Beauvoir, The Second Sex – II

Posted: Wed, Feb 26, 2025

In-Class Activity

“Among the blessings Plato thanked the gods for was, first, being born free and not a slave and, second, a man and not a woman” (pp. 10–11, emphasis mine).

• Why might one be grateful for this? What does it say about manhood and womanhood?
• If this were you, would you be grateful as well, and why or why not?

Beauvoir’s Famous Question: What Is a Woman Anyway?

“Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary; she is a female” (p. 21).

• But this can’t be right: it fails to explain how we think and talk about womanhood (p. 3).
• Rather, being a woman has to do with this “femininity” business: “So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity” (p. 3).
  • Note the “must” here is descriptive rather than normative.
  • Descriptive/positive morality: what people believe is morally right/wrong, good/bad, obligatory/permissible/impermissible, etc.
  • Normative morality: what is indeed morally right/wrong, good/bad, obligatory/permissible/impermissible, etc.

So, what is this “mysterious” thing called “femininity” or “womanhood”?

• The traditional philosophical answer: it is an innate nature/essence.
  • Beauvoir: too spooky.
• The “American” answer: there is no such thing as “femininity” or “womanhood”; we are all just human beings.
  • Beauvoir: too bougie.

Beauvoir’s own answer:

• Against the traditional philosophical answer: womanhood is a social situation/becoming.
  • The famous sentence: “One is not born, but rather becomes, [a?] woman” (p. 283).
• Against the American answer: moreover, it is an unequal social situation/becoming.
  • “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (p. 6).

In-class activity: Focusing on the paragraph on pp. 5–6, what do you think Beauvoir means when she characterizes woman as the Other?

How did women become the Other?

• Generally: “It is often numerical inequality that confers this privilege: the majority imposes its law on or persecutes the minority.”
  • Is this right?
  • Women don’t have a numerical disadvantage.
• Women’s subordination “is not the consequence of an event or a becoming, it did not happen” (p. 8, her emphasis); it is ahistorical.
  • Did it not happen? Notice Beauvoir implicit coding of women as white and bourgeois, all while Black people, proletarians, Jewish people, and Indigenous people are assumed to be male.
• Also not because of nature.
  • Even sexual reproductive does not require a binary system of sex categorization (pp. 21ff).
  • Brain size example (pp. 40ff): biological facts “do not carry their meaning in themselves” (p. 46); what matters is the meaning that we ascribe to biology.
• Still, what gave men the advantage?
  • Women are stuck with biological reproduction; men get to create values and meanings (pp. 71–75).
  • Womanhood is a response to a situation.
  • How does this differ from the “nature” answer?