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.
“… it had not been easy to decide whether to give the first place to Sartre or to her. If Sartre showed great intelligence and a solid, if at times inexact, culture [i.e., breadth of learning], everybody agreed that, of the two, she was the real philosopher…” —Maurice de Gandillac, quoted in Deirdre Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
In 1929, Simone de Beauvoir passed the agrégation in Philosophy, the youngest person ever to do so. It was her first try. Jean-Paul Sartre failed his first attempt, as was quite common, and it was in studying for his second sitting that he first met Beauvoir and invited her to study with his group. According to Maurice de Gandillac’s account in Beauvoir’s biography, two members of the jury didn’t want to give first place to a woman, and so she placed second behind Sartre.¹ I think it is fair to say that Beauvoir knew from experience that women’s lives are shaped by their economic and political situations. Beauvoir’s own family had lost its wealth during World War I, and this meant there was no dowry for Beauvoir to marry — she would have to work and earn herself a living. She decided marriage was not for her and began dreaming about becoming a writer instead.
Beauvoir knew that freedom is conditional, where Sartre saw it as absolute and unalienable. A central tenet of his existentialism is that man must create meaning for themselves through their choices and life projects. He is, in fact, compelled to choose because even not choosing (inauthentically refusing one’s responsibility) is itself a choice. “Man is condemned to be free,” he writes provocatively in Existentialism Is a Humanism. It was an ongoing argument between them. In her memoir, The Prime of Life, Beauvoir documents how she argued with Sartre about women’s situation, and put it to him to explain what kind of freedom has a woman who is shut up in a harem.² Sartre insisted that this situation could be lived freely in a number of ways, willfully refusing to compromise the absolute freedom he saw at the heart of every human situation. As early as The Ethics of Ambiguity (published in 1947, two years before the publication of The Second Sex), Beauvoir takes distance from Sartre’s existential freedom, proposing the more politically nuanced “concrete freedom,” the power to pursue one’s projects.
Beauvoir knew that women’s ability to pursue meaning is shaped by power, and that is what feminist struggle sets out to change. Marxism is how Beauvoir tells the power side of the story, the story of the systemic oppression of women, not as individuals or subjects, but as a class. But Marxism’s account of class rests on Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, an agonistic account of intersubjectivity that some feminists want to reject.
“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
In her 1970 manifesto Let’s Spit on Hegel, Italian feminist Carla Lonzi argues that Beauvoir’s use of Hegel is like a category mistake, and Lonzi refuses to be drawn into the dialectic at all. The first reason it is a mistake, she writes, is that “Hegel’s master/slave relationship is a relationship internal to the male human world” (Lonzi, 279). It is a settling of accounts among men, deduced from the logic of seizing power. It has nothing to do with women, and is not an apt description of the struggle between women and men. To see why, recall how Hegel’s story goes:
Two 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, forcing one of two outcomes: either consciousness decides that life is worthless without freedom, and in choosing freedom over life, becomes the Master; or consciousness decides freedom is worthless without life, and in choosing life over freedom, becomes the Slave. But this is key: the whole drama depends on the possibility that one side could annihilate the other. Each undifferentiated consciousness must face death as a concrete possibility for itself if it is to transform into Master or Slave.
But men and women need each other for the species to continue at all — at least so far. Unlike with other types of oppression, a woman’s bond to her oppressor is grounded in biological necessity. There is no final battle between them, and no reversal in which the oppressed takes the oppressor’s place.³ Try as he might, man cannot take woman’s place as surely as woman cannot take man’s place, at least in reproduction. 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” (Lonzi, 281).
Hegel understood that the slave’s subjugation had a human, historical origin rather than a natural one. But he never extended that recognition to women, whose subservience to man is naturalized. He ties her position to an eternal “principle of femininity.” Lonzi argues that if he had even tried, 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.” (Lonzi, 281)
History backs Lonzi’s argument that the Marxist account of class fails women. Lonzi points out that women’s oppression predates capitalism; patriarchy is not an after-effect of capitalism that will disappear with it. Marxist analysis never counted the work women do inside the family, reproducing the workforce, as essential to capital accumulation. Simply widening “class” to include women doesn’t really fix this oversight; not only does women’s oppression cut across economic class (the worker’s wife serves the worker in exactly the same ways as the owner’s wife does), but the worker is given a consolation wife to fill his personal needs, helping to keep him in his place.
Because of this, class revolt hasn’t delivered on its promises to free women as a sub-class inside its enlightened class politics: “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” (Lonzi, 282–83). Ergo, in the examples we have where class revolt more or less succeeded, women were not liberated from their oppression as women, and we now know that Marxism rests on 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.
Beauvoir was not unaware of these critiques. 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” (Beauvoir, 9). Later she takes on Hegel by name: “the woman is originally an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; there has never been combat between the male and her…” (Beauvoir, 74). She clearly sees Lonzi’s point here, but she treats these breaks as ways women’s situation departs from a model she still holds. Lonzi treats it as evidence that the model should not be applied to women at all.
Beauvoir keeps the frame, and with it Hegel’s measure of what counts. “The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions,” she writes; “it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal” (Beauvoir, 74). Where Lonzi reads women’s refusal to stake their lives as a relation to life that philosophy has never represented, Beauvoir doesn’t seem to see beyond it and counts it as a curse.
Beauvoir lacked language for women’s experience that men had not already written, and she says so herself. Women, she writes, “have no past, no history, no religion of their own” (Beauvoir, 9); “women’s entire history has been written by men” (Beauvoir, 148); and “the representation of the world as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth” (Beauvoir, 162). As one of the first to take up the woman question as a philosophical problem, she had to build with the available tools. In 1949, Marxism was the common language of the Parisian left, and the frame did work she needed to do at that time. 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.
“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.” (Lonzi, 295)
Lonzi is not wrong to reject the agonistic Hegelian framework, but let’s also take her rejection in context. She wrote her manifesto in 1970, two decades into the life of The Second Sex, from inside a movement the book helped make possible. The call for the New Subject was produced by Beauvoir’s successes as well as by her failures.
Beauvoir probably made the mistake, but arguably it is one she tried correcting. After a lifetime of denying she was a feminist, in 1972 at the age of 64, she embraced the feminist label at the same time as she broke with orthodox Marxism. More specifically, she rejected the claim that class struggle comes first and women’s liberation follows from it. Her achievement was clearing enough ground that the mistake could be seen clearly (the argument is a common-sense one now), and that the question of women’s subjectivity could be raised as a philosophical question in its own right.
NOTES
The reasons they gave were two: that it was Sartre’s second try (boo hoo, poor Sartre, let’s reward him for being less competent); and that she was not officially enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure courses but was an auditor (very common), whereas Sartre was an officially enrolled student. But this is a gender issue because very few women had the elite boys’ school preparation to officially enroll, and Beauvoir’s Catholic school preparation was not that. No rule or principle had to exclude her when practice and tradition sufficed. Simone Weil was admitted to the École Normale in 1928, but she had to attend a boys’ lycée first, and her family was socially positioned just so — the exception that proves the rule.
This is a problematic example. The harem was a European fantasy/fear button that symbolized total female captivity. Edward Said gives us an account in Orientalism of how this imagery works: the East becomes a projection for the West’s fears and desires. Beauvoir didn’t need to go east, when French women couldn’t vote, needed their husband’s permission to work or open a bank account. The fantasy example makes it too easy for Sartre to answer, as if it were an abstract question.
Marxism translates the Master and Slave dialectic into a class struggle between those who own the means of production (the bourgeois Masters) and those who must sell their labor on the market in order to survive (the working class). In Hegel’s story, just when you think the Master has won the day, you realize that this is not the case. The Master’s life becomes one of consumption, with the Slave anticipating his every need or desire. On the side of the Slave, by making things the Slave achieves independence even as the Master falls further into dependence. When he realizes that the Master is dependent on him to fulfill his needs and desires, the Slave realizes his own power and the tables turn. The dialectic carries on not on the side of the Master, but on that of the Slave. In this same way, Marxism holds that the working class must come to realize the bourgeois’ dependence on their labor to maintain their life, and make a claim for independence and freedom. Translating to gender politics, just as the slave wins independence by claiming a self-consciousness of his own, woman is to claim her transcendence through work, projects, and politics, until the sexes recognize each other as equals.
REFERENCES
Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. Summit Books, 1990.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
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. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, edited by John Kulka, Yale University Press, 2007.