FINAL Simone de Beauvoir Conclusion-1

FINAL Simone de Beauvoir Conclusion-1

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  Simone de Beauvoir’sOther Kendra Hulsebosch Written Work Sample
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  2 The most famousand most frequently cited observation in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, likely due to the fact that it seems to sum up Beauvoir’s notable book in an extremely concise fashion, is the following: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other” (p. 267). In this paper, I will critically discuss each sentence of this quote. We will note how Beauvoir proved her point about women being perceived as an inferior ‘Other’, despite the fact that the difference between the two sexes is just a matter of a different form of human embodiment, and we will also note how the oppressor in this case was the male figure, whether he intended it or not. Throughout this paper, it will become increasingly obvious how this quotation captures the central ideas of Beauvoir’s phenomenological-existential philosophy. With regards to the quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”: though women are simply another embodiment of a human being, the result of a genetic die cast, they were not treated as such. To be a ‘woman’, in Beauvoir’s day and age, meant conforming to a feminine ideal that was as charged with as much inferiority as ideals about how certain races were to act. A woman was not simply a woman. She was to become one by embodying the feminine ideal, whatever exactly that ambiguous term meant. I will now delve into how these gendered inferior ideals came about, notably leaning heavily on Beauvoir’s discussion about the privatization of property. Beauvior started off the introduction to The Second Sex by asking, “what is a woman?” (xi).
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  3 Through asking thisquestion, she made us come face-to-face with the realization that a woman is not simply a female human being. A woman is a person, characterized by a variety of gender roles. A woman is not a ‘woman’ until she “share[s] in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity” (xix), and what, Beauvoir asks, is femininity? She calls it what it is: “the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribes to…the Jew, or the Negro” (xx). During the time of Beauvoir’s writing, women were expected to conform to inferior roles based strictly on their sex in the same way that the Jewish and black people of that day were expected to conform to inferior roles based on their race. There were specific places for specific races and specific genders, a segregation and dichotomy which lumped one group here, in a superior position, and the other group there, in an inferior position. Certain clothes, interests and occupations were only for one or the other, meant to keep men in a dominant position over women and one race in a dominant position over other races. Beauvoir, deeply interested in phenomenology, found it necessary to ask, “What is woman” because, at the time, there was quite a bit of debate about what a woman was and it was a very phenomenological question in need of being addressed. It is only upon asking this question that we start to realize that what we think a ‘woman’ is, is not just a person who has the appropriate sexual organs. We even find that the sex of the female woman is charged with imposed gender stereotypes. A man, when someone says “he is male”, is proud of his sex, but women, when someone says “she is female”, is understood to be confined in her sex. The image of a large, submissive ovum, quietly passive, comes to mind, contrasted with the sprightly, rational sperm and its lively tail. There is an assumption about even these most base sexual objects: the living seed, the rational sperm,
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  4 b-lining for anoblivious ovum, a simple carrier. However, it is worth noting that these ideas about the sexual products of men and women are not rooted in fact. We know that the egg and the sperm both make individual sacrifices in order to create a living being, with the sperm shedding its tail and the ovum offering the riches within it. How these objects received such anthropomorphic ideals is rooted in history. After all, biology is not enough to satisfy how women have been made into the ‘Other’. We must look at history as well. According to Beauvoir, during the Stone Age, there was equality. The two sexes contributed equally to labor with the men hunting and fishing and the women remaining at home to make pottery, weave and garden. In this way, both sexes played a significant part in economic life. According to Beauvoir, it was the privatization of property that made “man become the proprietor…of woman” (54). When the politics of the family changed, the result was a change in gender roles as well. This is where we can find women’s great historical defeat: with the start of the patriarchal family. When humankind discovered bronze and started to invent new tools, men became autonomous individuals capable of creation, productive labor, the domination of nature (along with other men, such as slaves, and women) and self-fulfillment, whereas women’s restriction to domestic duties was viewed as insignificant comparably. This resulted in her economic and social oppression. This leads us to our next point. We are very aware that there is no difference between a man and a woman. Each being is simply a different embodiment for a human being. However, Beauvoir shows us a rather alarming way of how women were reared to become a ‘feminine’ creature. We already discussed previously in this paper that ‘femininity’ was an ideal meant to ensure
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  5 the superiority ofone sex over the other. This was true in Beauvoir’s day, but thankfully we have been left with changed times. This brings us to the second sentence of her quote: “No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine”. In other words, Beauvoir tells us that it is civilization that cannot appease itself with the idea of a woman being born woman. She must become a woman, society perpetuates, a feminine one. In Simone de Beauvoir’s Part IV: The Formative Years of her book, The Second Sex, Beauvoir states that a woman’s biology and psychology are only slightly different from a man’s. The feminine creature that results is a production of our civilization (267). Women do not have unfathomable susceptibilities that make them submissive and frivolous beings (268), which are commonly interpreted to be ‘feminine’. If it seems so, it has much more to do with influence and doctrine of others. Throughout Part IV, Beauvoir looks into the origin of what makes a female child develop into a stereotypically ‘feminine’ woman. The difference between the sexes is almost non-existent, which we can see in children. “There is no difference in the attitudes of girls and boys during the first three or four years” (269), she notes. It should also be noted however that there were two weanings present in childhood during Beauvoir’s time. The first weaning was a weaning from the breast, whereas the second weaning was a weaning from affections normally only reserved for young children. This impacted the boys a bit harder than the girls, according to Beauvoir. At the time of Beauvoir’s writing and in her society, when young female children cried, it was seen as sweet and they were to be coddled, offered sweets and treated delicately. However, when a male child cried he was told to man up,
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  6 that big boysdo not cry and he was treated roughly. It has often been compared that when handling female children, they were to be handled as precious china but when handling male children, they were to be handled as stones. We can already see how the dichotomy starts to form. As a child grew and matured, it was treated markedly different due to its sex. Girl children were not naturally more delicate or emotional; they were simply treated as such. There is an injustice developing, but the scales were not tipped in the girl’s favor for long. Naturally, a young boy may have been indignant about this difference in treatment for a bit (270), but eventually he would be taught that there are different, and much higher up privileges for him (271). The boy child was expected to grow up whereas the female child was to remain in her infant state for the rest of her life, and this became more apparent as the male child matured. This is where the differences, with the scales tipping infinitely in the boy’s favor, would come in. A female child had almost no distinction between childhood and womanhood, except for an increase in household duties and an understanding that she would bear children one day. She was given a doll as a child (280); later, in womanhood, a live baby would replace the doll. Her mother “saddle[d] her child” with her prior fate (281) and this fate would be all that the woman would know. Though this action, the girl understands: she will be a wife and a mother and that is all. The girl is just as intelligent as the boy, just as strong and determined and definitely has much potential as the boy, but any chance at a potential future was ripped from her. There was only one future for her: wife and mother. That was that. Boys, in turn, took joy in free movement, crashing their bodies against one another in rough games (280) and their physical body, its maturity post-puberty, did not cause them to be very alarmed. They looked forward to the future with happiness because their future was
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  7 limitless. The woman,however, was much more uneasy about her development (307 – 315). She knew that her development would “decide her destiny” (315); her only goal to look forward to, compared to the limitless one of the man’s, was to get married and have a house of her own to care for (367 – 368). There are, now, many more options for a modern woman to choose, but the development of children is still predominantly the same. Girls are still given a more easy ‘weaning’, are still expected to play with dolls in anticipation for their childbearing years and are given a more emphasized role in maintaining house. Thankfully, however, it is understood that marriage is not the ‘best thing one can do’, and if an independent woman does get married, it is understood that equality should prevail in the household, both in terms of financial contributions, housework and sexual needs. This now brings us to the last sentence of Beauvoir’s quote: “Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other”. Throughout the last bit of this paper, we will be looking at how exactly the hierarchy of the sexes was founded and how it was that women became ‘Other’ in the first place. We will examine the very first peoples, through the Middle Ages, on to Eighteenth century France and finally ending with the French Revolution. Throughout the whole thing, it is plain to see that “the whole of feminine history has been man-made” (129). According to Beauvoir, the first people who, confronted by the mysteries of life, such as the bearing of children and the production of plants, were racked with superstition. They were able to see that all of Nature was a sort of makeshift mother, bringing forth all sorts of wonderful creations; “the land is woman and in woman abide the same dark powers as in the earth” (68). According to Beauvoir, the association between woman and earth was so interconnected
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  8 that in Indian,Australian and Polynesian tribes “it [was] thought that the harvest [would] be more abundant if it is gathered by a pregnant woman” (68). However, even this did not denote a positive impression. Through this ‘magic’, a woman was seen as taboo, performing a magic that no one understood, much less herself. “Because of the powers she holds, she is looked upon as a magician, a sorceress” (70), and we even see idols such as Ishtar, Astarte, Gaea, Rhea, Cybele and Isis emerging. However, even though female idols were worshipped, the fate of women did not become better; “it was beyond the human realm that her power was affirmed, and she was therefore outside of that realm” (70). Men did not consider women their equals, not even with the feminization of Nature and Higher Beings. Though there seemed to be some forms of equal labor during the Stone Ages, we can see even here that women were seen as something mystically taboo, something dark and mysterious, not to be trusted, but also not equal or superior either. As discussed in Part I of Beauvoir’s book, it was predominantly after humankind discovered tools that men were able to face Nature and establish the patriarch. When private property was introduced, women became another object to be owned, sold, traded or bought as desired by property owners, namely men. “When she becomes a young girl, the father has all power over her; when she marries he transfers it in toto to the husband” (83). The woman became chattel, something to be offered over and possibly made into an easy transition with the bribe of a dowry. It is also worth noting that when faced with the problem of widows, some religious faiths, in true patriarchal custom, decreed that the widow should marry the brother or heirs of the deceased. We note all these facts because we can see here that this was where women truly lost any sense of being equal. The second that man could own her and other beings for that matter became a vital one. All
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  9 financial and societalvalue was stripped from her. She was to be eternally guarded by men throughout her life. First she would be the property of her father, then the property of her husband and if her husband died, she would become the property of his brother or someone else along those lines. She was never to just be, to simply exist freely. We can see how this type of ownership behavior contributed to her being regarded as the Other. Beauvoir also criticizes the polygamy of Arabic and Jewish people, along with Jewish and Muslim traditions, but she also did not hold back when it came to Christianity, especially within the Middle Ages to Eighteenth-century France. According to Beauvoir, from the time of Gregory VI, celibacy was strictly required from the clergy. When this happened, a variety of literature, all written by clergy of the Church, who we must remember were very prominent voices at that time, stressed the wicked and tempestuous nature of women. They drew on the example of Eve, the one who presumably tempted Adam and caused the downfall of humankind, as a damning example of what to expect from women in general. For quite a long time, clerics ran with this idea, using this form of degradation to label women as Other and quarrelling over all things relating to women. Eventually Christian de Pizan stood up with her Epire au Dieu d’Amour to defend her sisters, wielding her pen as expertly as a knife, and also Lurther refused to accept the celibacy of priests. Those were small victories as historically significant as they were, but even after those two major events, women’s position only improved by a little. Beauviour states that even after the French Revolution with its technological evolution, “the classes in which women enjoyed some economic independence and took part in production were the oppressed classes, and as women workers they were enslaved even more than the male workers” (129). Even more so than
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  10 this, however, wasa constant reminder in the schools and in language itself of how one sex dominated the other, namely by “man represent[ing] both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity” (xxi). At the time of Beauvoir’s writing, humanity’s default was male, with women only being considered in relation to men, never as autonomous beings. Men were seen as the focus of the story, the supreme, with women being considered as the extra and dispensable ‘Other’ compared to men. Who made up this ‘Other’? Men, in particular, “legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists” (xviii), throughout history were at fault for this setting up of women as ‘Other’. Though a woman, a free and autonomous being like all human beings, “finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of ‘Other’” (xxxv), the historical patriarchs managed to stabilize her as an object and doom her to immanence. The man was to be essential and sovereign, where her place was inessential. This is, of course, known as an oppressive move: the oppressor takes away the transcendence of those she oppresses, restricting them to immanence. The oppressed cannot participate in the world or the future or in new achievements. They are changed into objects, as unimportant and minor to their own life story as possible. In conclusion, Beauvoir’s most famous quote - “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other” (p. 267) – is assuredly famous for a reason. In many ways, this is her thesis sentence and it sums up
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  11 The Second Sexbeautifully. This is her phenomenological conclusion to the underlying question throughout the text, “what is woman?”. The answer, at that time, was not a different embodiment of a human being; the answer was that woman was, first and foremost, Other, imposed with a role labeled ‘feminine’, synonymous with ‘inferior’. Thankfully, it is due to Beauvoir and all those that came before and after her that women today do not have to feel obligated to be ‘feminine’.
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  12 Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de.The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books 1989, c1952. Print.