She built the most influential feminist philosophy of the twentieth century by joining insights from Existentialism and Marxism, but both of these rest on Hegel’s problematic Master/Slave dialectic.
“He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) brings Existentialism and Marxism to bear on the problem of women’s oppression. A basic tenet of Existentialism is that humans must create meaning for themselves through their life choices and projects. There is no pre-given meaning for a human life, no higher authority we can look to for direction. According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, we are radically free beings; “man is condemned to be free” he tells us in Existentialism is a Humanism.
As for women, we might be free to make choices that give our lives meaning, but that freedom is not absolute. Beauvoir knew from experience that our choices and actions emerge from within concrete situations, circumscribed as they are by economic and political realities. In 1929 she passed the agrégation in philosophy, the youngest person ever to do so, but placed second behind Sartre on his second attempt; rumor has it they didn’t want to give the first place to a woman. When women are treated as second class citizens, the truth is that they become second class citizens, with limited rights and freedoms. Our ability to pursue meaning-making activities is limited to what patriarchy is willing to afford women in the first place, and that is what feminist struggle sets out to change.
Marxism is how Beauvoir tells the story of the systemic oppression of women, not as individuals, but as a class (since women are oppressed because of their membership in that group, under patriarchy). But the Marxist account of class rests on Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, and feminist have raised some doubts about whether this is a good model for us to work from. Was Beauvoir’s use of Marx and the underlying Master/Slave dialectic a mistake?
“Forcing the woman question into a master-slave concept of struggle, such as the class struggle, is a historical mistake” —Carla Lonzi, Let’s Spit on Hegel
Italian feminist Carla Lonzi argues, in her 1970 manifesto Let’s Spit on Hegel, that this use is like a category mistake, and she refuses to be drawn into a dialectic at all. The reason it is a mistake, she says, is that “Hegel’s master/slave relationship is a relationship internal to the male human world” (p. 279). It is a settling of accounts among men, deduced from the logic of seizing power. It has nothing to do with women.
To see why, recall how Hegel’s story goes. Two self-consciousnesses meet, each demanding recognition from the other, and the demand escalates into a struggle to the death. Consciousness is shaken to its foundations in facing death. One party chooses freedom over life and becomes the Master; the other chooses life over freedom and becomes the Slave. The whole drama depends on the possibility that one side could annihilate the other. Hegel did understand that the slave’s subjugation had a human, historical origin rather than a natural one, which is how the dialectic ultimately continues on the side of the Slave once he achieves independence through his labor. Hegel never extended that recognition to women, whose position he tied to an unchanging “principle of femininity.” Lonzi argues that if he had, he would have hit a wall:
“If Hegel had recognized the human origin of the oppression of woman, as he recognized the human origin of the oppression of the slave, he would have had to apply the master/slave dialectic to her case, too. And in so doing he would have run into a serious obstacle... On the level of the man-woman relationship there is no solution that eliminates the other, hence the seizure of power as a conclusive act becomes irrelevant.” (p. 281)
Men and women need each other for the species to continue at all, at least so far. There is no final battle between them, and no reversal in which the oppressed takes the oppressor’s place. For Lonzi, this is what marks the struggle against patriarchy as a different kind of struggle, one that runs alongside class struggle but can’t be folded into it. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, she writes poignantly, “is a phenomenology of the patriarchal spirit” (p. 281).
She also has concrete reasons for thinking the Marxist version of the frame fails women. Women’s oppression predates capitalism; capitalism inherited it. Marxist analysis never counted the work women do inside the family, reproducing the workforce, as essential to capital accumulation, and simply widening “class” to include women doesn’t repair that fatal flaw. Revolution hasn’t delivered either: “the dictatorship of the proletariat has sufficiently demonstrated that it is not the bearer of the dissolution of social roles: it maintained and consolidated the family as the central social institution” (pp. 282–83). In other words, in the historical examples we have where a class revolution more or less succeeded, women were not automatically liberated. Marxism is compatible with the patriarchal appropriation of women’s labor. Marx himself, Lonzi adds dryly, lived as a traditional husband and fathered a child with the family’s maid.
Lonzi then turns Beauvoir’s own vocabulary against her. “Woman is immanence, man transcendence” is, for Lonzi, philosophy’s idealized hierarchy of destinies, and it is a falsification. Man achieves his transcendence by casting woman as the static immanence he needs to push against in order to set history in motion. Woman’s transcendence was never denied in principle, only in practice, because she lacked the political power to back it up. Lonzi’s reply is brisk: “Woman must simply claim her own transcendence. Philosophers have really talked too much” (p. 295).
If Lonzi is right, Beauvoir could not have fixed the mistake by extending Hegel a little further or by making an easy correction. She would have needed a model of relation beyond the agonism of Master and Slave, and it remains an open question what that might look like.
Beauvoir was not unaware. The introduction to The Second Sex already concedes that the comparison with class struggle breaks down: “a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other.” Between men and women there is no solution that eliminates the other. Beauvoir also knew that women had never entered Hegel’s fight. “It is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal,” she writes, and she offers this as an account of how woman was made the Other, not as an ideal women should take up.
On this reading, Beauvoir borrows the Master/Slave dialectic to describe how a Subject makes itself by making an Other, with her own endpoint being reciprocity. Just as the slave must lay claim to its own independent self-consciousness, woman too must come to realize man’s dependence on her, and come to make a claim to her own independent self-consciousness. That is, when women assert man’s otherness with respect to them, then an authentic woman’s standpoint will emerge to make women’s economic, political, and social projects possible. Woman must make of man her Other, a very similar ending point as Lonzi’s own call for women to claim their own transcendence and for the emergence of an Unexpected Subject:
“The unexpected destiny of the world consists in starting out anew, on a new path where woman is subject... Those who are not part of the master-slave dialectic are coming into consciousness and are introducing into the world the Unexpected Subject.”
In 1949, when The Second Sex was first published, Marxism was the common language of the Paris left. At that time, the frame did work she needed. It showed that women’s subordination is made by people rather than given by nature, which is the premise of everything else in the book. And underneath the borrowed Hegelian vocabulary, she had a second concept doing the heavier lifting: situation.
Julie K. Ward’s essay “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of ‘Body’ in The Second Sex” argues that Beauvoir uses “body” in two senses. In the first, the body is a thing: inert matter (close to Descartes’s res extensa for those of you who participated in the Feminist Romp). In the second, the body is a situation. Beauvoir writes, “if the body is not a thing, it is a situation,” and she says she is adopting the perspective “of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.” The situated body is “our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects,” and its facts mean nothing outside a world of values.
Take physical weakness. Beauvoir grants that women on average have less muscle mass and lung capacity, but adds that “‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he imposes”; technology, she notes, “can cancel out the muscular inequality separating man and woman.” In Beauvoir’s formulation, “a situation does not depend on the body; it is rather the body that depends on it.”
The same reading changes how we see Beauvoir on motherhood. The Second Sex calls woman “prey to the species.” It describes morning sickness as “the body’s revolt against the species taking possession of it,” and says that in pregnancy a woman is “both herself and other than herself.” Critics such as Mary O’Brien and Charlene Seigfried read this as a masculinist contempt for the female body. On Ward’s account, “prey to the species” describes women pregnant again and again without adequate food, health care, or contraception, rather than reproduction as such. Beauvoir fills her chapter on the mother with accounts that pull in different directions. One of them is Colette’s wonder at her newborn daughter, whose nails resembled “in their transparency the convex scale of the pink shrimp.” From this range Beauvoir concludes that there is no maternal instinct: “The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.” Ward then turns the charge of classism around. The feminists who celebrate motherhood as such are the ones assuming that every woman gets pregnant voluntarily, in comfort, with good health care (p. 236).
Ward points out that existentialism and historical materialism both combine freedom with unchosen conditions, and that Beauvoir joins them in her notion of situation (pp. 229–30). Beauvoir’s real claim is that women become women through situation rather than being born into Otherness. That claim runs on bodies, history, economics, and choice. It doesn’t need two consciousnesses fighting to the death, and that fight mostly gets in its way. As with so much of Beauvoir’s work, she seems to be using the tools of the day, but the tools are not the same, nor do they do the same work in her hands.
REFERENCES
Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. 1948. Translated by Carol Cosman, University of California Press, 1999.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Heinämaa, Sara. “The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference from Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir.” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, pp. 137–151.
Lonzi, Carla. “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Translated by Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine Maclachlan. In Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, edited by Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Sarah Richmond, Routledge, 2018.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, edited by John Kulka, Yale University Press, 2007.
Simons, Margaret A., editor. Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Ward, Julie K. “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of ‘Body’ in The Second Sex.” In Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 223–242.
Lonzi refuses the single category Beauvoir’s epigraph rests on. “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other”: in The Second Sex, “man” arrives as one category. Lonzi splits it in two. The real fault line under patriarchy, she argues, runs between the father and everyone his authority is used against, and that includes young men. “The two colossal refutations of Hegel’s analysis are within our power,” she writes, “women in their rejection of the family, young men in their rejection of war.” Writing in 1970, two years after May ’68 and at the height of the movement against the Vietnam War, she could see young men conscripted to die enforcing an order built by and for older men, and refusing. “It is against this authority that women and young men have become allies.” On his own, the young man’s revolt is fragile: “Without the presence of his historical ally, woman, the anarchical experience of the young man is undermined,” and his rebellion gets rerouted into the class struggle, the nation, or whatever other cause patriarchy has waiting for him. I’ve written about this alliance at more length in “Women and Young Men, Together At Last,” including what keeps it from forming.