme that had preoccupied her for decades: the ethics of love and devotion. In The Second Sex she claimed that the word ‘love’ has different meanings for men and women – and that these differences are responsible for many of the disagreements between them.
Beauvoir believed that men remained ‘sovereign subjects’ in love – that they valued their beloved women alongside other pursuits, as an integral part – but only a part – of their whole life. By contrast, for women love was presented as life itself, and ideals of love encouraged women to live lives of self-sacrifice or even complete self-forgetting for the sake of their beloved. Men were raised to expect to be active in the world – to love but also to be ambitious and to act in other domains. Women were taught that their value was conditional – that they needed to be loved by a man to have worth.
One of the barriers to authentic love is that women have been objectified so much that now they objectify themselves, attempting to identify with their beloved man and become more desirable in his eyes. The woman in love tries to see through his eyes, shaping her world and herself around him: she reads his preferred reading, interests herself in his art, his music, his ideas, his friends, his politics – and so on. Sexually, too, Beauvoir objected that many women are used as ‘instruments’ for male pleasure rather than as subjects whose desires and pleasure are also taken into account.
The problem with the dominant paradigms of love, as Beauvoir saw them, was that they were not reciprocal. Men expected women to give themselves in love in ways that were not mutual. Consequently, love was dangerous for women in ways that it was not dangerous for men. She did not lay the blame for this exclusively at the feet of men. Women, too, perpetuated the oppressive structures of non-reciprocal love through participating in it. But it was hard not to, Beauvoir wrote, because the world was structured in a way that enticed them to consent to their own oppression.
Although Beauvoir’s account in The Second Sex largely frames the discussion in heteronormative terms, she herself had faced this tension in life in her own relationships with women. In 1940, following a conversation with Bianca Bienenfeld about Bienenfeld’s desire to occupy a more central role in Beauvoir’s life, Bienenfeld wrote to Beauvoir:
You don’t give yourself, you take.
It’s false that I’m your life – your life is a mosaic.
For me, though, you are my life – I’m all yours.30
Beauvoir thought authentic love was possible in reciprocal relationships – and she hoped it would become more widespread. ‘The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger.’31 It was possible for women to love their beloved and themselves as subjects in their own right. But it was hard: because non-reciprocal myths of love perpetuated women’s secondary status, promising them salvation and delivering a living hell.
Like Beauvoir’s fiction, The Second Sex raises the question of how much autobiography to read into Beauvoir’s philosophy – and which autobiography? For in addition to Beauvoir’s early encounters with Bianca, in a letter from Beauvoir to a later lover she identified ‘true reciprocity’ rather than sex, as the quality she found lacking in her relationship with Sartre. This raises the question: when she described ‘reciprocal love’ in 1949 did she believe herself to have lived it? There are other passages in the book that closely resemble Beauvoir’s own becoming – including an ‘older sister’ who resents participating in ‘maternal chores’, and grandparents who ‘poorly hide’ the fact that they would have preferred a male grandchild. Was she drawing on her research on ‘woman’ here, or on the lived experiences of Simone and Hélène?32 Her chapter on lesbianism also provoked speculation. Prior to the posthumous publication of her letters to Sartre there were only novels and suspicions to compare it with – what did she mean when she wrote about feeling ‘obscure longings’ for women in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter?33 – but even so people wondered: was it rooted in her own experience, or even in suppressed desire? Was she in bad faith about her own sexuality? In the book she claimed that there is ‘no sexual destiny that governs an individual’s life’ and that homosexuality is ‘a choice made from a complex whole, contingent on a free decision’.34
At the end of The Second Sex Beauvoir did what her Grasset rejection letter said she failed to do when they declined When Things of the Spirit Came First in the 1930s. Henry Müller had written: ‘You are content to describe a disintegrating world, and then to abandon your readers on the very threshold of the new order, without giving any precise indication of what its benefits will be.’35
So in the final chapter she presented ‘The Independent Woman’, whose freedom came at a cost, but not at the cost of love.
There Beauvoir said that men are at an advantage in a society that ‘Others’ women, not just for the benefits they reap (those are easy enough to see from ‘without’) but also ‘within’ themselves. Men, from boyhood onwards, can enjoy their vocations as human beings without anyone telling them that their vocation contradicts their ‘destiny’ as a lover, husband or father, or that their success lessens the likelihood that they will be loved. But for a woman to be feminine she must renounce her claims to what Beauvoir calls ‘sovereignty’ – to have a vision for her life, to pursue her own projects – because this is perceived to be unfeminine. This places women in a lose–lose situation: should she become herself if that means becoming unlovable? Should she renounce herself to succeed at love? Sartre had written that in the human condition we are ‘condemned to be free’. Beauvoir now wrote that in ‘the feminine condition’ women were condemned to feel divided, to become ‘split subjects’.
The root of
the problem is that ‘the individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will’.36 For centuries men benefited from the myths of femininity, and it was understandable that they were afraid to lose both the myths and their benefits. It was understandable that they told women that they didn’t need vocations apart from marriage and family; that it was against nature to want them; that they would be ‘happy’ if they succeeded in the life cycle of being desired as sexual objects before sacrificing themselves as loving wives and mothers. But men should feel uneasy about doing so, since ‘there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy’.37
When Volume II of The Second Sex was published in November 1949 the reviewers redrew their weapons – Beauvoir would later refer to the coverage of this volume as ‘the scandal’. The Figaro columnist André Rousseaux expressed ‘embarrassment’ for this ‘female follower of Bacchus’ who had written about ‘sexual initiation’, who wanted to ruin love in order to claim the freedom of pleasure. After all, he said, women were already emancipated!38 A surprising quantity of his words were dedicated to ridicule and attacks on her person: he wrote that ‘woman, relegated to the level of the Other, is exasperated in her inferiority complex’, that Beauvoir argued with ‘such tenacity’ that he wondered if she needed existentialism to ‘deliver her from a veritable obsession’. Emmanuel Mounier, writing in L’Esprit, lamented the ‘tone of ressentiment’ that he found in the book. If it had been better controlled, he said, perhaps it ‘would have less impeded the lucidity of the author’.39 They called her life sad, neurotic, frustrated. Camus accused her of ‘making the French male look ridiculous’.40 The philosopher Jean Guitton expressed pain at seeing between its lines ‘her sad life’. L’Epoque published a prediction that in ten years no one would be talking about ‘this nauseating apology for sexual inversion and abortion’.41
The Vatican put the book on its list of forbidden books.
Beauvoir had made a philosophical argument about the oppression of women, drawing on the lived experience of women – including herself – to say that many women’s situations must be changed if they were to be truly ‘human’. She claimed that women’s desires should shape sex; that their projects should shape family life; and that their agency should shape the world.
But the reception it met was largely ad feminam. In many quarters Beauvoir was mocked, derided and dismissed. But not in all. There was another, much more welcoming readership: the next generation. They read the book as something without precedent – something which talked frankly about female experiences that had been taboo. Some, desperate for information about their own bodies, read it as a sex manual. Paris Match published excerpts in August, introducing their author as ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’s lieutenant and expert in existentialism, [who] is without doubt the first woman philosopher to have appeared in men’s history. It fell to her to extract a philosophy of her sex from the great human adventure.’42
Since its publication, Beauvoir’s ‘philosophy of her sex’ has often been summarized by the claim that there is a distinction between the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, with the former being biological (i.e., male, female) and the latter acquired socially through acculturation (e.g., masculine, feminine). But there are significant problems with reducing The Second Sex to this claim. First, the word ‘gender’ never appears in the book. Second, the idea that there is a biological and cultural dimension to the concept ‘woman’ and the perpetuation of women’s oppression was not an original one, even in 1949. For centuries before Beauvoir (as she discusses in The Second Sex), philosophers and writers have claimed that women’s inferior status in society resulted from their lack of concrete educational, economic and professional possibilities – not from any innate inferiority. In the eighteenth century (to give one example) Diderot had already written that women’s inferiority was ‘largely made by society’.43
It is important to dwell on this because to reduce The Second Sex to the claim that gender is a social construct risks divorcing it from one of its most powerful and unpopular claims: that the sexual objectification of women’s bodies plays a large part in the perpetuation of their oppression. In the first volume, ‘Facts and Myths’, Beauvoir studied the ways in which ‘femininity’ had been construed as a destiny for women – over and over again, she found that the ideal woman was the object of men’s desires.
The second volume, ‘Lived Experience’, was much longer. Here Beauvoir adopted a different method of analysis and considered the question ‘what is a woman?’ from the point of view of women themselves, at different stages in their lives. In doing this Beauvoir reversed the philosophical perspective on power: instead of analysing ‘woman’ from the point of view of those who dominated, she turned to the everyday lives of those who were expected to submit. To do this she had to discuss topics that the philosophical elite did not consider to be worthy of the title ‘philosophical’: how household work was divided, how managers appraised work, how women experienced sexual initiation and practices. These were not elevated questions about the nature of reality or the possibility of knowledge.44 Rather, they were questions about who gets to say what parts of reality matters – and whose knowledge is worthy of the name.
She knew all too well that it was difficult to let women speak for themselves: one of the features of their oppression was that they did not have the means to leave records of their lives in the same quantity and quality that men did. Women’s voices were less public, and when they became public their testimony was often dismissed as partial or false, malicious or immoral. To analyse the submission of women Beauvoir cited particular women’s experiences of the private sphere, a situation that was, structurally and systematically, reduced to silence.45
One of Beauvoir’s childhood inspirations, George Eliot, once wrote that ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’.46 On the other side of silence, Beauvoir heard a restless refrain of confusion, resignation and despair – a chorus of women’s voices, asking: what have I become?
When she researched The Second Sex Beauvoir was dismayed by her own discoveries. But she found reasons to hope in them, too. Yes, in 1949 women were inferior to men, ‘because their situation opened fewer possibilities to them’. But they didn’t have to be. If men and women stopped hiding behind alibis, things could be different.
The Second Sex is often described as a book that ‘applied’ Sartre’s philosophy to ‘the woman question’. And at this stage Beauvoir did still agree with Sartre about some things – the importance of freedom, for example. But she was doing what philosophers do – agreeing with what she thought was true, and dismissing what she thought was false, inconsistent or unethical, even if it was someone she loved who thought it. She rejected Sartre’s conception of the ‘situation’, drawing instead on Heidegger’s characterization of human beings as ‘thrown’ into a world that always already has meanings that we have not made ourselves. She was returning in full force to the question she had asked Sartre in the 1930s: what kind of freedom can a woman in a harem achieve?
But by now she had seen more clearly that women don’t have to be kept in harems to be told that their value comes from magnifying men’s greatness or satisfying their pleasures. Even in 1949, even in America or France, a woman could not simply escape the ways that sexual difference structures the possibilities available to her simply by claiming to be human. Philosophers like Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were beginning to write philosophy about the body (a topic that Western philosophers have a long history of ignoring, in favour of the mind). But Beauvoir claimed that they failed to take into account women’s bodies, and in particular the alienation that a woman can feel from her own body when she recognizes the way it is reduced to a sexual object by a certain kind of male gaze – a gaze that sees her as ‘p
rey’ to be hunted and possessed rather than a person in the process of becoming.
Beauvoir wasn’t satisfied with what she saw of women through this distorted lens. So she used an original philosophical method that consisted of presenting multiple first-person perspectives, describing her task as ‘describing the world that is proposed to women from the point of view of women’. If it were the case that women by nature submitted to men, then there would be nothing immoral about a hierarchy between men and women. But if that hierarchy were perpetuated by culture, and women’s submission was experienced by them as the ‘degradation’ of their freedom, then the problem was a moral problem, and both the oppressors and the oppressed were responsible for redressing it. In Volume II, Beauvoir combined women’s voices describing their experiences of becoming a woman under the hegemony of man-made myths, to show the ways that girlhood is an ‘apprenticeship’ in the feminine condition, a preparation to renounce autonomy and submit to the expectation that to become a woman is to be for men.47
Because Beauvoir published sections of the book in advance the earliest readers couldn’t follow her argument from start to finish. But it is not just piecemeal readings that led to the ad feminam reception she received. Many readers had strong reasons to want her to be wrong, unread or misheard. After all, alibis are a great way to get off the hook. If Beauvoir’s readers could reject her as an unoriginal thinker, a failure of a woman, or an immoral person, then they could rest untroubled by her account of human suffering in ‘the feminine condition’. They could tell the silence to shut up again.
In a 1949 radio interview about The Second Sex Beauvoir was asked about the attacks she received after its publication. She said that it wasn’t her fault that in France, when one speaks of women, ‘people immediately think of sex’. It didn’t escape her notice that, despite relatively few of the 1,000 pages of The Second Sex being dedicated to sex, it was these pages that drew the most comment. She thought it was problematic that sexual matters weren’t taken seriously, as matters deserving philosophical scrutiny. It was as if people didn’t think philosophy could be something living, something that could illuminate even this dimension of human life.48
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