Dear students,

Due to the pandemic, Covid 19, the whole world is under threat and has to fight
against it, so we all have to join hands to overcome the crisis. But we don’t have to
break our flow of knowledge through any means if we are not in the condition to
meet in person in the classroom.
We talked a lot in classroom and now it’s time to have some chat on
online materials. Since our paper centres, and as the title of the paper suggests,
around the position of women in a patriarchal society, we talked at a greater length,
had a detailed discussion over the texts and critical essays prescribed in our course.
As we know, that now we have to talk on the third unit which focuses on
Women and Education, harassment of women at work places and Labour force
restructuring; we need to have some talk on these subjects. We all know that no
academic discussion over women, gender and sexuality will ever be complete if we
drop four major feminists and their ground-breaking works. These feminists and their
writings are:
1. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own and three Guinees
2. Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
3. Kate Millett: Sexual Politics, and
4. Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own
So, I would like to share with you four chapters of my work devoted to said critics
and their work which was published from Authorhouse, United Kingdom in 2012.
I request you all to please go thoroughly trough the four pdf files I am
sending to upload on the University website which will not only turn out to be a great
asset for you on the paper, but also will enrich your insight on women’s studies.
I also invite you and welcome you all for your queries related to the
shared pdf files and your paper, “Gender, Sexuality and Social Change”, and assure
that I will be available for you round the clock, 24x7. You all please feel free to
contact me through whatsapp, email and phone. Do keep in touch. The details of
which are as follows:
Mobile: 9407343432
Email: vipinsingh@cusb.ac.in
Whatsapp Group: Gender, Sexuality and Social Change (On which you all are
available)
STAY HOME. STAY SAFE.

Good Luck.

Dr Vipin K Singh
Associate Professor
Department of English
CUSB, Gaya, Bihar, India
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir's becoming the writer of the "bible of modern Western

Feminism"1: The Second Sex, covers a long journey bearing so many influences.

1
Ursula Tidd, "Why Beauvoir", Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge,
2004), p. 1.
One's childhood experiences and individual involvement in public and private
spheres of life and social activities contribute a lot in shaping one's sensibility. All
psychological studies stress and approve this fact and Simone de beauvoir is no
exception to the principle.

Biographical Factors

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9 th January 1908 in a

conservative bourgeoise family. Simone had a priviledged childhood. She was treated
so much like a little adult. Deirdre Bair in her biography of Simone de Beauvoir has
quoted one of Simone's cousin:

She was a spoiled, spoiled, spoiled brat, and to her

parents she could do no wrong. We were all very
conscious in our family there was the rest of usall the
cousins  and then there was Simone. She was
different. She was special.2

Like Virginia Woolf, Simone also had a voracious appetite for books and her father
also, like Woolf's, provided her with them.

Simone's early childhood bears so may similarities with Woolf. Both were
the favourite child of their fathers, both had a fondness for books from an early age
and both of their fathers provided them with that. Georges de Beauvoir, Simone's
father, considered as his first and foremost priority to give his daughters a quality
education. Woolf being a woman, was stopped from entering into a library without
the accompaniment of a fellow of the college, which made her resent patriarchal set-
up. Simone also had such experience when she was admitted to Sorbonne, an
influential higher education college associated with the University of Paris, instead of
Ecole Normale Superieure where Sartre and most of her male contemporaries were
taught; since "in 1925, women were not permitted to study there and (they) went
instead to the women-only branch of the Ecole Normale Superiure . . . where
philosophy was not taught. . ." 3

The first experience of any girl with a male, which influences her mind, is
with her father. Simone also had a great influence of her father on her. Deirdre Bair
quotes Simone answering the question that who is the most important parent to her,
she answered that "her father was the most important parent, the one who had the
most influence, who meant the most to me". 4 He treated Simone as if she were his
educational equal and an adult since she was a child. He always encouraged Simone
in her studies. Beauvoir says: "He liked that I was brilliant intellectually", but being a
part of the patriarchal set-up "at the same time wanted me to be pretty, and to be 'the
nice girl who serves tea at home' and all that". 5 Her father was very liberal and was a
good husband but Simone sometimes heard him passing comments to her mother

2
Deirdre Bair, "My sister, My Accomplice", Simone de Beauvoir: A
biography (New York: Touchstone, 1991), p. 37.
3
Ursula Tidd, p. 3.
4
Deirdre Bair, "When the Trouble Really Started", pp. 55-56.
5
Ibid., p. 56.

2
over her unpaid dowry. Simone had such a strong bond with her father that even in
sixties she called it an "Oedipus Complex". Although, there was nothing physical
only intellectual yet "in reality it was truly a love affair of the head". 6 Deirdre Bair
tells that Beauvoir "identified herself with her father, not as a man, not wanting to be
a man or regretting that she had not been born one, but as a superior woman. . . ." 7

Simone's second experience with any male was with Jacques

Champigneulle. He was a frequent visitor to her house. Although her mind was finer
than Jacques's but he took her position in her father's eyes as his intellectual equal.
And furthermore, says Bair:

. . . Georges's background and temperament seldom

discussed issues and ideas with women. At first
Simone was puzzled when she was forced to sit quietly
while the two men talked; soon she resented the
physical separation of two spheres within the same
drawing room.8

The feeling of being the other started from here. Jacques' and Simone's relationship
developed and he started flirting with her and assuming so much importance in her
life. He introduced her to night clubs and cafes and many a times she returned home
in early morning hours, staggering and with smell of liquor and tobacco on her
clothing. But nothing happened further and "it was a narrow escape", said Helene
(Simone's sister), "because he simply was not worthy of her". 9

In her early life Simone had very few male contacts and had very little
experience. She discloses Deirdre Bair two of her encounters with the male world,
similar to that of Woolf's adolescence experiences with her cousins, when while
watching a play a man fondled with her throughout the performance and she stood
passively unwilling to call attention to her by crying out or moving. The other was
when a young clerk in a religious- artifacts store beckoned her into dark corner and
exposed himself. She suffered from guilt believing herself responsible for it. All
these experiences left a deep impression on Simone's mind.

As an adolescent, Beauvoir believed that men should be subjected to same

laws of behaviour and should follow same codes of conduct as women: if a woman is
expected to be virginal till marriage the same law should be applied to men also. She
denounced the double standard society adopts in the treatment of men and women,
when she heard Jacques' mother telling her father and mother about her son's
escapades. When her mother told Simone's idea to her father saying it the radical
theory Simone had just propounded, he laughed, dismissing the girl's seriousness as
something she would get over. But the more she thought about it the more she was
convinced of its rightness. Her opinion about her future life with her man was of

6
Ibid., "The Girl with a Man's Brain", p. 59.
7
Ibid., p. 60.
8
Ibid., "Za Za", p. 84.
9
Ibid., p. 87.

3
complete devotion. She writes in her Memoirs, assuming herself to be at the age of
seventeen, that "If I loved a man, it would be forever, and I would surrender myself
to him entirely, body and soul, heart and head, past, present and future". 10

Beauvois's graduation from Cours Désir in 1924 coincided with

educational reforms in France which allowed women to appear in all important
Baccalaureate examinations. Earlier until the end of World War I the sole purpose of
education for French women was to make them good companion for their husbands
and capable instructor for their children. The reforms changed the mindsets of
women a lot, who started aspiring to educate themselves for some profession.
Georges also encouraged Simone to study and to prepare herself to work but not
because he was so liberal rather because "for his daughters, marriage without the
dowry was simply unthinkable"11 in his patriarchal society. While for Helene's
studies, Georges was never worried and he never thought about her "other than as
pretty, charming and likely to catch the eye of a rich husband even without a
dowry."12 In both the attitudes towards his daughters he shows a typical patriarchal
ideology.

It is significant that like any other woman, Simone felt depressed in her
adolescence. Fed up with all what happened with her, she presumes to materialize her
dreams only in marriage. At the age of nineteen she was thinking of marriage as the
only solution to all her problems and proved herself no different from countless other
women of different societies and cultures. But later on situations at home changed
her mind. She often saw Georges and Francoise (her father and mother) argumenting
with each other. Georges often stayed out the whole night with his mistresses,
leaving Francoise disturbed, roaming about the apartment, slamming doors and
throwing objects. Throughout her marriage Francoise did what was expected of her
and supported her husband through bad times also but this was what she got in return.
And so Simone and Helene became the targets of their mother's frustration which
created a distance between them.

Ever since their childhood, Francoise was too interfering with her
daughters' lives. She used to read their letters before giving that to them and used to
paste the pages of their books which she thought unsuitable for her daughters. She
also used to read their books before them and then allowed them to go through that.
As they grew up, the situations got worse at home; restrictions and the nagging
attitude of her mother made Simone somewhat protesting and revolting in her
attitude. The result was that when she got opportunity she crossed the limits of
freedom in the name of adventure. With her friend Stepha she started going to bars
and cheap night clubs and often allowed men to buy drinks for them and allowed
strangers to drive them around Paris, parking in areas frequented by prostitutes.
When Stepha got tired of those games, Simone involved GéGé and Hélène in her
adventure game and started taking greater risks at night. In one such incident Simone
and GéGé, heavily drunk, went with two foreigners who took them to their separate
bedrooms but it was fortunate for Simone and GéGé that the boys were also drunk
because otherwise tells Simone: "I doubt that we could have controlled them. They

10
Ibid., p. 86.
11
Ibid., "Eighteen, and in Love with Love", p. 89.
12
Ibid., " A High - minded Little Bourgeois", p. 108.

4
wouldn't let us off the beds. . . ." 13 But she continued her adventures even after this
experience.

Till that time Simone had started earning. In her times, according to
general conception, girls used to give all their earnings to their parents or families but
"the unusual fact about this money" tells Bair was "that she was allowed to keep it". 14
She kept her money with herself and in the manner refused to follow the patriarchal
conception. This was the time when feminist movement was setting its stage and
most of the young female minds were filled with new thoughts of women's freedom
and Simone also blew with the current. Her experiences and studies made her
manners reflect a revolt against the patriarchal norms.

One such instance of breaking the patriarchal norm was her refusal to
bind herself in the social institution of marriage and being in a "illegitimate
relationship"15 with Sartre, who had again a great influence in her life. Deirdre Bair
quotes Beauvoir:

Oh, he felt he had to propose to me after my father

accousted us at La Grillere. I told him not to be silly
and of course I rejected marriage.16

In the way she is somewhat similar to Woolf who rejected sexual intercourse, at her
honeymoon, as a husband's right in marriage. And Simone moving a step ahead
rejected marriage as a prerequisite for a woman to be with a man.

Her relation with Sartre was entirely different with that of Jacques', with
whom she played "a good girl". 17 He never kissed her, never put his arm around her
and never really touched her except to guide her in or out of a car or a building. But
with Sartre she took extreme liberties, breaking all social norms and taboos. Bair
writes:

Prudery even Characterized castor's (Simone) love with

Sartre. He was stationed now in Tours, near enough for
her to visit every weekend. Even though she always
rented a hotel room, they spent most of the daylight
hours walking the streets awaiting darkness, or, when
their passions grew unmanageable, finding some
hidden place along country roads where they could
have sex.18

13
Ibid., p. 118.
14
Ibid., P. 112.
15
Ibid., "On Her Paris Honeymoon", p. 155.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., "A High - minded Little Bourgeois", p. 117.
18
Ibid., "On Her Paris Honeymoon", p. 160.

5
 But she had not made herself totally free from the clutches of patriarchal
notions of an ideal woman. The liberties she took with Sartre were just for the sake of
mental satisfaction and not for the sake of breaking any norm. The conventional
woman was still alive in her at some corner of her mind. That is why she started
taking interest in her appearances when she was in love with Sartre. Bair writes:

. . . she began to read fashion magazines avidly,

especially Marie - Claire, a woman's magazine whose
content lay somewhere between the present-day
Cosmopolitan and the Ladies' Home Journal. It became
her fashion bible for the next decade.19

Here Beauvoir still seems to adhere to the typical patriarchal notion that a girl should
look beautiful to her man. Again when talking of Madame Morel she said: "I had not
emancipated myself from all sexual taboos, and promiscuity in a woman still shocked
me".20 Her mind till the time was swinging between the conventional norm of a
woman and that of a radical feminist defying all social norms. Some of the instances
of her strictly following the set conventions, is her sticking to extreme fidelity when
Sartre was away and even then when Sartre was telling her about women flirting with
him and many men suggested their availability to her but she remained extremely
faithful. One more was when she, unwilling to go, went to see Jollivet, a friend of
Sartre, when he "ordered" her to because "in those days she never disobeyed
Sartre".21 All these shows how she was still a product of patriarchal society, treading
the same path which any woman of any culture and tradition treads.

But it was not until 1970 that she, influenced by the ongoing feminist
movement, since she was already involved in current political events with Sartre,
became a pure feminist in her mind and made her first public appearance on behalf of
a specific feminist issue and from that date she made herself available for any
individual or group until her death in 1986. Her The Second Sex won her immense
applause but it was after 1971 that her person and her pen became totally devoted to
women's issues. The first major cause with which she assigned herself was the fight
for legal abortion in France. She was attached with "The Manifesto of the 343" (a
statement signed by 343 women who claimed to have had abortions which was
illegal in France), and was a witness of the Bobigny abortion trial and the first
President of Choisir, the pro-choice organization. She took active participation in the
meetings at the Mutualite, which was held to denounce crimes against women. For a
time, she was president of the League for the Rights of Women to denounce
discrimination against women in the work force. And always helped battered and
abused women with her time and money. Bair in this context writes:

She was largely responsible for creating the current

feminist revolution that changed the lives of half the

19
Ibid., p. 161.
20
Ibid., p. 160.
21
Ibid., p. 163.

6
 human race in most parts of the world . . . (and) in the
most profoundly respectful sense of the phrase, (was)
"the mother of us all."22

It can, therefore, be evidently argued that the impressions of the feminist ideas were
started taking origin in her mind since she started facing the outside world. Her
groundbreaking treatise on women's subordination, The Second Sex, posits her pro-
woman ideas but she denied to accept the fact because she took the whole enterprise
as a social work attempting to make a harmony between the sexes. It would be more
helpful to examine her ideas if we go through her works in detail and discuss it at a
greater length.

Evolution of Thought

Simone de Beauvoir's thesis on women's plight and secondary position

comprises a number of hypotheses that view women in all the corners of life. Her
deliberation, though it appears to involve Woolf's ideas off and on, on women's
situation does not avoid the elaborations which Woolf has done. Beauvoir has
ventured to view women both in abstractions and in concrete realities. Like Woolf,
she does not concentrate on women of a particular century and of any specific time.
Nor does she discuss only some of the prominent issues that prevent women from
enjoying the equal opportunities as men. Her study of women in The Second Sex
seems to form a compendium of the anatomy of female world. Comprising of two
books, The Second Sex deals with the whole female history both in fact and fiction,
myth and reality, religious and secular domains, past and present. Not only this,
Beauvoir also focuses on the various stages and hostile situations through which they
pass. It may be noted here that in all the aspects of her study the effort has been
shown to demonstrate the secondary position of women, how they have been crushed
and compelled to attain a derogatory position.

H.M. Parshley, the translator of Beauvoir's The Second Sex comments that
the central thesis of Beauvoir in her present book is that:

. . . since patriarchal times women have in general been

forced to occupy a secondary place in the world in
relation to men, a position comparable in many respects
with that of racial minorities in spite of the fact that
woman constitute numerically at least half of the
human race, and further that this secondary standing
is not imposed of necessity by natural 'feminine'
characteristics but rather by strong environmental
forces of educational and social tradition under the
purposeful control of men.23

22
Ibid., "Women, You Owe Everything to Her!", p. 618.
23
H.M. Parshley, "Translator's Preface", The Second Sex (London:
Vintage, 1953), p. 9.

7
Parshley further states that Beauvoir views it as the failure of women to attain human
dignity as free and independent existents, associated with men on the plane of
intellectual and professional equality. It is this condition that has not only limited
women's achievements in many fields but has also given "rise to pervasive social
evils and has had a particularly vitiating effect on the sexual relations between men
and women."24

De Beauvoir's first book Facts and Myths is divided into three parts, all
dealing with "Destiny", "History" and "Myths" related to women. Further Part I
"Destiny", of the first book consists of three chapters which appear to contribute to
define a woman's destiny. In "The Data of Biology" Beauvoir has commented on the
notions that make distinction between men and women in the terms of biological
differences. Tracing out the general notion which men have in their minds about
women, Beauvoir has defined a woman on the basis of her biological traits:
"Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary;
she is a female  this word is sufficient to define her". 25 She condemns men for their
irrational beliefs and prejudiced arguments. A man thinks of, and speaks the epithet
"female" in an insulting manner but he does not feel ashamed of his animal nature.
On the contrary he feels proud of being called a "male". She uncovers the latent fear
hovering in the minds of men and their biased nature:

The term 'female' is derogatory not because it

emphasizes woman's animality, but because it
imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to
be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb
animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility
stirred up in him by woman.26

Beauvoir maintains that males and females are two types of individuals who are
differentiated within species for the function of reproduction and that they can be
(and should be) defined correlatively.

Beauvoir does not limit her study only to human beings but to other
species also. Discussing about the certain biological functions of different species
and the vital role they play in procreation, she points out that in certain species both
male and female are equally dependent on each other and in others males do not
appear to play a vital role. Beauvoir states that in certain species "the stimulus of an
acid or even of a needle prick is enough to initiate the cleavage of the egg and the
development of the embryo." 27 On this basis it can be pointed out that the male
gamete is not necessary for reproduction and that it acts at most as a ferment.

24
Ibid.
25
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Data of Biology", The Second Sex (London:
Vintage, 1949), p. 35.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., p. 41.

8
 Beauvoir seems to have criticized the philosophers whose notions about
the role men and women play in procreation appear to be biased. She criticizes
Aristotle for giving women less credit and a passive role and men an active role in
procreation. She also condemns Hippocrates who propagates a similar doctrine,
recognizing two kinds of sexes the weaker is female and the stronger is male. She has
also charged Hegel who views man as the "active principle" and woman "the passive
principle". Beauvoir observes that "fully formed male and female are basically
equivalent" because "the expenditure of energy must be about equal in the two
sexes"28 in the process of procreation. They are equivalent also because they cannot
avoid their dependency on each other. Beauvoir maintains: "without the foresight of
the egg, the sperm's arrival would be in vain; but without the initiative of the latter,
the egg would not fulfill its living potentialities." 29

Simone de Beauvoir also discusses several practices, both biological and

cultural that might have set a pace in the wheels of women's subordination. She
stresses that man asserts his domination in the very posture of copulation that in
almost all the animals male is over the female. She observes, a woman may be
declared weaker because she has to bear maternal responsibility. But Beauvoir gives
impression that a woman's bearing the responsibility of maternity should not be taken
as her weakness but rather her strength. Raising the question who is more important
and necessary for society, man or woman, on the ground that single man fecundate a
number of women, she emphasizes that it requires a man for every woman to assure
the survival of the offspring after they are born, to defend them against enemies, to
wrestle with nature to satisfy their needs. Beauvoir finds biology insufficient to
answer the question why woman is the "other", and feels a need to view the facts of
biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social and psychological context.

In the next chapter, "The Psychoanalytic Point of View", Part I, book I,

she refutes Freud and other psychoanalytic critics as Adler for their biased notions
that view women as mere sexual objects. She criticizes them for assuming women as
a mutilated man and propagating the concept of penis - envy. She also charges Freud
and his followers for not elaborating the concept of "Electra Complex". She says, the
concept of the Electra complex is very vague because it has not been supported by
the basic description of feminine libido. Beauvoir maintains that the "sovereignty of
the father is a fact of the social origin, which Freud fails to account for. . ." Adler
differs from Freud in maintaining that it is not the lack of Phallus that causes this
complex, rather a woman's total situation. If a little girl, according to Adler, feels
penis - envy it is only as the symbol of privileges that boys enjoy. Beauvoir further
elaborates Adler:

The place the father holds in the family, the universal

predominance of males, her own education -
everything confirms her in her belief in masculine
superiority. Later on, when she takes part in sexual
relations, she finds a new humiliation in the coital
posture that places woman underneath the man."30

28
Ibid., p. 48.
29
Ibid., p. 45.
30
Ibid., "The Psychoanalytic Point of View", p. 74.

9
 Beauvoir seems dissatisfied with psychoanalysts because they, she argues,
propagate the concepts based on a masculine model. She refutes them because they
never gave us more than an inauthentic picture and for the inauthenticity, there can
hardly be found any other criteria than normalcy. Even with Adler, Beauvoir
observes that the will to power is only an absurd kind of energy. She points out that
Adler dominates as masculine protest every project, involving transcendence.
According to Adler, when a little girl, states Beauvoir, climbs trees it is just to show
her equality with boys. Adler never conceives that she likes to climb trees. For
mother, her child is something other than an equivalent of the penis. She charges the
psychoanalytic critics for distorting the common definition of mankind (man is a
male human being, woman is a female human being) and making the discrimination
between man as a human being and woman as a female. She also condemns them for
conceiving the behaviour of a woman as a human being as an imitation of man.
Beauvoir writes:

. . . the psychoanalyst describes the female child, the

young girl, as incited to identification with the mother
and the father, torn between 'viriloid' and 'feminine'
tendencies; whereas I conceive her as hesitating
between the role of object, other which is offered her,
and the assertion of her liberty.31

Beauvoir does not give the same significance as does the Freudian or the Adlerian.
For her a woman is viewed as a human being in quest of values in a world of values,
in a world in which it is necessary to know the economic and social structure. Here
de Beauvoir may be included among the Freudian Feminists group because along
with them she pays special attention to "the impact of women's primary care giving
responsibilities on personality and social relations . . . (and) stress(es) the prior
importance of the mother."32

In her third chapter "The Point of View of Historical Materialism", Part I,

Book I, Beauvoir has focused on how the division of labour between man and
woman came into existence. She studies Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State and analyses that he has seen human history as based on
techniques. According to Engles men in the Stone Age, she points out, were stronger
than woman; so their field of work were also different, men hunted, caught fishes
while women remained at home and did all the domestic works like making pottery,
weaving and cooking. After that man became master of the earth and the proprietor
also of woman. The causes which restricted women to domestic duties, also assured
domination of man over women. Women's domestic works were thought to be
insignificant in comparison to men's productive labour. Then maternal authority was
dominated by paternal authority; property was inherited from father to son and no
longer from woman to her clan. In this way the patriarchal family emerged and was
31
Ibid., p. 83.
32
Chris Beasley, "Other Possibilities: Feminism and the Influence of
Psychoanalysis", What is Feminism?: An Introduction to Feminist Theory
(London: SAGE publications, 1999), pp. 66-67.

10
founded upon private property. As a result woman was subjugated in the family
while man enjoyed almost all sorts of freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir finds Engels views inadequate because he found

woman weak and inferior but he did not view that the limitations of capacity for
labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage in a certain perspective. She
also condemns Engels for not explaining the particular nature of the women's
oppression. He attempted to reduce the antagonism of the sexes to class conflict. She
maintains that:

the division of labour according to sex and the

consequent oppression bring to mind in some way the
division of society by classes, but it is impossible to
confuse the two. For onething, there is no biological
basis for the separation of classes.33

What is more serious problem with women is that she cannot be regarded
only as a worker because her reproductive function is as significant as his productive
capacity. She charges Engels for having slighted the problem, saying that the socialist
community would abolish the family, she maintains that to do away with the family
is not to liberate woman. A woman cannot be compelled directly. What can be done
is to place her in a situation where maternity becomes her prime and sole concern.
She rejects both the sexual monoism of Freud and the economic monoism of Engels.
She condemns the psycho-analytic critics for interpreting all the social needs of
women as phenomena of the 'masculine protest'. She rejects the Marxist critics for
they view a woman's sexuality as an expression more or less of her economic
situation. Beauvoir does not deny the contributions either of biology or of
psychoanalysis. She does not ignore also, the part historical materialism plays in
defining the image of a woman. She maintains that:

the body, the sexual life, and the resources of

technology exist concretely for man only in so far as he
grasps them in the total perspective of his existence.
The value of muscular strength, of the phallus, of the
tool can be defined only in a world of values. . . . 34

In the second part "History" of book I, Facts and Myths, Beauvoir

concentrates on history and the way women became powerless and subordinate. In
"The Nomads", she tells how the physical weakness of women and the lack of spirit
to take risks turned out to be the cause of her secondary position. Along with this,
certain biological features (like child birth, pregnancy and menstruation) reduced this
capacity for work and made them wholly dependent for protection and food.
Beauvoir maintains that the worst curse that befell upon woman was that she was:

33
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Point of View of Historical Materialism", p.
89.
34
Ibid., p. 91.

11
 excluded, from these war like forays. For it is not in
giving life but in risking life that man is raised above
the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in
humanity not to the sex that beings forth but to that
which kills.35

In "Early Tillers of the Soil", Beauvoir demonstrates how the gender

discrimination developed in the later phases and how it became the part of social
infrastructure. She points out that after the settlement of nomads on the land and their
becoming agriculturalists a certain division of labour between men and women came
into existence according to their temperament and physical capacity. Women were
assigned domestic work and men field work. Beauvoir has also pointed out how
certain myths were related to women. Sometimes she was related to the myth of
creativity. In certain primitive societies several practices were prevalent, in certain
societies women were considered dangerous for the garden while in others it was
assumed that the harvest would increase if it is gathered by a pregnant woman; in
India, naked women pushes the plough at night. It is a myth that women were
identified on a concrete level but they were also regarded as Mother Earth, Mother
Nature in abstraction. But Beauvoir does not hesitate unfolding the mysterious knot
and asserts that in reality "The Golden Age of Woman is only a myth." 36 She further
elaborates the cause:

In spite of the fecund powers that pervade, man

remains women's master as he is the master of the
fertile earth; she is fated to be subjected, owned,
exploited like the Nature whose magical fertility she
embodies.37

Beauvoir has also attempted to trace out the secondary position of women
in different religious and ethnic groups. Along with this she has pointed out the
secondary position that women have been given in different cultures like Indian,
Roman, Islamic etc. She also displays the image of women which hangs in man's
consciousness. She reports Pythagoras' notion that whatever is positive attribute like
order and light have been associated with man and the negative traits like chaos and
darkness with woman. In the laws of Manu woman figures as a vile being who
should be treated as a slave. Leviticus compares women with animals. The laws of
Solon give women no rights. The Roman code puts women under male guardianship
and emphasizes her 'imbecility'. Canon Law regards her as 'the Devil's doorway'. The
Koran finds women detestable.

In "Patriarchal Times and Classical Antiquity", she has displayed the

status of women in different communities. She has marked out how certain practices
turned out into law that promoted gender discrimination and deprived women of

35
Ibid., "The Nomads", pp. 93-94.
36
Ibid., "Early Tillers of the Soil", p. 102.
37
Ibid., pp. 104-105.

12
certain rights that it willingly appear to bestow on men. She has displayed certain
social evils that contributed in female subordination. First a woman becomes an alien
in her husband's family because of the diasporic experience and treatment. Female
baby was undesirable and female infanticide was frequently practiced. Polygamy was
another evil that existed in the patriarchal society. Women were brought under severe
test and punishment if any moral violation was thought to be exercised by them.
Dowry was another social evil that was in practice and some religious scriptures like
Koran seems to have supported this custom. Koran stresses superiority of men over
women on account of the qualities, in which god has given them pre-eminence and
also because they furnish dowry for women. Levirate is another custom that went
against women's interests. According to this custom, at the death of her husband the
widow had to marry his brother.

Now Beauvoir discusses the condition of women in different cultures. In

Egypt, she observes that women enjoyed a favourable condition; they had the same
rights as men, the same powers in court. Women also owned family property.
Women could marry without any compulsions and if widowed they could re-marry
according to their wish. While in Greece and Oriental countries the similar customs
were in practice except polygamy. But Greece remained polygamous because
concubines frequently took place of wives when the latter got ill. In Athens the wife
was held in severe constraint by law and watched over by special magistrates; so she
was accorded a secondary position. She quotes Herodotus in her support that in
Babylonian civilization woman in her lifetime, by duty, was bound once to yield
herself to a stranger in the temple of Mylitta for money which she had to contribute
to the wealth of the temple. It is significant how Beauvoir has disapproved the
religious prostitution which exploited women physically and tormented them both
mentally and emotionally. It is evident that whether it is an oriental country or
European, women were always in fetters: they were freebut for nothing.

In "Through the Middle Ages to Eighteenth-Century France", she has

again stressed the secondary position of women. In the beginning she has quoted
several biased opinions of saints that marginalized women. St. Thomas found women
"a kind of imperfect man". St. Ambrose held Eve guilty for Adam's sin while St. John
Chrysostom observed women most harmful of all creatures.

It was not only in the Middle Ages that women were given a secondary
position but they also faced the same problems and treatment in the sixteenth century.
Political rights were not in her hands. All the European legal courts were made on the
ground of Canon Law, Roman Law and Germanic Law - all of them were
unfavourable to the weaker sex. Since sixteenth till nineteenth century condition of
women remained almost unchanged.

On the problem of prostitution she does not keep mum. Though

prostitutes are thought to be detestable in everyway, yet they are considered
necessary for a healthy society. Christianity disapproved prostitution but protested its
suppression. Prostitutes have been compared with sewers. It may be noticed here that
the necessity of prostitutes does not show any sympathy in religion for women in
prostitution. As far as code of conduct is considered they are detestable. Since they
surrender themselves before lust of men and act as a means for their sexual
gratification they are necessary for society. It may also be noticed that they were not
treated as human beings at all.

13
 In the last part of the chapter Beauvoir has concentrated on the female
writers. She charges Woolf for discussing women in a limited range: Woolf talks
basically of the eighteenth century women and of the middle class. But Beauvoir
observes somewhat favourable condition for women writers in France; while in
England the condition was hostile to them. There were some male writers like
Erasmus who wrote in defence of women; Voltaire and Montesquieu stood for
women's cause and condemned all the inequality and injustices against women. But
the upholders of patriarchy were not silent and they published books as Alphabets
that dealt with women's fault with every letter. Philosophers like Rousseau declared
that the chief aim of women's education should relative to men.

Her last chapter of the second part "Since the French Revolution: the Job
and the Vote" starts in the background of French Revolution. Beauvoir states that
there was great hope in the French Revolution for women but nothing of the sort
happened. Whatever was bestowed on women it was not for all but for the working
class women, and for them even it was very limited. A little economic independence
that working class women enjoyed, the other classes of women were deprived of that
liberty. After the revolution, there diffused certain double standards in the treatment
of women. Girls and wives were deprived of the attribute of citizenship. Wife owed
obedience to her husband; he could behave with her in any way; he would beat her,
torture her, and kill her; and it was thought that he was only exercising his powers.
Thinkers like Auguste Comte and Balzac declared the sole motive of a woman's life
should have been to benefit men and to satisfy them physically and mentally.

The movement for women's liberation became futile because the

movement lacked female, partisans. This movement could also not become
successful because of the inaptitude of women partisans. Clubs, magazines,
delegations and movements like 'Bloomerism'- all were mocked at. Feminism was
generally favoured by the reform movement of the nineteenth century because it
sought justice in equality. But there always existed attempts to exploit women. In the
nineteenth century, the unprecedented growth of factory demanded more labour than
men could furnish, it demanded the collaboration of women. In factories women
worked more than men and were paid less than them: "the working woman did not
earn enough to satisfy her needs. . . . The employers often preferred them to men.
'They do better work for less pay'. 38

The exploitation of women, less pay for more work and unhygienic
working conditions prompted women to make a union against their exploitation.
Consequently, there came a new law to support women. Now women could not be
compelled to work more than 12 hours; night labour was banned for female minors.

Working women were left with several other problems. They could not
(and were not supposed to) get rid of the domestic works that they were unable to do
with 10-12 working hours. Child-bearing and child-rearing were the other burdens
that women were compelled to carry along with the work.

Beauvoir focuses on how feminism as a movement came into existence. It

was started in France by Condorcet, in England by Mary Wollstonecraft in her A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But, it was John Stuart Mill who in 1867, for the
first time delivered a lecture in English Parliament in favour of votes for women. So

38
Ibid., "Since the French Revolution: The Job and the Vote", p. 144.

14
franchise became one of the major concentrations of the female welfare movement.
Beauvoir regards Leon Richies as the true founder of feminism who produced in
1867 "The Rights of Woman" and organized the International Congress on the
subject in 1878. For thirty years the movement could not be influential but later on
several actions were taken to support women. In 1901 the question of franchise was
raised for the first time before the chamber of Deputies by Viviani. The moment also
influenced religion and ecclesiasts like Pope Benedict XV who in 1919 spoke in
favour of votes for women. In New Zealand women got the right to vote in 1893, in
Australia in 1908, in America 1920,in Norway in 1907, in Finland in 1906, in
Germany in 1914, in England in 1928 and in France in 1945.

Beauvoir makes a deliberate division among women. She divides them in

several classes, based on economic, social and political positions. Working class
women, according to her, enjoyed a little economic liberty while upper class women
remained parasites. The former could not be wholly independent because of the class
distinction in society and the latter were compelled to depend on their husbands
because they were not allowed to work outside house. Whether they were peasant
women or business women or women employees, all of them bore gender
discrimination. She further mentions another class of women who could not be put
under any short of gender discrimination because of their genteel birth and
outstanding social and political position. She writes:

Queen Isabella, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great

were neither male nor female  they were sovereigns. .
. . (T)heir femininity, when socially abolished, should
have no longer meant inferiority: the proportion of
queen who had great reigns is infinitely above that of
great kings.39

It is significant here that Beauvoir stresses the unaffected superiority of women

having positions. She asserts that Queen Elizabeth may be superior to other kings
because of her dominion. But Beauvoir does not break the ice on the fact of her
(Queen Elizabeth) superiority to her male counterpart. Working class women suffer
dependency because of class distinction and sexual disparity; upper class women
because of gender discrimination. But about women like Queen Elizabeth or
Catherine the Great, Beauvoir keeps silence.

In part III, "Myths", chapter I, "Dream, Fears, Idols", Beauvoir has shown
how there have been, directly or indirectly in several myths and customary rituals, in
primitive tribes, an attempt to marginalize women and make them a detestable
"Other". In the male consciousness the female other is always identified in negative
terms; she is always what man does not like to attribute with male race. It is
significant that the othering of the weaker sex, as Beauvoir gives impression, is
absolutely a male construct: "For if woman is not the only Other, it remains none the
less true that she is always defined as the Other." 40 Jane Freedman, on the other side
opines that women are seen as "closer to nature", and men are perceived as "closer to

39
Ibid., p. 161.
40
Ibid. "Dreams, Fear, Idols", p. 175.

15
culture", so more suited for public roles and political associations. For this reason
"women have been relegated to a secondary status in society. . . . 41 It is also important
to notice that all the notions and observations of Beauvoir in the present chapter
involves an undercurrent existential philosophy. Beauvoir has consciously shown the
contradictions in male ideology regarding female race. Whether it is their wishful
desire or the fear that generates from their dreams or the ideological construct
deifying women as idols  all involves paradox.

Beauvoir has shown several myths in which women were given

paradoxical images. They were both holy and unholy, respected and degraded,
desirable and detestable, mistress and servant and godess and sorceress. Both the
images have been constructed by men for their benefit. Beauvoir herself is taken
aback when she ponders over the paradoxical nature of myths. She writes:

The myth is so various, so contradictory, that at

first its unity is not discerned . . . woman is at
once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant,
a source of life, a power of darkness; she is the
elemental silence of truth, she is artifice,
gossip, and falsehood; she is healing presence and
sorceress; she is man's prey, his downfall, she is
everything that he is not and that he longs for. . . 42

From the beginning women have been treated as mysterious creatures.

They are often compared with Nature, Earth, Water and thought to be harmful for
men. These negative attributes are hightened and more ruthlessly discerned since the
coming of patriarcate. Now women are identified in relation to men. Since the
antiquity, in all the patriarchal systems and in the notions of all the philosophers who
support patriarchy, women are acknowledged in contradiction to men. Philosophers
like Aristotle, Hippocrates and Aeschylus found male principle truly creative: from it
came form, number, moment. While women are regarded passive attributes, but in
opposition to men women are earth, men the seed; they are water and men are fire.
The creation is conceived as the marriage of fire and water; the Sun is the husband of
the Sea; the Sun and Fire are male divinities; and the Sea is one of the most nearly
universal maternal symbols.

In any form woman was conceived to be, a man was always desirous to
take possession of her. If he conceived her to be a goddess in several mythological
images, it was to benefit him. Whether she was a mother or wife, she was supposed
to belong to man as his property, just as nature and earth were under his possession.
Beauvoir metaphorically writes:

Before being the mother of the human race, Eve was

Adam's companion; she was given to man so that he
might posses her and fertilize her as he owns and

41
Jane Freedman, "Equal or Different? The Perennial Feminist
Problematic", Feminism (New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt. Ltd., 2002), p. 10.
42
Simone de Beauvoir, "Dreams Fears, Idols,", p. 175.

16
 fertilizes the soil; and through her he makes all nature
his realm. It is not only a subjective and fleeting
pleasure that man seeks in the sexual act. He wishes to
conquer, to take to, possess; to have woman is to
conquer her; he penetrates into her as the ploughshare
into the furrow; He makes her his even as he makes his
the land he works; he labours, he plants, he sows. . . . 43

M.H. Abrams ponders over this and states that women are projected by men in two
contrasting categories44: one is an idealized image where she is represented as an
object of worship and the other is the actual portrayal of the condition of women in
real life where she is demonstrated as a detestable object, is beaten, burnt and
tortured to death.

Man hesitates between fear and desire: the fear of being controlled by a
mysterious and uncontrollable power and desire to possess and rule over that power;
and this can be evidently seen in the myth of virginity. In the primitive societies, it
was in custom to deflower a girl before the wedding; so her virginity was broken so
that a man should not feel any risk of the menstruation blood (menstruation blood
was thought to be infectious). But this myth was broken by the fact when man started
conceiving woman as his personal property, a property that should be related to him.
The sense of wholeness, completeness and purity appeare to have prompted man to
violate all the customary rituals. Now he thinks what is his was no one else's before
his wedding and would not be other's in future. All his dignity depends on her:

She belongs to him so profoundly that she partakes of

the same essence as he; she has his name, his gods, and
he is responsible for her . . . He takes pride in his wife
as he does in his house, his lands, his flocks, his
wealth . . .; through her he displays his power before
the world. . . .45

Beauvoir has examined the "Oedipus complex" to demonstrate how men

do both: they hate women at the same time they love them. He (in childhood) cannot
tolerate his mother being taken away or being loved by someone else. He wishes her
to be beyond all possessions and wants to have her himself. She explains, in light of
this concept why woman has a double, a deceptive visage: "she is all that man desires
and all that he does not attain."46

In the second chapter "The Myth of Woman in Five Authors" de Beauvoir

has displayed the image of women in the five renowned authors; she has
43
Ibid., p. 183.
44
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Singapore: Thomson Asia
Pvt. Ltd, 2003), p. 90.
45
Simone de Beauvoir, "Dreams, Fears, Idols", p. 207.
46
Ibid., p. 229.

17
demonstrated the mythological construct of woman in canonical literary works. She
draws conclusion that all of them seems to have formed more or less the archetypal
image of women. Montherlant conceives women as flesh who are harmful to men in
everyway. He finds mother one of the great enemies of men because she prevents her
son from getting engaged, as he has shown in L'exile. He reproaches and what he
detests in her is the fact of his own birth. He condemns mother for being the most
deplorable teacher, for clipping her child's wings, for holding him back from the
zenith he aspires for and for making him stupid and degrading him. For him the
mistress is as ill-omened as the mother because she prevents man from reviving the
god within him. Woman's lot in life is its immediacy; she lives on sensations and has
a rage to live and wishes to confine man in such a state. He supports the oriental
attitude and states that "The ideal woman is perfectly stupid and perfectly
submissive; she is always ready to accept the male and never makes any demand
upon him".47 According to him, women are never taken seriously because they are
traditionally supposed not to understand anything. His attitude has no positive
explanation. It is basically the fear of loosing sovereignty that made Montherlant
gender biased.

In his writings, Lawrence has produced phallus centered notions. He does

not view women as inferior other. Nor does he view them as a diversion or prey; she
is not on object confronting the subject. Instead, a woman, for Lawrence, is a pole
necessary for the existence of the opposite sex. He finds marriage an illusion if it is
not phallic; it is nothing if it is not based on a correspondence of blood; the blood of a
man and the blood of a woman are the substance of the soul that cannot mix because
they are two eternally different streams. He finds women a passive substance of the
erotic will of a man. Beauvoir disapproves this view saying that this is a miserable
kind of domination. If a woman is only a passive object, what the man dominates is
nothing. He thinks he is taking something, enriching himself but it is a disillusion. He
believes passionately in the supremacy of the male and stresses on the phallic
marriage. He states that a man plays not only the active role in the sexual life, but he
is active also in going beyond it; he is rooted in the sexual world but he makes his
escape from it; woman remains shut up in it. Thoughts and actions are rooted in
Phallus; liking the phallus, woman has no right in either the one or the other. A
woman is polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth while man is
polarized upwards; towards the sun and the day's activity. Lawrence does not declare
woman as evil; she is good but subordinate.

Grounding his ideas in Christianity, Claudel points out that nothing

created by God in the universe is useless. All is useful and necessary. So woman also
has her place in the harmony of the universe; but this is not an ordinary place but a
significant one. Most assuredly woman can be a destroyer: Claudel has incarnated in
leachy the bad woman leading man to perdition. A Woman comprises all nature: rose
and lily star, fruit, bud, mind, moon, sun, fountain and so on, and a man is not made
to be unattached, he cannot rid himself of carrying the heavy burden of woman. In a
marriage, says Claudel, the wife gives herself to the husband who becomes
responsible for her: Lila lies on the ground before her husband and he sets his foot
upon her. Claudel describes a woman's destiny in these words:

"To devote herself to children, husband, home, estate,

Country, Church this is her lot, the lot which the

47
Ibid., "The Myth of Woman in Five Authors", p. 234.

18
 bourgeoisie has always assigned to her. Man gives his
activity, woman her person."48

There is an analogy between the views of Breton and that of Claudel. Like
Claudel he finds woman a "disturbing factor". A woman is an enigma and she poses
enigmas. To all poets woman incarnates nature, but for Breton she not only expresses
nature but releases it: "she is wont, is nature, to be lighted up and to be
darkened, to render me service or dis- service. . ." 49 He does not speak of woman as
subject and never evokes the image of a bad woman. Woman interests him only
because she is a privileged voice: "Truth, Beauty, Poetry - she is all: once more all
under the form of the other, all except herself." 50

Stendhal viewed woman as a sensual object lacking in intellect and

wisdom. He accuses them of lacking in judgment and preferring emotions to reason.
According to some irrational customs, women are not supposed to shoulder the
family responsibility; reason is never useful to them. Man intentionally deprives
women of their opportunities. In childhood girls are more eloquent, talkative and
clever than boys but after 20, man becomes intelligent and witty while woman turns
out to be an idiot, shy, and afraid of a spider. Intelligent and cultivated women in
society, according to Stendhal, are conceived to be monsters.

Now it is evident that all the authors have presented the same image of
women. That is more or less in negative terms. This description of women in literary
works by men might have induced Judith Fetterley to write a critical book, The
Resisting Reader. A resisting reader is one, who resists the author's intention and
design in order by a "revisionary reader", to bring to light and counter the covert
sexual biases written into a literary work." 51 As woman has been described by these
authors as flesh because the flesh of a man is produced in mother's body and re-
created in the embraces of the woman in love. She has been related to nature because
she incarnates it: vale of blood, open rose, siren etc. she can hold the keys to poetry;
she can be mediatrix between this world and the beyond; grace or oracle, star or
sorceress. In all the cases she is described as privileged other, through whom man,
the subject, fulfils himself, his desire and dreams. For Motherlant "transcendence is a
situation: he is the transcendent, he soars in the sky of heroes; woman
crouches on earth, beneath his feet. . . ." 52 Lawrence, on the other side, places
transcendence in the phallus and regards it as life and power only by the virtue of
woman. He opines that "woman is not to be scorned, she is deep richness, a warm
spring; but she should give up all personal transcendence and confine herself to
furthering that of a male." 53 Claudel expects the same devotion from woman and
maintains that she should maintain life and man should extend his range through his

48
Ibid., p. 261.
49
Ibid., p. 265.
50
Ibid., p. 268.
51
M.H. Abrams, p. 90.
52
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Myth of Woman in Five Authors", p. 279.
53
Ibid.

19
activity. For Breton the position of the sexes is reversed. Action and conscious
thought, in which man explores his transcendence, seem to him to "constitute a silly
mystification that gives rise to war, stupidity, bureaucracy, the negation of
anything human . . ." His attitude is the exact opposite of Motherlant because the
54

later likes war for in war one gets rid of women, Breton desire woman because she
brings peace and serenity. Stendhal regards woman as being, like man, a
transcendent. Simone de Beauvoir sums up the views of all the authors about women.
She states that all these authors have attempted to define woman as the other capable
of revealing him to himself. She writes:

Montherlant, the solar spirit, seeks pure animality in

her; Lawrence, the phallicist, asks her to sum up the
feminine sex in general; claudel defines her as a soul-
sister; Breton cherishes Melusine, rooted in nature,
pining his hope on the woman-child; Stendhal
wants his mistress intelligent, cultivated, free in spirit
and behaviour: an equal. But the sole earthly destiny
reserved for the equal, the woman-child, the soul-sister,
the woman-sex, the woman-animal is always man. 55

In the third chapter "Myth and Reality", de Beauvoir demonstrates how

the mythological construct of women differs from their behaviour in real life. She
displays how the former seems to be a product of patriarchal ideology and is used
from time to time to torment and harass women in real life. She describes the basic
difference between the mythological concept of woman mother and her portrayal in
real life. The concept of saintly mother and the cruel step mother has great relevance.
The ideological concept of both the images of mother and several notions grounded
in this concept, are used as means to harass women mentally and emotionally. Most
of the women in the role of step mother are shown in negative roles because of the
mythological concept of mother: Cindrella's mother is an example of this
mythological construct.

An other mythological concept of woman is a destructive power which

affects man and prevents him from attaining any victory and accomplishing his goals.
She is identified as all which causes man's decline. This is the lot assigned to women
in a patriarchal society. She is conceived to be a slave and leads man to servitude.

Another concept of woman is that of a mysterious figure. She is

conceived to be an insoluble enigma. Man cannot understand a woman's
temperament, her likes and dislikes, what she thinks and how she behaves. This myth
foregrounds a notion that one cannot interpret confidently and correctly the female
nature. A woman at the same time is both the saintly mother and the cruel step
mother, Virgin Mary and the temptress, a priestess and a prostitute and the
embodiment of nature and all what befalls misfortune on men. A woman is viewed
and interpreted in any way that suits a man's interest, and this interpretation is very
often contradictory:

54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., p. 281.

20
 . . . deceived by the woman he loves, one declares that
she is a Crazy Womb; another, obsessed by this
impotence, calls her a Praying Mantis; still another
enjoys his wife's company: behold, she is Harmony,
Rest, the Good Earth!56

Now Beauvoir deliberates on reality and the notion that it produces. In

real life man desires a woman to be both, the inferior other and his equal mate. They
aspire for a woman who could satisfy his male ego with her submission and a woman
who could walk with him and be an eminent help for him in achieving his goals in all
the streams of life. He wants to conceal her beauty and desires to see and enjoy this
treason alone, at the same time he wishes her to be a model performing on ramp.

In the first chapter, "Childhood" of the Fourth Part "The Formative Years"
in book II Woman's Life Today, Beauvoir has described how a woman comes to
identify herself as a secondary being since her childhood. She states that there is not
one factor that determines a secondary place for women but several others that
contribute to acknowledge them as an inferior other. She wises that it is society with
its several cultural and customary practices that make women to realise herself as a
compendium of shortcomings in one way or the other. She writes that femininity is
not a biological feature but a socially produced characteristic; a woman is not a
woman by birth but is rather produced by civilization. She states:

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, . . . which is described as feminine.57

Beauvoir talks about several practices that women since their childhood
exercise and that gives them a certain complex in some way. She says that in the
early childhood (i.e. the pre-oedipal stage, oral stage and anal stage), both male and
female child enjoy the same pleasures and bear the same crisis. There is no difference
of any sort in the attitudes of girls and boys during the first three or four years. Both
of them strive to perpetuate the happy conditions that preceded weaning. Both of
them are equally desirous of pleasing adults, causing smiles and seeking admirations.
She points out that there are some differences in the treatment of the male child and
the female child that distinguish a girl from a boy; it is attitude of the elders and the
family members and that of society which promotes the boy's interest. The distinction
between them is often made by separating one from the other by telling him/her how
he/she is different from the other. Generally, a boy is forbidden to play with girls, to
dress up like a girl and to sleep with his sister because he is a boy. A girl, on the other
side, is told not to compare herself with her brother because she is not as efficient in
doing the things skillfully as her brother. Another difference that Beauvoir points out
is urinary function. She maintains that incapable of urinating like a boy, a girl gets a
56
Ibid., "Myth and Reality", p. 290.
57
Ibid., "Childhood", p. 295.

21
complex and wishes to do it like a boy. This complex originates from certain
problems that she faces; she has to undress herself and has to squat to discharge
urine. Another complex that she gets is the lack of male sexual organ: she sees a boy
urinating in standing position and holding his organ, touching and caressing it; she
thinks herself to be deprived of it. This deprivation should not be taken what Freud
calls "Penis-envy". Instead it is situational and the uncomfort lets her feel inferior.
She asserts:

She does not experience this absence as a lack;

evidently her body is, for her, quite complete, but she
finds herself situated in the world differently from the
boy, and a constellation of factors can transform this
difference in her eyes, into an inferiority.58

She further writes:

The psychoanalysts who, following Freud, Suppose

that the mere discovery of the penis by a little girl
would be enough to cause a trauma profoundly
misunderstand the mentality of the child; this
mentality is much less rational than they seem to
suppose, for it does not envisage clear cut categories
and it is not disturbed by contradiction.59

A girl usually imitates her mother. Since most of the time she is in her
mother's contact, she copies her in all the domestic works such as cooking, sewing,
house-keeping. She wishes to become as important as her mother: she feeds her doll
as her mother feeds her, she shows her anger to it as she is rebuked by her mother.
Not only this even she wishes to beget children like her mother. In fact she imitates
her mother and tries to become like her because she can never become the "sovereign
father". Here she evidently disapproves Freud's notion of "Electra Complex":

I have already pointed out that what Freud calls the

Electra complex is not, as he supposes, a sexual desire;
it is a full abdication of the subject, consenting to
become object in submission and adoration. If her
father shows affection to his daughter, she feels that her
existence is magnificently justified; she is endowed
with all the merits that others have to acquire with
difficulty; she is fulfilled and deified.60

58
Ibid., p. 300.
59
Ibid., p. 304.
60
Ibid., p. 315.

22
 As the girl grows, Beauvoir notices certain charges in her attitude.
Whereas in her early childhood she imitated her mother, now she starts disliking her
mother's authority. At one place, she wishes to be a grown up female adult; on the
other, she is afraid of the crises that an adult female fears: such as pain of child
bearing, fear of male sexual organ, fear of the crisis that threaten married people,
disgust for indecent behaviour etc. This is partly because of the disturbance that she
feels by noticing certain changes in her body.

In next chapter, "The Young Girl", Beauvoir has demonstrated certain

differences between the feelings of a boy and a girl. Being convinced and taught
since her infancy, of male superiority, the girl aspires for protection from the boy she
is to be married with. This is also because economic and social systems are mastered
by men. Beauvoir points out that marriage is the only institution that alone allows a
woman to keep her social dignity intact and at the same time to find sexual
fulfillment as loved one and mother. She wishes to get free from parental home, from
her mother's hold and open up her future "not by active conquest but by delivering
herself up, passive and docile, into the hands of a new master." 61 She is even taught
by her parents and elders to become passive and docile in marital life. But a woman
cannot give up her essential identity as subject, active and free. In her childhood, she
was independent and free. Her tendency is to regard herself as essential and
independent and she finds herself unwilling to be the inessential. If she accepts her
otherness as her destiny, she could not give up her ego. She oscillates between desire
and disgust, hope and fear and so hangs in suspense between the time of childhood
independence and that of womanly submission. She finds no hope in future, and
present disappoints her; the past experiences of childhood are tormenting and the
physical changes and the disturbance it causes torture her both physically and
mentally. Thus she becomes an entitiless being. Beauvoir writes:

If the future scares her, the present dissatisfies her; she

hesitates to become a woman; she is vexed to be still
only a child; she has already left her past behind, but
she has not yet entered upon a new life. She is busy,
but she does nothing, she has nothing, she is nothing. 62

In "Sexual Initiation", Beauvoir focuses on the several complexes that

dwell in a woman's mind and the fears in her heart. Being taught to be passive and
docile, she faces many problems that is, to please her counterpart and satisfy him on
the terms of his wishes and desires. The image of conjugal relation that figures in the
mind of a woman tortures her in two ways. First is the idea of being a satisfying
sexual object and the second is to face the real situation. The role that she is supposed
to play is not only to be passive one but she has to play a part by being passively
active. She is compelled and supposed to seek pleasure in pain and keep mum while
crying.

Beauvoir also talks about the traumas of the relationship that woman
bears in the intercourse before and after her marriage. In pre-nuptial relation (if it
exists) she bears the risk of impregnation and the other traumas that society threatens
61
Ibid., "The Young Girl", p. 352.
62
Ibid., p. 380.

23
her of. In the marital relation, she cannot take pleasure because so many things are
going in her mind. She is horrified and ashamed of the things that are going to
happen with her. She is ashamed of her own nude body before a man and afraid of
the fact that she is before the man who is supposed to be her judge:

. . . she cannot take arrogant pride in her body unless

male approval has confirmed her youthful vanity. And
just this fills her with fear; her lover is still more
redoubtable than a look: he is a judge. He is to reveal
her to herself in very truth . . .63

The other fear which a woman has in her mind is to be manhandled. The other torture
that she conceives is the idea of first penetration into an unknown and untouched
organ. This is a shock that brings a troublesome idea of being over- powered, forced
to compliance and be conquered.

In "The Lesbian", Beauvoir reflects on the causes why women become

lesbians. She speculates that women form this unnatural relation on account of two
reasons: one is protest and the other is imitation. Few women protest the customs and
the conventions that give men privilege to treat women in any way they wish. These
women resist this sort of practice and dislike to be treated as puppets in the hands of
men. The other reason is to imitate men who play the active part in the harassment of
the weaker sex. It is significant that both the groups of women attempt to empower
themselves, if one resists the male oriented practice at a broad level, the other tries to
capture the male hegemony by imitating the way men exercise their power over
women.

Beauvoir describes other causes that are in the background. First she
makes the mention of certain complexes like the complex of a woman of not being
beautiful and so unable to be a proper and charming object of a man's desire. The
other reason that prompts a woman to become a lesbian is her liking for softness.
Being soft and gentle in mind and body, they aspire for a soft treatment. They wish to
maintain the relationship on equal terms and in the same sex, the relation where no
one is superior or inferior, is another factor that motivates women to indulge in this
relation. There are women who do not wish to abdicate the maternal love and
affection or women who are deprived of their mother's love since their early
childhood form this sort of relation with older women. Beauvoir talks of another
cause, that is, the cause of betrayal. Having been betrayed by their men, women
attempt to replace them with women. The other factor that prompts women to form
this relation is that they can present their real self and need not to pretend and be
afraid of anything. Here no one would be her judge. Women are fascinated towards
this relation because all the fears, dilemmas and shames of heterosexual relation are
eradicated in this and they form a harmonious relation: ". . . separateness is
abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at
once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality becomes mutuality". 64

63
Ibid., "Sexual Initiation", p. 402.
64
Ibid., "The Lesbian", p. 436.

24
 Women don't get liberated in this relation also because the patriarchal
ideology pervades the whole society in which they live. They feel frustrated because
this relation is seen as derogatory and detestable. The humiliation that they want to
avoid comes again in their way. Women seem to fail in this relation also because they
realise that this can be a means to avoid male interference in female dominion but it
can't be as constructive as in the union with men. It is so because procreation is
barred and the wish to get children will remain a wish. This relation also brings
frustration and disappointment because a lesbian can never set herself free from the
inferiority complex both as a woman and as a man: she appears at once both "a
defective woman and an incomplete man, and this leads her to affect a haughty
superiority or to show towards them . . . a sadistic aggressiveness". 65

Now Beauvoir shifts her attention on the marital condition of a woman in

a male oriented society in the chapter, "The Married Woman". She is of the view that
marriage is an institution that helps men to subordinate women and assert the male
hegemony. This is as powerful that it becomes the destiny of a woman. Not only this,
it becomes a parameter to identify her. The celibate woman is interpreted and defined
in context of marriage, no matter she is frustrated, rebellious or indifferent pertaining
to that institution. She speculates that the experience of marriage comes to them (man
and woman) in opposite ways. Both the genders are necessary to each other but this
need never brings a condition of reciprocity between them. Where a man is socially
independent and a complete individual, a woman is dependent on her male
counterpart in every respect. Truly a man needs her in all walks of life but this
requirement is demonstrated and defined in society in a different way. Where the
freedom of a woman is restricted through marriage, she is reduced "to the rank of
parasite and pariah; marriage is her only means of support and sole justification of
her existence."66 A woman is accorded through the institution of marriage two major
roles to perform. The first is that she must provide the society with children and the
second is that she has to satisfy a male's sexual needs and to take care of his
household. Wherever she is, she is under the possession of a man (father, husband,
brother). Even in her marriage, she is traditionally and by custom offered by a man to
a man. She aruges:

. . . it is the men's group that allows each of its

members to find self-fulfilment as husband and father;
woman, as slave or vassal, is integrated within families
dominated by fathers and brothers, and she has always
been given in marriage by certain males to other
males.67

Being subordinate in every stream of life, a woman wishes to make marriage a

mainstay of her life and pleasingly offers herself to her husband. She owns his name,
his religion, his class, his circle and joins his family. Before marriage, she is
compelled to live a life of restrictions; she cannot enjoy as much freedom as her
brother. A man in society can enjoy sexual freedom even before his marriage; but

65
Ibid., p. 443.
66
Ibid., "The Married Woman", p. 446.
67
Ibid.

25
this is an unforgivable crime for a woman. If she wants a bit of freedom of this sort,
she will have to get married. Maternity is other privilege that promises her a
respectable place in society. These, according to Beauvoir, may be the reasons why a
woman wishes to get married, while a man considers marriage as his "fundamental
project".

Beauvoir also meditates on several ways the process of marriage is

materialized in society. She states that there is the practice of arranged marriage,
which becomes a contract between the two parties more than a means of fulfilment of
a woman's desire. She tells that 36 percent girls in France wish to marry while 38
percent desire not to get married at all. Near about 1945 social contracts accounted
for 48 percent of engagements; money played a leading part in 30 to 70 percent of
marriages. She deliberates on the stress and frustration a woman has in the early days
after her marriage. She states that many women find marriage a mystery which
tortures them both mentally and physically. They detest the man who extracts
pleasure out of their suffering:

. . . women hate forever a man who selfishly takes his

pleasure at the price of their suffering; but they feel
external resentment against men who have seemed to
disdain them, and often against those who have not
attempted to deflower them during the first night or
have been unable to do so.68

As far as physical satisfaction of a woman or a man is considered, Beauvoir

maintains that it is mere an absurdity to presume that "two married persons, bound by
ties of practical, social and moral interest will provide each other with sex
satisfaction as long as they live". 69 In fact, physical love can be treated neither as an
end in itself nor as a means to an end. It cannot serve as a justification of existence;
instead, it may play in any human life an episodic and independent role.

Simone de Beauvoir now narrates the saga of a woman in house. She

narrates that throughout her life a woman keeps on struggling with so many domestic
works: she cooks, sweeps, washes clothes, rears up her children and passes her whole
life in feeding her husband and children. Thus she has the complete control over her
household and the domestic world. But the marriage becomes a valueless affair. She
is treated ungratefully for all the service she provides to her family members. The
aim of marriage for a man is not to confine him in domestic affairs but to liberate him
from these activities. Women remain unpaid for their bone-breaking services.
Beauvoir captures the plight of women:

. . . marriage is today a surviving relic of dead ways of

life, and situation of the wife is more ungrateful than
formerly, because she still has the same duties but they
no longer confer the same rights, privileges and
honours. Man marries today to obtain an anchorage in
immanence, but not to be himself confined theirin; he
68
Ibid., p.462.
69
Ibid., p. 464.

26
 wants to have hearth and home while being free to
escape therefrom . . .70

A woman's work within her home, therefore, gives her no autonomy. Nor it is
directly useful to society. It also does not open out in the future.

Marriage, therefore, subordinates a woman to her husband; the problem of

their mutual relation is posed most sharply to the former. The young wife very
seldom admits her feelings to herself with such sincerity. For her, to love her husband
and to be happy with him is a duty she owes to herself and to the society. Marriage
incites man to a capricious imperialism: "The temptation to dominate is the most
truly universal, the most irresistible one there is, to surrender the child to its mother,
the wife to her husband, is to promote tyranny in the world." 71 Beauvoir opines that it
is only a naive husband who thinks that he can easily subdue his wife to his will and
shape her as he pleases. Thus the whole tradition enjoins upon women the art of
managing their husbands. She states that a husband should be granted neither too
much nor too little freedom. If a woman becomes too obliging, she has the risk to
become a mistress in the eyes of her husband.

Beauvoir speculates that a woman is doomed to immorality because for

her to be moral would mean that she must incarnate into a being having superhuman
qualities. If she thinks, dreams, desires, sleeps and breathes freely and independently,
she betrays the masculine ideal. Sometimes women may succeed in becoming their
husband's true companion; she may discuss his problems, give him counsels. But she
is "lulled in illusion if she expects in this way to accomplish work she can call her
own, for he remains alone the free and responsible agent." 72 She must love him if she
finds joy in his service, otherwise she will find only vexation because she will feel
herself robbed of the fruit of her efforts.

The tragedy of marriage "is not that it fails to assure women the
promised happiness . . . but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and
routine".73 It is the duplicity of the husband that dooms the wife to a misfortune. Just
as he desires a woman to be at once warm and cold in his bed, he wants her to be
wholly his, he wishes her to establish him in a fixed place on earth and to leave him
free. He wants her all to himself and does not wish himself to belong to her; to live as
one of the couple and to remain alone. A woman, therefore, "is betrayed from the day
he marries her. Her life through, she measures the extent of that betrayal. . . . (The)
union of two human beings is doomed to frustration if it is an attempt at a mutual
completion which supposes an original mutilation". 74

Beauvoir now turns towards another fact of womanhood: motherhood.

She says that maternity is a woman's physiological destiny, since her whole anatomy

70
Ibid., p. 475.
71
Ibid., p. 483.
72
Ibid., p. 493.
73
Ibid., p. 496.
74
Ibid., p. 497.

27
or organic structure is adapted for this purpose. In this chapter Beauvoir has talked
about the experiences, feelings, traumas, sufferings and complexes which a mother
has in the whole period of her maternity. She has also discussed about her reactions,
her inner psyche and the outer social conditions associated with a woman's
pregnancy. She has also talked about the relation of a mother with her son or with her
daughter, the different roles she plays in her children's life and the types of mothers
regarding their attitude towards their children and their own motherhood.

Beauvoir has started with the mental and social conditions preceding a
woman's maternity. She has talked about the ways of contraception which are often a
source of conflict between lovers and married couples. And where the ways are
primitive the last resort left is abortion which, she tells, was often performed secretly
and by lay women since it was illegal. But in France "it is an operation to which
many women are forced to resort and which haunts the love - life of most of them". 75
In this matter she has quoted an example from a book by Dr. Roy in which he regards
abortion as a crime and is wrong even as a therapeutic measure i.e. when the life or
health of the mother is at stake. According to him it is immoral to make a choice
between one life and another, and in this condition he would advise sacrificing the
mother. On this Beauvoir says that "(h)ow lively anti-feminism still is can be judged
by the eagerness of certain men to reject everything favourable to the emancipation
of women".76

In this regard, Beauvoir further discusses and gives a data that in France
abortion has averaged one million per year of which two third are married women;
she muses that how cheap and of less value a woman's life is, since abortion causes a
large number of deaths and injuries because they are often performed secretly and
improperly. Now she turns her attention towards the condition and sufferings of an
unwed mother and talks that a girl would prefer suicide or infanticide to the status of
an unmarried mother. This happens in France with about 300,000 employees,
secretaries, students, workers and peasant women each year, which brings despair
and suffering for each woman concerned. On the other hand the male involved
generally shirks his responsibilities in most of such cases, or himself:

convinces the woman that she must rid herself of the

child. Or he may have already abandoned her when she
finds herself pregnant, or she may generously wish to
hide her disgrace from him, or she may find him
incapable of helping her.77

Beauvoir has very deeply felt and expressed the pain of a woman put in this
condition, facing the menace of death combined with the feeling of shame. She has
empathetically described the suffering, pain, humiliation and anguish a woman is
forced by married situations to resort. She writes:

75
Ibid., "The Mother", p. 502.
76
ibid., p. 504
77
Ibid., p. 506.

28
 We know how great is the difference between suffering
and torture, accident and punishment; through all the
risks she takes, the woman feels herself to be
blameworthy, and his interpretation of anguish and
transgression is peculiarly painful.78

A woman's whole moral universe gets disrupted because abortion means disowning
herself from feminine values. But men tend to take it lightly. Here also they apply a
double standard, they forbid it universally but accept it individually as a convenient
solution. Beauvoir further elaborates a woman's reactions:

But woman feels these contradictions in her wounded

flesh; she is as a rule too timid for open revolt against
masculine bad faith; she regards herself as the victim of
an injustice that makes her a criminal against her will,
and at the same time she feels soiled and humiliated.
She embodies in concrete and immediate form, in
herself, man's fault; he commits the fault, but he gets
rid of it by putting it off on her; he merely
says some words in a suppliant, threatening,
sensible, or furious tone: he soon forgets them; it is for
her to interpret these words in pain and blood.79

Beauvoir further talks about a woman's attitude towards her maternity and
states that pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in various ways depending
upon the woman's true attitude, which may be one of revolt, resignation, satisfaction
or enthusiasm. During childhood and adolescence a woman passes through several
phases in her attitude towards maternity. It is a miracle and a game for a little girl
who sees in her doll, her future baby and domineers over it, for an adolescent girl
maternity seems a threat to the integrity of her precious person. Her attitude also
depends on the relation she has with her husband. If she loves her husband she will
accept her maternity with delight; on the contrary, if she is hostile towards him, she
may fiercely devote herself to her child and withhold it from her husband or hate it as
an offspring of a man she detests. But in most cases she needs masculine support in
accepting her new responsibilities.

Maternity appears to produce a sort of confused and mixed feeling in a

woman, which Beauvoir terms as "drama". It is at the same time enrichment and an
injury for her. She gets the throne of motherhood but loses her own self. Carrying the
foetus, she feels herself as vast as the world but this feeling also arouses in her a
contrary feeling of no longer being anything. She feels proud also and at the same
time finds herself a plaything in the hands of obscure forces. She also has some sort
of longings especially for things to eat with which she sometimes gets obsessed.
Beauvoir tells that there is "a cultivation of these longings as a matter of tradition,

78
Ibid., p. 507.
79
Ibid., p. 509.

29
just as there used to be a cultivation of hysteria; the woman expects to have them, she
is on the watch for them, she invents them". 80

Maternity develops varied responses in women. It makes them important

or 'interesting' as in Beauvoir's words, which is her deepest desire since adolescence.
As a wife, she was dependent on a man but the time she conceives she is no longer in
service as a sexual object now she represents the promise of life, of eternity. She
feels herself as the earth; on the other hand, there are women who love and are very
conscious about their bodily beauty they feel disgusted to see themselves deformed
and disfigured.

Beauvoir notices the vacillations in a woman's response. She tells that a

mother desires to retain the "precious flesh" which is a treasure of her ego and at the
same time wants to rid herself of an intruder. She wants to see her dream actualized
and wants her baby in her hands but simultaneously dreads the new
responsibilities. A woman vacillates between two opposite poles and is torn between
the contrary desires of which either may predominate. In this stage a woman is often
of divided mind; she wants to prove that she can tackle the situations alone but at the
same time she bears a grudge against the world, against life and against her family
for the sufferings inflicted upon her and remain passive in protest.

The relation of a mother with her newborn child is also highly variable,
says Beauvoir. Some women feel emptiness in them as if their treasure has been
stolen. Some other find it miraculous to hold a living thing created within their body.
But there is an amazed curiosity in every young mother. Few women receive their
motherhood and their newborn happily and with so much pleasure but some others
are alarmed at their new responsibilities and view no pleasure in such activities. In
Beauvoir's words:

. . . she is apprehensive of ruining her bosom; she

resents feeling her nipples cracked, the glands painful;
suckling the baby hurts; the infant seems to her to be
sucking out her strength, her life, her happiness. It
inflicts a harsh slavery upon her and it is no longer a
part of her: it seems a tyrant; she feels hostile to this
little stranger, this individual who menaces her flesh,
her freedom, her whole ego.81

So motherhood is a very varied experience depending upon several influences. A

woman's relation with her mother and with her baby's father have a great impact on
her attitude towards her motherhood and the type of experience she will have. On the
whole, economic factors and the sentimental considerations make a baby a burden or
a jewel. Beauvoir says that there is no such thing as "maternal instinct"; a mother's
attitude depends on her total situation and her reactions to it. But unless the situations
are extremely unfavourable the mother will find her life enriched by her child.

80
Ibid., p. 516
81
Ibid., p. 524.

30
 Beauvoir now adds a new dimension to her discussion on the responses of
a mother. She tells that a woman's aggressive eroticism which does not get fully
satisfied in male embrace, is satisfied by her infant. She says:

". . . the mother finds in her infant - as does the lover in

his beloved - a carnal plenitude, and this not in
surrender but in domination; she obtains in her child
what man seeks in woman: an other, combining nature
and mind, who is to be both prey and double". 82

She also tells that usually the woman, to whom a helpless baby is given, is a
"discontented woman: sexually she is frigid or unsatisfied: socially she feels herself
inferior to man; she has no independent grasp on the world or on the future". 83 She
seeks to compensate for all her frustrations through her child. So when a mother is
punishing or beating her child, she is not beating it rather taking her vengeance on a
man or on the world or on herself. Beauvoir talks that a mother has masochistic
devotion towards her child. Such mothers are very anxious; they don't allow their
child to go out of their sight and deny all independence and freedom to them.

Now the discussion takes a new turn from the responses of a mother
towards the relationship between her and her children (both son and daughter); when
the child grows older, he enters into a world from which his mother is excluded and
sometimes he scorns her on that account. Specially being proud of his masculine
prerogatives, the boy laughs at a woman. Although it is difficult to adjust with a boy
but normally a mother makes a better adjustment with him because of the prestige
attributed to men by women: "How wonderful to bring a man into the world!" 84

Freud is of the view that the relation between a mother and her son is of
least ambivalence. He says that as in marriage and love affair, in maternity also
woman has an equivocal attitude towards man. If her experience in marriage or in
love has made her hostile towards a man then she will domineer over her male child.
Otherwise she becomes over possessive; she forbids him to play with playmates and
at the same time wants him to be worthy of her pride. She wants him to rule the
world but on his knees before her. In this role her influence is harmful as Montherlant
and other writers have portrayed in their works.

The relationship between a mother and her daughter is much more

dramatic. She does not greet her daughter as a member of superior community as she
does with her son. If a woman is satisfied with her life then she will not take her
daughter with disappointment and will try to avail her daughter the opportunities she
has and even those which she missed. But sometimes it reaches to the limit of
masochistic devotion which becomes offensive for the female child. Some women
take their femininity as curse, such mothers take their daughter as another victim;
they accept them with disappointment feel guilty of bringing them into the world. But
sometimes a woman who is disgusted of her sex gives her daughter a man's

82
Ibid., p. 527.
83
Ibid., pp. 528-529.
84
Ibid., p. 531.

31
education. She wants to compensate for her inferiority by making her daughter a
superior creature. As the girl grows older, she sees herself as an individual being
other than her mother but the mother is not ready to accept her double as another. A
mother sees her daughter, especially the oldest one who is her father's favourite, as
her rival. She assigns her so much of work and demands extreme soberity from her
and finds it very irritating if she notices her daughter being influenced by anybody
other than her just because she does not want to accept that her double (her daughter)
is a separate independent being. Ultimately the mother gets defeated when the
daughter becomes an adult, and they establish a sort of uneasy friendship but both
remain uncomfortable and disappointed with other.

Now Beauvoir talks about the false preconception attached with

maternity. She tells that maternity is always taken as a crown in a woman's life;
which is not true. There are many mothers who are unhappy and unsatisfied. The
relation between the mother and her child depends on her experience with her life, on
her relation with her husband, her occupation and her social condition. A woman
who is well-balanced, healthy and aware of her responsibilities can be a good mother.
The second false preconception, of which she talks, is that a child always feels happy
in its mother’s arms.

Beauvoir talks about the paradox in the common attitude of contempt for
women and the respect given to mother's. It is also paradoxical to deny women any
role in public affairs and shutting all masculine corners to her and entrusting her the
role of moulding a human being. Montesquieu is of the view that a woman as
efficient and rational as a man, when she is given the opportunity or role in State
affairs than in family, as a man, she is much more balanced and rational at work
place than at home. Beauvoir further tells that women who are working undergo
pregnancy much easily because they are not absorbed in themselves only. A woman
who has her own individual life will have much to give her children and will demand
the least from them.

It is wrong to say that a woman becomes the actual equal to man through
maternity. Psychoanalysts have taken great pains to prove that a child is an
equivalent to penis for a woman but it’s not the ultimate. The sacred rights of
women, is also a much talked issue but it is not as mothers; that a women have
gained the right to vote. Moreover motherhood is not glorified outside marriage i.e. it
is held in high esteem only when she is subordinated to her husband. A woman is
shut up in home and lacks all means to establish herself; thus, individuality does not
get recognition. Among Arabs, Indians and in many rural populations, women are
only female domesticated animals; but now women want a role in economic, political
and social life. They are not satisfied in limiting themselves to domestic work and
maternity.

In her chapter, "Social Life", Beauvoir discusses a woman's part in

maintaining social relations. A man is tied to a community, as producer and citizen,
by bounds of an organic solidity based upon the division of labour. She argues that a
couple is a social construction defined by the family, the class, the circle and the race
to which it belongs. It is wife who can embody this relation more purely because the
husband's professional associations are very often out of tunes with his social
standing. She has to manage both inside and outside the house: "Her social duty,
which is to make a good show', combines with her pleasure in letting herself be

32
seen."85 While working in house, she needs only to be clothed; and outside the house,
she has to dress up properly. Formal attire, therefore, plays twofold purposes: it is
intended to demonstrate the social standing of a woman on one hand and on the other
hand it is a feminine narcissism in concrete form. Not only this, even a wife has to
shoulder up all the jobs that sustain social relations. Along with putting on different
types of dresses on different occasions, she has to perform several duties related to
family, friends and society. Beauvoir states:

She experiences that multifarious subjection which

marks the lot of the housekeeper: she is subject to
soufflé, the roast, the cook, the extra help; she is
subject to her husband, frowning at some hitch; she is
subject to the guests, sizing up the furniture and the
wines and deciding whether or not the party has been a
success.86

Beauvoir considers on women's friendship with women; what are the

subject of their conversation, and how it is different from the friendship of the men.
She ponders over that men communicate as individuals through ideas and projects of
personal interests, while women are confined within their feminine lot and discuss
the universe they have in common. Unlike men, they do not discuss opinions and
general ideas but exchange confidences and receipts, they are in league to create a
kind of counter universe. Collectively they find strength to shake off their chains;
they negate the sexual domination of the males by admitting their frigidity to one-
another. By deriding the men's desires or their clumsiness, they question ironically
the moral and intellectual superiority of their husbands and men in general. They
compare experiences, pregnancies, births, their and their children's illness and
household cases become the essential events of human story. Women know that
masculine codes are not theirs, they, therefore, call upon other women to help define
a set of "local rules", a moral code specially for women.

In "From Maturity to Old Age", Beauvoir describes the psychological

trauma a woman bears due to the physical changes and changes in the physical
function with the passage of time. Whereas man grows old gradually, woman is
suddenly deprived of her femininity. She is relatively still young when she loses the
erotic attractiveness and fertility which were the chief sources of pleasure and
happiness. Long before the eventual mutilation, a woman is haunted by the horror of
growing old. The mature man is involved in enterprises more important than those of
love; and his erotic ardour is less keen than those in the days of his youth. In woman,
on the contrary, it is usually towards thirty five, when all inhibitions have been
finally overcome. Her sexual desires hereafter are stronger and she most keenly
wishes to have them satisfied; and not being fulfilled her erotic desires, she gets
irritated and feels frustrated.

From the very day, a woman consents to growing old, her situation
changes. Till now, she was still a young woman; but now she "becomes a different

85
Ibid., "Social Life", p. 543.
86
Ibid., p. 555.

33
being, unsexed but complete: an old woman". 87 Towards fifty, she is in full
possession of her powers; she feels she is rich in experience; that is, the age men
attain the highest positions, the most important posts; but as far as a woman is
concerned, she is put into retirement. Beauvoir comments:

She has been taught only to devote herself to someone,

and nobody wants her devotion anymore. Unless,
unjustified, she looks forward to the long,
uncompromising years, she has yet to live and she
mutters; 'No one needs me'.88

She looks for salvation towards her son or daughter, but in vain; no one, as she
thinks, understands her, requires her. The only problem now she faces is how to kill
time. Now she seeks relief in social life; she goes to every wedding, every funeral.
Having no longer any value for her own, she encourages company:

"Once a coquette, she becomes a gossip; she watches

people comment on their behaviour; she compensates
for her inaction by scattering criticisms and advice all
around her, offering the benefit of her experience,
unasked, to one and all".89

In the fourth part "Justifications" of the Second Book, Beauvoir meditates

on traits of narcissism. She argues that the critical conditions of woman lead her
towards herself and prompts her to devote her love to herself. She states that there
can be no real relation between a woman and her double because this double does not
exist. A narcissist encounters a fundamental frustration. She cannot take herself as a
total being. Her isolation, like that of every human being is felt as contingence and
forlorn abandonment. Beauvoir maintains that it is unfair to presume that a woman
escapes dependence in choosing herself as supreme end in view. Instead, she "doors
herself to the most complete slavery. She does not stand on her independence, but
makes herself an object that is imperiled by the world and by other conscious
being".90 She is not troubled that her body and her face are of flesh that time will
disfigure. But it is an "expensive enterprise to adorn the idol, to erect its pedestal, to
build its temple".91 Beauvoir further comments: "The narcissist, in fact, is
as dependent as the hetaira. If she avoids the tyranny of an individual man, she
accepts the tyranny of public opinion".92

87
Ibid., "From Maturity to Old Age", p. 595.
88
Ibid., p. 596.
89
Ibid., p. 604.
90
Ibid., "The Narcissist", p. 651.
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid., pp. 651-52.

34
 Love has been assigned to woman as one of her supreme vocations; and
when she reveals it towards a man, she searches God in him. But if human love is
denied to her by circumstances, if she is disappointed or over particular, she may
choose to adore divinity in the person of God himself. Mystical fervour, like love and
narcissism, can be seen as traits associated with the life of activity and independence.
But these attempts on behalf of women to liberate themselves, according to Beauvoir,
are bound to go astray. She lacks any grasp on the world; she does not escape her
subjectivity; her liberty remains frustrated. There "is only one way to employ her
liberty authentically and that is to project her through positive action into human
society".93

In "The Independent Woman" in the Seventh Part, "Towards Liberation",

of Book II, Beauvoir ascribes the independence of woman. Beauvoir here differs
from Virgina Woolf in stressing that mere economic independence is insufficient to
liberate women because it does not let them get rid of the domestic duties and
responsibilities they are bound to shoulder. Woolf emphasized that it is necessary for
a woman that she should have economic independence. Beauvoir maintains that it
should not be presumed that "mere combination of the right to vote and a job
constitutes a complete emancipation: working, today, is not liberty". 94 Their jobs at
factories do not relieve women of house keeping burdens. The situation is made more
complex with the fact that a woman who is economically independent of man is not
for all that is a moral, social and psychological situation identical with that of man.
She is not viewed by society in the same way as a man is; the universe presents itself
before her in a different perspective. She has to be more conscious for her cloths and
more careful about her residence if she is in job. Society generally does not take
woman in confidence and considers man to be more competent than a woman.
Further, whether it is a man or a woman, no one wants to be governed by a woman.

There is one feminine function which is almost impossible to perform in

complete liberty as maternity. An unwed mother is a scandal to the community, and
illegitimate birth is a stain on the child; so it becomes almost impossible to become a
mother without accepting the chains of marriage. Many women appreciate artificial
insemination not because they disapprove sexual intercourse but because they hope
that "freedom of maternity is at least going to be accepted by society". 95 One of the
major problem of woman willing to get liberated is to make a balance between their
professional interests and their sexual life.

Further accentuating the issue of liberation of woman in her conclusion of

The Second Sex, Beauvoir quotes Montaigne and tells that many men are of the same
opinion that there will always be strife and dispute; and fraternity between men and
women will never be possible. Today men and women are not satisfied with each
other. Beauvoir raises a question that is it a curse on them to be in conflict with each
other or is it just a moment of transition in human history. Woman stands amidst this
strife, conflict and rivalry as a confused being; Beauvoir writes:

93
Ibid,. "The Mystic". p 687.
94
Ibid., "The Independent Woman", p. 691.
95
Ibid., p. 705.

35
 No, Woman is not our brother; through indolence and
deceit we have made of her a being apart, unknown,
having no weapon other than her sex, which not only
means constant warfare but unfair warfare - adoring or
hating, but never a straight friend. . . .96

It is said that woman envies man and his penis and wants to castrate him
but is not so; penis, for her, is a symbol of privileges of manhood and she does not
wishes to deprive him of them rather she wish to possess them. "The battle of sexes is
not implicit in the anatomy of man and woman." 97 Since society is male biased it
decrees that woman is inferior and this inferiority is imposed upon her and as all sorts
of oppressions create a state of war this also leads to the same. Instead of challenging
man's superiority or putting him in prison now women tries to escape from it. The
attitude of males now is creating a new conflict, he wishes to remain the absolute
superior, "the essential being"; and he refuses to accept his companion as his equal.
So instead of creating a mutual adjustment both try to dominate the other and create a
perpetual tussle.

Now Beauvoir tells that on sexual as well as on spiritual plain there can
be two different attitudes. The "feminine woman" makes herself a prey, she accepts
to be submissive and passive, making herself a thing; while the emancipated or the
"modern woman" accepts masculine values: she takes pride in thinking, taking
action, working, creating, on the same terms as men and she thinks herself their
equal. Like Virginia Woolf, Beauvoir is also of the view that this quarrel will go on
as long as men and women recognize each other as equals or as long as femininity
exists as such. Woman wants to emancipate themselves from it and at the same time
wants to retain its privileges and man wants her to assume its limitations also. So it is
a vicious circle of which both are the victims.

In talking about a man's attitude Beauvoir appears to have same notions as

Woolf has. She says:

Man is concerned with the effort to appear male,

important, superior, he pretends so as to get pretence in
return; he, too, is aggressive, uneasy; he feels hostility
for women because he is afraid of them, he is afraid of
them because he is afraid of the personage, the image,
with which he identifies himself. What time and
strength he squanders in liquidating sublimating,
transferring complexes, in talking about women, in
seducing them, in fearing them! He would be liberated
himself in this liberation. But this is precisely what he
dreads.98

96
Ibid., "Conclusion", p. 725.
97
Ibid., p. 726.
98
Ibid., pp. 728-729.

36
That is why he persists in the mystifications which keep women in chains.

"What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet the misfortune, when one is a

woman, is at bottom not to comprehend that it is one," 99 says Kierkegaard. A woman
is restricted and deprived under the pretext that it is in her interest; for example,
guardianship is imposed on the name of protection and she is forbidden to work and
kept at home just to make her happy. Balzac counseled men to treat her as slave and
persuade her that she is a queen. Many men really think that women are privileged;
and in exchange for her liberty, she gets the false treasure of femininity. Few
American sociologists teach today the theory of 'low-class gain' and in France also a
similar opinion exists. They say that "women enjoy that incomparable privilege:
irresponsibility. Free from troublesome burdens and cares, she obviously has 'the
better part".100

Blaming women, women say that they desired the destiny men have
imposed on them. All her training includes restrictions, barring her from revolt and
adventures. Society, including her parents, moulds her in a way to make her
submissive. She is brought up in a way that she easily accepts protection, love,
assistance and supervision of others, but it is man who showed her the way. When a
conflict arises both hold other responsible for the situation. She will blame him for
making her the way she is and he will hold her responsible of accepting it. She is
being deceived in being persuaded that her worth is priceless. In fact she is an
amusement and a thing of pleasure while he is for her the meaning and justification
of her existence.

Beauvoir says that let women have the means and let them take the
responsibility of their existence, their dependency will end and undoubtedly men and
women both will be profited from the new situation. Then she tells that some skeptics
say that women will always be women and some prophesy that by casting off their
femininity they will not become men rather they will turn into monsters. She further
says that woman is not determined by her hormones or by any mysterious instinct,
but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world is regulated by
others. Since childhood she is brought-up differently from a boy in a way that she
could not be other than what she was made.

The New woman, says Beauvoir, cannot appear only by changing the
economic condition of women, a moral; social and cultural change is also required.
Since these are not actualized, the woman of today is a confused being torn between
the past and the future. If a girl was brought up with the same rewards and freedom,
taking part in same studies and games as her brother and surrounded by men and
women who seem to be equals, she would have been an entirely different being and
the meanings of castration complex and Oedipus complex would have been modified.
If a girl perceives around her an androgynous world instead of a masculine world and
is allowed to test her powers in work and sports, competing with boys, she will not
feel the absence of penis and will not develop an inferiority complex and
correlatively the boy would not have a superiority complex. And puberty and
menstruation will stop to be a horrifying thing and for this Beauvoir has thanked the

99
Cited by Simone de Beauvoir, "Conclusion"", The Second Sex, p. 729.
100
Ibid., p. 729.

37
co-education schooling which provides open rivalry and familiarity and has resolved
the mystery of Man in her mind.

Man also, like woman, is flesh who is plaything of his hormones and prey
of his desires. Both men and women are essential for one another and have the same
needs. So if equality will exist between the two, both will be benefited. Beauvoir says
that people could think of it a Utopian fancy, but it could be achieved by breaking the
relation of the oppressor and the oppressed. She says, give women responsibilities
and she will become able to handle them. It could not be expected from the oppressor
to show the generosity, it is the revolt of the oppressed which could create a new
situation and Beauvoir asks women, who have already taken partial emancipation, to
continue their ascent. She also refutes the argument that such type of world, where
woman will become same as her male, is not desirable because the life will lose its
meaning then.

Anticipating the future humanity and shedding all doubts of the skeptics
that equality will never be possible, Beauvoir says:

New relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no

conception will arise between the sexes; already, indeed,
there have appeared between men and women
friendships, rivalries, complicities, comradeships - chaste
or sensual- which past centuries could not have
conceived.101

But there will always be certain differences between man and woman. Her sexual
world, her sensuality and sensitivity will always be of a special nature. Her relation to
her own body, to that of the male and to her child can never be same as that the male
has with his own body, to that of female and to the child. Beauvoir also refutes the
statement that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion and feminine charm will disappear if
men and women will become equal in real sense.

The emancipation of women means to stop limiting them to the roles

assigned to her in relation to man. And if men let her have an independent existence
she will surely exist for him also. The reciprocity of their relations will not make the
words, desire, passion, love, dream and adventure, disappear. On the contrary if the
slavery of half of the humanity will get abolished then the division of humanity will
have its real significance and the human couple will find its true form. Now Beauvoir
ends with an appeal:

It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the

midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme
victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and
through their natural differentiation men and women
unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.102

101
Ibid., p. 740.
102
Ibid., p. 741.

38
Range of Thought

Unlike Virginia Woolf, who does a horizontal study of women's problems

and has a latent anticipation of the basic concerns of several schools of Feminist
Criticism, Simone de Beauvoir attempts a vertical study of women's situation both in
past and present, real and fiction. She unravels almost all the abstract and concrete
assumptions about women and exposes various causes and factors that contribute to
their subordinate position in society. Woolf talks about the women of a particular
class (middle class) and time (nineteenth and twentieth century), whereas Beauvoir
enhances her focus of study and deliberates on women in general; she ventures to
examine everything which is related to women and her world. Her study of women
extends beyond time and space. She does not talk about women of a particular nation
or continent but the whole female race, giving no significance to any geographical or
political boundary. She takes under examination women across time and studies all
the historical, mythological and real constructs of women. Instead of being much
theoretical and critical in her analysis, she very carefully unfolds all the implicit
notions, customary rituals, myths and practices that seek to marginalize women and
acknowledge them as secondary and subordinate to men in all the streams of life. She
attempts to undermine all that exclude women from the main current of life and make
them the stereotype other.

In the The Second Sex, Beauvoir seems to demonstrate at a greater length,

why women were segregated and how all the customs, systems and social institution
like law and religion approve this segregation. She peeps into history, explores
various myths and analysis all psychological, biological and literary views about
women; she examines in greater detail the situations that supported men to
subordinate women and so contributed in their marginalization. About Beauvoir's
view and the range it covers, Elizabeth V. Spellman speculated that "there is hardly
any issue that feminists have come to deal with that she did not address." 103 Indeed
she has touched the issues "such as attitudes towards lesbianism that some later
feminists did not dare to think about." 104 She, in fact, does a thorough survey of the
origins and the perpetuation of the patriarchal oppression of women. There are
scholars, like Judith Okely, who observe some limitations in Beauvoir's The Second
Sex, Okely, for example, states:

de Beauvoir has in part done an anthropological village

study of specific women, but without the
anthropological theory and focus. Her village is largely
mid-century Paris and the women studied, including
herself are mainly middle class. There are almost no
references to working class urban women and only the
rare glimpses of the rural, peasant women.... 105

103
Elizabeth V. Spelman, "Simone De Beauvoir and Women: Just who
Does she Think "we" IS?", eds M.L. Shanley and C. Pateman, Feminist Literary
Interpretations and Political Theory (United States: Pennsylvania State
University, 1991), p. 199.
104
Ibid.

39
Sonia Kruks views The Second Sex as "a painstaking case study of oppression - that
of women by men."106

In fact, to limit Beauvoir's epochal study of the half of the human race
(i.e. women) to the women of a specific class, place or time would be to become
inconsiderate towards her sound thoughts and speculations on the plight of women; it
would also mean to shake one of the pillars that uphold woman's cause in almost all
the ways in the history of feminism. The critical study of various critics on Beauvoir
should not be taken as her loopholes and it should not be counted as her demerits.
There would be hardly any myth, situation, biological attribute and difference,
civilization, religion, customary rituals and social practice that Beauvoir has not
examined. She walked everywhere (mentally), watched everything and examined
them to focus on the female, drawn more frequently from a specific class, time or
place; but her examination and deliberations are not particular but general. She may
be charged for generalizing the problems of women but not for limiting her range of
study. Her study and ultimate conclusion drawn about women's sub-ordination may
be applied and understood with reference to any women without making any
discrimination of their class, race or ethnicity. The nature of their problems may be
different but their cause would be same. Beauvoir seems to have concentrated more
on the cause of women living in any corner of the globe. To have a comprehensive
knowledge about the range of Beauvoir's critical notions; it would be a bit easier to
discuss in brief the various parts and chapters of The Second Sex.

Book I of The Second Sex consists of three parts: "Destiny", "History" and
"Myths". In the first chapter of "Destiny", Beauvoir attempts a study of certain
primary reasons why a woman is considered to be a woman; which attributes
traditionally contribute to the definition of a female. For this, she studies in detail
some biological functions not only of women but of other species also and then
mediates why one is thought to be a woman. Designating woman a creature
consisting of a womb and an ovary, she argues that a woman is recognized with
negative attributes because she is imprisoned "in her sex". To break this construct of
a woman, Beauvoir makes a sound examination of the biological function of
reproduction that men and women perform; and points out that they can only be
defined correlatively. She states that body is not sufficient to define her as a woman.
Biology is not enough to answer the question: why is woman the other? Now she
ventures for another task, that is, how the nature of women has been effected
throughout the course of history and what humanity has made of the human female.

Being unsatisfied and unconvinced with the biological functions of a

woman as the basis of her otherness and subordination, Beauvoir turns towards
psychoanalysis. She studies Freud and Adler and critically accounts for their notions,
drawing the conclusion that neither Adlerianism nor Freudianism gives a satisfactory
explanation of women's subordination. She argues that neither the explanation based

105
Judith Okley, "Rereading The Second Sex, ed. Elizabeth Fallazie, Simone
de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 21.
106
Sonia Kruks, "Beauvoir : The Weight of Situation", ed. Elizabeth
Fallaize, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, (London: Routledge, 1998), p.
58.

40
upon sexual urge nor that based upon motive is sufficient because "every urge poses
a motive but the motive is apprehended only through the urge...." 107 Adler posits the
idea of Psychic causation as an integral part of his system when he introduces his
concepts of goal and of finality; and he is somewhat in accord with Freud in regard to
the relations between drives and mechanisms. She condemns all the psychoanalysts
for alloting the same destiny to woman. Beauvoir writes:

Her drama is epitomised in the conflict between her

'viriloid' and the 'feminine' tendencies, the first
expressed through the clitoral system, the second in
vaginal eroticism. As a child she identifies herself with
her father, . . . he it is whom she really seeks in lover or
husband, thus her sexual love is wingled with the desire
to be dominated.108

She expresses her anger on all the psychoanalytic critics for situating women in such
a demeaned condition: the female child or a young girl, as incited to identification
with the mother and the father, is torn between 'viriloid' and 'feminine' tendencies.
Beauvoir on the other side, observes a girl to be hesitant between the role of the
subordinate which is offered to her by the phallagocentric society and the assertion of
her liberty. It is significant to note here that Virginia Woolf does not turn towards
psychoanalysis. If there are some traces of psychological interpretations of women's
problems, it is covertly involved in the explanation and subordinate to the issues that
show social inequalities and encourage gender discrimination. Beauvoir not only
makes a study of psychological interpretations of emotional trauma of the weaker
sex, but she also criticizes all the psychoanalyst critics for having a jaundiced eye in
accounting for women's involvement in psychological interpretation of human life.

Beauvoir brings to a critical scrutiny all the issues and situations where
women's oppression is visible to her. In "The Point of view of Historical
Materialism", she makes a thorough study of Engel's The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State and rebukes him for inadequately declaring woman's
muscular weakness as a real point of her inferiority and the limitation of her capacity
for labour. She refutes Engel's view on the ground that the division of labour between
sexes would have meant a friendly association and not the division of human race
into two classes.

Now Beauvoir turns the pages of history. She analyses that the division of
labour between man and woman which is based upon the physical capacity and its
limitations, gives rise to several social practices that hammer women's interests to
some extent and various mythological perceptions, superstitions and beliefs because
of which women have been marginalized. If she is granted an honourable place in
society, or if she is worshiped and paid dedication, it happens only in theory and not
in practice. She argues that the golden age of women is only a myth. The fact that
woman is an "other" reveals the fact that there did not exist between the sexes a
reciprocal relation. Legal and religious institutions are afraid of giving woman
107
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Psychoanalytic Point of View", The Second
Sex, p. 75.
108
Ibid.

41
equality with man. She argues that a woman can attain the same position and get the
same respect as a man gets but only by making a relation with him. But, when it
comes to her comparison with a man, she always gets a secondary position. A
Brahmani in India and a Flaminica in Rome are as holy and respectable as their
husbands; but in relation to their husbands they always attain a secondary position. In
"Patriarchal Times and Classical Antiquity", she discusses how patriarchy dominates
society and fetters women with the help of several social institutions like marriage. A
woman is separated from the group in which she is born and annexed to her
husband's group: he buys her as one buys a farm or animal; he imposes his domestic
responsibilities on her that she is compelled to shoulder at the cost of her own
interests; and the children born to her belong not to her but to her husband's family.
She also points out how religious scriptures like Koran proclaims man's superiority
over woman on the basis of the fact that God has given him pre-eminence and he
furnish dowry for woman. 109 She also discusses some customs that pushed woman in
shadow and have cornered her everywhere; everywhere she was made to sacrifice
herself for her male relative (no matter he is dead or alive) whether it was the custom
of "levirate" (the practice of marrying the widow to her brother-in-law) or any other
practice, all made women their target and enjoy ravishing them and their interests,
and Beauvoir is very critical towards them. She examined all the cultures and all the
civilizations, read almost all the scholars/ philosophers of her age or before her and
experienced that everywhere the fair interests of the fairer sex were throttled; Laws
of Manu allowed women to survive her husband but encouraged levirate which took
the form of polyandry in which all the brothers in a family are, to forestall the
uncertainties of widowhood, given as husbands to one woman. In Babylon, the laws
of Hammurabi encouraged dowry; incest was not forbidden and the marriage
between a brother and a sister was in practice. Not only this, Beauvoir also studies
women's situation from middle age to eighteenth century France and observed no
change in woman's situation. She studies philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire and
Diderot, and notices that all of them dedicate a woman's life, education and all efforts
to the pleasure of her husband. It is important to notice that Beauvoir, like Woolf,
turns out to be a radical feminist as far as her concentration centres on female
oppression in an androcentric society. Though she denies to be called a feminist in
any regard, yet she seems to have some implications of the views of Radical Feminist
Criticism. Chris Beasley foregrounds the radical feminist thoughts in following
words:

Radical Feminism pays attention to women's

oppression as women in a social order dominated by
men. According to this approach, the distinguishing
character of women's oppression is their oppression as
women, not as members of other groups such as their
social class. Hence, the explanation for women's
oppression is seen as lying in sexual oppression.110

109
Ibid., "Patriarchal Times and Classical Antiquity", p. 115.
110
Chris Beasley, "Starters on the Feminist Menu: Liberal, Radical and
Marxist/Socialist Feminisms", p. 54.

42
It is remarkable here that Beauvoir leaves no stone unturned to demonstrate the
oppression of women in society. She queries into almost all the matters and situations
to bring out the subordination of women.

Beauvoir now peeps into various myths for the instances of female
subordination. She explores the creation myth and argues that a woman's birth is not
independent: she is created to become a companion of man. Eve was created from
Adam's rib and God made her to worship him and to take him out from loneliness; so
in her mate was her origin and purpose. Beauvoir sharpens scepticism in her reader
and dismantles a variety of western myths about women. She reads all rituals related
to childbirth as evidence that gestation is naturally and universally found to be
disgusting. Among several, one is the myth of association of women with nature. A
woman is conceived to be passive Earth and man to be the seed, the true creator.
Beauvoir's examination of myth "explores a process whereby women's subordination
is reaffirmed or over determined through ideology." 111 That Beauvoir offers these
ideas about women as causes or consequences of women's marginalization is less
important, more significant is the fact that she points out the recurrent aspects of
myths of women, and she should be given the credit for that. Okely charges Beauvoir
for her limitation and observes her tendency towards generalization misleading when
she strays into cultures in another time or space. Okley writes:

de Beauvoir selects from social anthropology cross -

cultural examples which confirm her argument and
avoids reference to the many available counter-
examples. To be fair, she does attempt some broad
distinctions between Islam, Greico-Roman culture and
Christianity. Both otherwise, random cases are plucked
from India, Egypt and Oceania, with only occasional
counter-examples.112

Whatever stand Okley holds to criticize Beauvoir, but one cannot deny the fact that
Beauvoir's Understanding of women's problems and her depiction of female
subordination and its causes covers not only French or European cultures, but it
ranges to oriental cultures too. She brings her examples not only from Christianity
but also from Islamic scriptures, Hindu religion alongwith other canonical Occidental
and Oriental philosophers and scholars from ancient times to present day. Beauvoir
delineates the female image already portrayed in various standard literary writings.
She selects five writers and examines their perspectives on the myths of women. She
argues that almost all the writers draw the same conclusion. In describing women,
each writer discloses his general ethics; and in her often betrays the gap between his
world view and his egotistical dream. For all of them, the ideal woman will be she
who incarnates most exactly the other, capable of revealing him to himself.
Montherlant seeks pure animality in a woman; Lawrence, the phallicist, seeks to sum
up the feminine sex in general; Chandel defines her as a soul-sister; Stendhal wants
his mistress intelligent, cultivated, free in spirit and behaviour. The soul master of

111
Judith Okley, p. 23.
112
Ibid.

43
woman in any image (the woman child, the soul-sister, the woman-sex or the woman
animal) is always a man.

It is noteworthy here that Beauvoir's cross-cultural, cross-continental

study of female plight and predicament in all the situations and times makes an
archetypal pattern of women's problems. Everywhere and in all the times, women
were given the secondary place in the society and men had (and still have) the same
attitude, i.e. of the other, towards them. They were always assumed to be a pleasure
giving object of man's desire. Whether it is myths or reality, dream or desire, fact or
imagination, women are conceived to be an alluring object that man takes pain to
endure only to extinguish his fire of lust.

Being unsatisfied with her examination of women's situations in the first

volume of The Second Sex, Bauvoir, in the second volume, Women's life Today,
further ventures to explore how one is not born but rather becomes a woman; what
are the situations, factors and causes that affect a woman's mind and make her
assume herself in the image of a woman. In the first chapter, "Childhood", of the
fourth part, "The Formative Years", Beauvoir discusses the situations a female child
undergoes and elaborates several social practices that create a psychological trauma
in a girl. She again discusses the biological differences between a male and a female
child and interprets it in the light of psychoanalysis. She argues that in the first three -
four years, there is no difference between the attitudes of a boy and a girl. It is the
difference in their nourishment and treatment they get in the society that make a girl
realize her different from a boy and identify herself in the terms of what a boy is not.
She also discusses some differences between a girl and a boy on the ground of their
behaviour that they bring into practice because of their biological convenience: the
difference, for example, between the habits of urinating; a boy urinates while
standing and a girl does it by sitting. Beauvoir concludes that the biological reasons
and differences are less responsible than the realizations about one's inferiority,
imposed through the practices and treatments of society; that makes a girl grow
wounded, shameful and culpable. Throughout her childhood a girl suffers bullying
and restriction of activity.

In "the young girl", Beauvoir examines the situations a girl faces after her
childhood. Being transcendent in childhood, she does not accept her inferiority all of
a sudden. Beauvoir argues that a girl brought up and treated in boyish fashion does
not feel any sort of lacking, weakness or imperfection; instead, she thinks herself as
strong as a boy. With the march of time, she starts realizing her weakness. In her
childhood, she suffers the lack of male sexual organ (not in the way of Freud) which
is conceived to be the emblem of transcendence, confidence, independence, power
and superiority. But now she starts realizing her dependence and inferiority in other
ways, developing new psychological traumas. Beauvoir states that in a young girl,
the biological fact of painful menstruation affects her both physically and mentally.
Any girl overcomes that crisis, but the differences that society creates in its treatment
of a boy and a girl is hardly to be overruled. A girl is prevented to do certain things
that are thought to be a boy's privilege: playing, climbing trees etc. Parents are hostile
towards their daughter's liberation; she is cut off from the male gathering, prohibited
to behave like a boy. Mothers teach their daughters to treat the boys no longer as
their comrades, not to make advances and to a passive role. If they wish to start a
friendship or flirtation, they must carefully avoid to take the initiative in it. Beauvoir
argues how a girl starts developing a complex that no one understands her, cares for
her desires and respects her wishes. Beauvoir writes:

44
 She is also convinced that she is not understood; her
relations with herself are then only the more
impassioned; she is intoxicated with her isolation, she
feels herself different, superior, exceptional; she
promises herself that the future will be a revenge upon
the mediocrity of her present life."113

In whatever way a girl attains her adulthood, her apprenticeship, Beauvoir argues, is
not yet over. Whether gradually or all of a sudden, she must undergo what Beauvoir
calls "sexual initiation." If sexually disagreeable incidents have marred their
childhood; if faulty education has rooted in them a lover of sexuality, they may attain
their childish repugnance for the males. She states that circumstances may enforce a
prolonged virginity upon certain women against their wills. But generally a young
girl fulfils her sexual destiny sooner or later. In "sexual Initiation", Beauvoir,
demonstrates how women are subordinated through sexual intercourse which she
receives first as an odd experience then as an activity - that has to be performed to
gratify her partner's sexual needs. She gives an example of Isadora Duncan and
narrates how she got fever as she was enforced to maintain a sexual relation. She
quotes Duncan:

Frightened but ecstatic and crying out in pain, I was

initiated into the act of love. I confess that my
impressions were a horrible fright and atrocious pain,
as if some had torn out several of my teeth at once; but
a great pity for what he seemed to be suffering
prevented me from running away from what was at first
sheer mutilation and torture... Next day what was at
that time no more than a painful experience for me
continued amidst my martyred cries and tears. I felt as
if I were being mangled.114

Beauvoir hardly leaves any situation that a woman faces in a patriarchal

society. In "The Lesbian", she muses on the factors, problems and situations that
enforce a woman to involve in this act which is traditionally considered derogatory
and unhealthy for society. One reason why women turn towards lesbianism is that
they want to protest against the practice which gives men privilege to treat women as
puppets. The other is that they want to initiate men who play the active part. The
other complexes which make her a lesbian are: when she thinks herself less charming
to arouse male desire, or when she wants a soft treatment, or when she is deprived of
her mother's love, or when she wants a sexual relation where nobody is superior or
inferior, or she is betrayed in love, or when she wants a relation where she does not
have to pretend on where there is nobody to judge her. But women don't get liberated
in this concern also. They still feel frustrated and disappointed because being a
lesbian they become defective women and incomplete men.

113
Simone de Beauvoir, p. 364.
114
Quoted by Simone de Beauvoir, "Sexual Initiation", p. 405.

45
 Beauvoir does not view marriage and motherhood as happy experiences
for women in a man ruled society. In Part V, "Situation", Beauvoir states in "The
Married Woman" that marriage has been promoted as a desirable norm in all the
cultures, even though it has traditionally served only the male interests. Marriage is
an institution that allots a woman her destiny and works as a legal, social and
religious institution which contributes to female subordination and exploitation. It
stands as a social, religious and legal canon according to which women are defined,
identified and acknowledged. Beavuoir writes: "The celibate woman is to be
explained and defined with reference to marriage, whether she is frustrated,
rebellious or even indifferent in regard to that institution." 115 Marriage has always
been a different thing for a man and a woman. It is necessary for both the sexes, but
this necessity has never developed reciprocity between them because it almost all the
time works as an agent to support and promote male interest. It comes, as Beauvoir
writes, to both the parties (that is the bride and the groom) at the same time as a
burden and a benefit; but there is no symmetry in the situations of the two sexes. For
girls, marriage is the only means of integrity in the community, and if they remain
unmarried, they are, socially viewed, so much wastage. Infact, marriage promises
women some share in the world as her own and law protects her against capricious
action by men; but she becomes his vassal. He is the economic head of the joint
enterprise, hence he represents it in the view of society. She owns her husband's
caste, class, religion, reputation; so she is presumed to be utterly dependent on him.
Beauvoir argues that there are some households which give the impression of
forming a relation on the basis of perfect equality. But as long as man retains
economic responsibility for the couple, this will only be an illusion. It is he who takes
decisions in the family and woman is supposed to remain mute and obey him utterly.
She cannot get complete freedom until this situation prevails. Beauvoir further states:

Divorce is only a theoretical possibility for the woman

who cannot earn her own living; if in America alimony
is a heavy charge upon the man, in France the lot of the
abandoned wife or mother, dependent upon a
ridiculously small pension, is a scandal.116

Unsatisfied with her marital life, a woman, argues Beauvoir, nourishes

some hope of fulfillment of her desires in maternity. Through her child, she expects
to retain her honour and position, sexually and socially; in her maternity, she fulfills
her physiological destiny. But she has little control over her experiences of
motherhood as contraception and abortion are not available to her. For Beauvoir,
there is no such thing "as a maternal instinct it is a patriarchal fabrication which
can instill maternal guilt because women's reactions to their motherhood are very
variable."117 Beauvoir reflects:

. . . no maternal 'instinct' exists: the moral hardly

applies, in any case, to the human species. The mother's

115
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Married Woman", p. 445.
116
Ibid., p. 498.
117
Ursula Tidd, "Becoming a Woman", p. 68.

46
 attitude depends on her total situation and her reaction
to it. As we have just seen, this is highly variable. 118

Beauvoir contends that motherhood is too important a task to entrust to a sector of

the population who is denied complete autonomy. It is noteworthy that Beauvoir
analytically studies woman in all the situations and at every stage.

Beauvoir devotes her next chapter to women's condition in a patriarchal

society and deliberates on their social life. She observes that women have been
accorded some derogatory position in society and her interests are sacrificed to
benefit men. Women do not have any other option but to compromise, in the
complicated situation, with her partner and victimize her in almost all the walks of
life. In the chapter "Prostitutes and Hetairas", she muses on another group of women
present in society that is prostitutes and Hetairas. She analyses that here a woman's
situation grows worse; she is segregated not only from the rest of society but from
the female community also. In her next succeeding chapters, "From Maturity to Old
Age", and "Woman's Situation and Character", Beauvoir ponders over other
complexes women have. She states that some changes in biological functions and the
frustration that springs from these changes horrify her from becoming a useless
object for the rest of her family members. That also contributes, according to
Beauvoir, to affirm female subordination.

In the chapter, "The Independent Women", Beauvoir just points out the
contradiction between what a woman is promised to be provided and what she is
given. She argues that theoretically a woman is (or demonstrated) independent; but
practicality she is deprived of whatever pleases her. She states that French Law
accorded several types of freedom and obedience which is no longer included among
the duties of a wife. But these "civil liberties remain theoretical as long as they are
unaccompanied by economic freedom." 119 Here it is significant to remark that
Beauvoir asserts the same view as Virginia Woolf professed. But at the same time,
Beauvoir differs from Woolf in stressing that only economic independence is not
sufficient to liberate women from the androcentric practices in society. A job does
not let a woman get rid of domestic liabilities. She does not easily win a man's
confidence and is not considered as efficient and competent at work as a man.
Maternity is another factor that prevent women from actualizing the dream of liberty.

In the "conclusion" of The Second Sex, Beauvoir muses over the causes
and situation which are acting as obstacles in the attainment of the state of perfect
equality among men and women. She refutes the doubts that if women will become
equal to men, words like love, passion, dream, adventure and feminine charm will
disappear. She will become just like men and life will loose its savour. Beauvoir
appeals to let women have their own independent existence and she will exist for
man also. Then she anticipates the future which this process of evolution will bring
where men and women will be equal and will develop new relations of flesh and

118
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Mother", The Second Sex,
p. 526.
119
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Independent Woman", p. 689.

47
sentiments among them. But the difference will always remain with equality since
men and women cannot be same in their nature and behaviour.

Critical Achievement

Simone de Beauvoir's name and career as a feminist critic rests on her The
Second Sex which she wrote in the mid 1940's but she did not like to be called a
feminist until 1965. This was because she "rejected first wave" feminist groups in
France prior to the MLF as reformist and in sufficiently radical in their political
projects."120 In 1970s, Beauvoir joined the activists and got involved in the second
wave feminist campaigns, she also advocated for the issues concerning women that
the second wave feminists raised in France such as the fight for legalized abortion. It
will be the purpose of this section to mark out the significance of the feminist
thoughts elaborated in The Second Sex. Besides this, the section is also an attempt to
represent the development of Beauvois's feminist thought as it developed after The
Second Sex, and both prior to and during the second-wave feminist movement in
France. She did not write any sequel to The Second Sex and her notions after 1940's
were articulated mainly in interviews and short texts. So it will be helpful to examine
briefly her ideas and views deliberated in her ground - breaking work on gender, The
Second Sex.

Divided into two books, Facts and Myths and Women's Life Today, The
Second Sex focuses on how femininity has been conceptualized and how woman
become relative beings in a patriarchal world. Its main venture is to highlight how
women, throughout history, have been constructed as man's other and denied access
to a free and autonomous existence. The persistence of patriarchal ideology
throughout history enabled men to assume that they have the right to keep women in
a subordinate position and women have unwittingly internalized that position.
Beauvoir speculates that both "men and women perpetuate patriarchy, which is why
it is able to continue."121 Sexual marginalization continues because, according to
Beauvoir, gender roles are formed and learned from a very early age and reinforced
perpetually. For her, the society is organized with its several sections structured
accordingly in such a way as to favour male projects and aspirations. She notices
certain biological and cultural differences between man and woman, but she does not
accept that the valuing of these gender differences could "justify the oppression of
women and their traditional status as second class citizens in patriarchal society." 122

In the introduction of the first volume of The Second Sex, Beauvoir states
that woman is transcendent who, like man, should live as an authentic subject and
allows others to do the same.123 She also points out that freedom is an individual and

120
Ursula Tidd, "Feminist Praxis", p. 71.
121
Ibid., "Becoming Woman", p. 51.
122
Ibid., p. 52.
123
Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence (London: Wesleyan University
Press, 1996), p. 184.

48
collective undertaking: "to will oneself free is also to will others free". 124 In her The
Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir further maintains that freedom implies transcendence
and responsibility: "to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to
be able to surpass the given towards an open future." 125 She speculates that
"woman . . . finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the
status of the other" and is deprived of her transcendent position. 126

In addition to an existentialist ethical study, Beauvoir also adopts a

Marxist analysis of history in her interpretation of the situation of women. In her
attempt to account for the interpretation of the causes of the origin of woman's
oppression, she argues that "historical evidence is not reliable or conclusive because
it is produced by men to justify their oppression of women." 127 Following Hegel's
account of master - slave dialectic, she finds woman's position as absolute "Other" as
the result of a process of becoming socialized. She argues that "to be" a woman
should be interpreted in the light of the Hegelian notion of "to have become". 128 She
compares women with other marginalized groups and concludes that unlike the latter,
the former has not been recognised and has no position. She speculates:

They have no past, no history, no religion of their

own, . . . they live dispersed among males, attached
through residence, housework, economic condition,
and social standing to certain men - fathers or husbands
- more firmly than they are to other women. If they
belong to the bourgeois, they feel solidarity with men
of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are
white, their allegiance is to white men, not
negro women, . . . the bond that unites her to
her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The
division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in
human history.129

It may be noted here that Beauvoir mentions two different notions of

"otherness". One is the master-slave conflict which attempts to establish the concept
of “self” and other among men; and the other is the non dialectical relationship
rooted in their biological and psychological dependence on each other. Thus, women
is other to man but she is not the same type of other as other men are against whom
man seeks to differentiate and define himself. Infact, woman is other to man "because
of the special nature of her relationship to her oppressor through a combination of

124
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press,
1947), p. 73.
125
Ibid., p. 91.
126
Ibid., "Introduction", The Second Sex, p. 29.
127
Ursula Tidd, "Becoming Woman", p. 54.
128
Ibid.
129
Simone de Beauvoir, "Introduction", The Second Sex, p. 19.

49
economic, emotional, domestic and social bonds." 130 In her formulation of the notion
of the otherness of women, Beauvoir is also indebted to the contemporary
anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss, who argues in his The Elementary Structures
of Kinship that "men always use women as 'instruments of exchange' among
themselves to retain their social power." 131 Women, consequently, are compelled to
assume themselves as secondary and absolute other to men who present themselves
as universal subjects.

In the first volume of The Second Sex, divided into three parts entitled
"Destiny", "History" and "Myths", Beauvoir examines how in a patriarchal society
femininity is conceived, interpreted and represented. Initially, she observes three
influential forces which she finds responsible to describe what it is to be a woman;
these forces are biology, psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Beauvoir's foregrounding argument concerning women's biology is that

women are "obliged to experience their body as facticity rather than contingency: this
means that women do not choose how they 'exist' their bodies because their
embodiment has been pre-defined by patriarchal society." 132 Woman's relationship to
her body is, therefore, a cultural product and not a natural reality. It is noteworthy
that Beauvoir's view of embodied existence in The Second Sex owes to Sartre's
account of body in Being and Nothingness and M.H. Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perceptions. Beauvoir views Ponty's view of subjectivity "as always already
incarnate." His concept of body was close to her notion of the female body "as
expressive of situation and distinct from Sartre's account in Being and Nothingness of
embodied consciousness as effectively striving towards its own perpetual self
disembodiment."133 She finds Sartre's view of the body rather abstract.

The second view that Beauvoir objects is Sartre's account of the body as a
passive instrument. She charges him for neglecting the sophisticated ways in which
one can experience one's body psychologically and physiologically. She seems to
adopt rather Ponty's view of the embodied subject and develops her own notion of
the lived body and the represented body in the context of gender. She argues that
woman's experience of embodiment is separated from her transcendence; and in an
androcentric society which has traditionally promoted woman's objectification, she is
invited to reduce her transcendent subjectivity to her physicality and is rewarded for
it. In The Second Sex, she makes it clear that woman's alienation in her body is not
inevitable, but the lurid portrayal of female biology might appear deterministic. In
this reference, Toril Moi states, "for Beauvoir, women are the slaves of species.
Every Biological process in the female body is a "crisis" or a "trial", and the result is
always alienation."134

Beauvoir discusses the issue of sexuality in her chapter on psychoanalysis

and in the "Formative Years", and criticizes it for devaluing women in several ways.

130
Ursula Tidd, p. 255.
131
Ibid.
132
Ibid., "Becoming Woman", p. 56.
133
Ibid., p. 57.
134
Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
(Cambridge/Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 165.

50
First, sexuality and gender are of great importance in psychoanalytic theory.
Psychoanalysis views gender as central to the constitution of subjectivity; all identity
is seen in terms of gendered identity. Second, since psychoanalysis is concerned with
telling stories in talk therapy, feminism takes interest in analyzing women's lives and
the patriarchal system which shapes those lives. She charges Freud for being
prejudiced in conceiving female sexuality on a male model; she condemns him for
stating that a girl can only consider herself as a mutilated boy and suffers "penis
envy". She refutes the view that girls value the penis in the way Freud describes. She
argues that the girl's entire situation in a patriarchal society contributes to her sense
of inferiority, not because she does not have a penis: "she envies instead the
privileges brought by the possession of a penis." 135

Beauvoir speculates that all psychoanalysts allot more or less the same
identity to woman and interpret her in terms of the conflict between her masculine
and feminine tendencies. As an existentialist, she views psychoanalysis as
suppressing the notions of choice and value rather than viewing existence as a
material experience. She emphasizes that situation and reciprocal relations are the
key factors in subjectivity. In her Sexual/Texual Politics, Toril Moi states that
Beauvoir in The Second Sex discusses Marxist views less than the existentialist
notions. Moi argues that she may be a socialist, but her notions are not grounded on
the traditional Marxist theory. They are influenced rather with Sartre's existential
philosophy. Moi points out: "In spite of its commitment to socialism, The Second Sex
is based not on traditional Marxist theory, but on Sartre's existentialist philosophy". 136

It will be untrue to deny Beauvoir's Marxist implications in The Second

Sex. She has used several Marxist analyses of history. A fundamental assumption that
she shares with Marxists is the rejection of a given human nature: human nature is a
historical and social product. Human nature is not a reality but a social/cultural
reality. Beauvoir argues that economic and social contexts are crucial in determining
the importance attributed to the "biological facts" of gender. She finds Friedrich
Engel's the main representative of historical materialism because it was he, not Marx,
who deliberated on the situation of women in his development of Marxist theory. She
refutes his claim that women's oppression is related to the ownership of private
property. She objects Engles for reducing the antagonism of the sexes to class
conflict. She argues that it is true that the division of labour according to sex and the
consequent oppression gives the impression that the society is divided on the basis of
class. But it is impossible to confuse the two. A woman is not simply a worker, but a
human being who has productive and reproductive capabilities. Beauvoir reflects: "it
is impossible to regard woman simply as a productive force: she is for a man a sexual
partner, a reproducer, an erotic object through whom he seeks himself." 137

In Part II, "History", of Book I, Facts and Myths, Beauvoir peeps into past
and unearths all the historical monuments of fact and fiction, myths and realities,
truths and falsity, and brings them to a critical scrutiny. She examines all the factors
and situations in history that contributed to push women in margins and lose her

135
Ursula Tidd, "Becoming Woman", p. 61.
136
Toril Moi, "From Simone de Beauvoir to Jaques Lacan", Sexual/Texual
Politics (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 90.
137
Simone de Beauvoir "The Point of View of Historical Materialism", The
Second Sex, p. 90.

51
transcendence. She speculates on how some situations and biological attributes
turned out to be the main cause of the division of the work between man and woman;
how the latter was compelled to limit herself to domestic activities and child bearing
and how the former enjoyed all the privileges by taking the responsibility of all
outdoor activities. She ponders over how patriarchy dominated society from the
classical antiquity; and how all female interests were marginalized, limited and
finished to some extent to benefit the males: "she runs nothing, woman does not
enjoy the dignity of being a person; she herself forms a part of the patrimony of a
man: first of her father, then of her husband." 138 Beauvoir examines most of the
civilizations, religious scriptures, customs and cultures, but everywhere she finds
women in a secondary and miserable position. The customs of the Greeks, orients,
Egyptians, Babylonians, all accord more or less the same position to women and
surrender them to men's pleasure. She furthers her meditation and contemplates how
in different continents women were deprived of certain rights; how after the French
Revolution they started getting certain rights, such as right to vote; but freedom was
still required in all the domains of life and women faced several inequalities in almost
all the streams of life. In house, they were dominated; if they went outside to explore
freedom by earning money, they could not visualize their dreams of getting equality
to men because they (woman) were paid less remuneration in comparison to men. In
this part, Beauvoir unveils the fact how from the antiquity men kept in their hands all
concrete powers, kept women in a state of dependence; how their codes of law were
set against women, and how they (women) were established as other.

In the third part, "Myths" of Book I, Beauvoir has discussed the myth of
women in Society and literature. Women have been given certain images and are
conceived in terms of certain attributes. She discusses various contradictory images
of women: at one place she is viewed as a sexual object and at the other place she is
assumed to be the Goddess and mother Earth. Then she examines the myths of
women in five different authors: D.H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, Montherlant and
Stendhal. For Montherlant, she writes, man is transcendent and soars in the sky of
heroes, while woman crawls on earth, beneath his feet; it pleases him to measure the
distance that separates him from her. Lawrence adopts the same standpoint and
places transcendence in the phallus; the phallus is life and power only by virtue of
women. A woman should give up all personal transcendence and confine herself to
furthering that of her male. Claudel asks her for the same commitment and integrity.
For him, a woman should sustain life while man extends its range through his
activities. For Berton, woman is a revelation because she tears him out of his
subjectivity. Stendhal hardly sees any mystical value in woman.

Beauvoir divides her Second Book, Woman's Life Today, of The Second
Sex into four parts: "The Formative Years" "Situation", "Justifications" and
"Towards Liberation". In "The Formative Years", she analyses many psychoanalytic
and biological factors that contribute to women's subordination. In "Childhood",
"The Young Girl", and "Sexual Initiation", she points out how girls are neglected and
marginalized due to certain biological attributes. She maintains that in childhood girls
do not observe any biological difference between boys and themselves. They are
treated equally, but as soon as they grow they start observing the difference in the
attitudes and practices, for example, the practice of urinating, made men different and
privileged from the girls. Beauvoir writes:

138
Ibid., "Patriarchal Times and Classical Antiquity", p. 114.

52
 Investigations make it clear that the majority of parents
would rather have sons than daughters. Boys are spoken
to with greater seriousness and esteem, they are granted
more rights; they themselves treat girls scornfully. . . 139

Beauvoir also examines several biological changes, like menstruation, that contribute
to decide their position as "other".

In "The Young Girl", Beauvoir states that girls in their adolescence are
prevented from several types of freedom while boys are granted much liberty and
appreciated for their effort to become a man who knows the world. Girls are required
to stay at home, their outdoor movements are restricted. She is expected to become a
woman; and to be a feminine is to appear weak, futile and docile. In succeeding
chapters of the fourth part of The Second Sex, Beauvoir unfolds several practices that
give women a complex which corners them and cuts them of from the main stream of
life; sometimes they prefer women as their companions for a soft treatment. She
states that lesbianism is no more a perversion deliberately indulged in, but it is a cure
of fate. It is an approach towards life chosen in a certain situation - "that is, at once
motivated and freely adopted."140

In "the Married Woman", Beauvoir stresses the relevance of marriage as

an institution which grants women subordination in many ways. She states that there
have been situations when marriage took a contractual form. Contracts were made
between father-in-law and son-in-law; and dowry and inheritance still enslaved her to
her family. She argues that two sexes are necessary to each other, but necessity does
not bring a condition of reciprocity between them. She reflects that marriage is the
destiny that society has traditionally imposed upon woman. It has become a standard,
an attribute to define woman and to explain her desires, dreams and sentiments.

Beauvoir writes: "Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to

women by society. . . ."141 In marrying, woman gets her husband's name, religion,
class, circle; so she becomes his "half". She is made to realise that her husband is the
supreme authority as he gives so many things to her: house, name and even identity.
She, therefore, should try her best to please him by gratifying his sexual needs, taking
care of his household and begetting him children. Having been separated by marriage
from all whatever is hers, a woman is made to adopt and adapt all that is alien to her
and made to breath in a strange place. Now, as a wife, she feels, she is not a complete
individual; when she becomes mother, the child becomes her happiness and her
justification. It is through her child that she hopes to find self realization sexually and
socially; through child bearing, the institution of marriage gets its meaning and
achieves its purpose.

Child bearing, Beauvoir writes, appears no longer a priceless treasure to

woman; to give birth is no longer a sacred function. It has rather turned out to be a
feminine defect. The proliferation of cells becomes troublesome, the monthly bother

139
Ibid., "Childhood", p. 313.
140
Ibid., "The Lesbian" , p. 444.
141
Ibid., "The Married Woman", p. 445.

53
seems comparatively a blessing. Men universally forbid abortion but individually
they accept it as a convenient solution for a problem.

But woman feels this in her flesh; she is too timid for open revolt against
man's will; she regards herself as a victim of an injustice that makes her a criminal
against her will. To account in brief, Beauvoir sums up several troubles that a woman
faces in motherhood and concludes that a wife can cheerfully carry "the house
keeping load; happy in her children, she will be forbearing with her husband. But
such harmony is not easy to attain for the various functions assigned to women are
out of tune with one another". 142 Beauvoir now gives her conclusive statement. She
argues that, being codified by man, society decrees that woman is inferior, and she
can do away with this inferiority only by destroying male superiority that is
embedded in reigning patriarchy. But doing this, she states, would only be her
defense against man. Beauvoir appeals men that it is they who could establish the
state of equality amidst the differentiation between them. In her Sexual/Texual
Politics, Toril Moi sums up the whole thesis of Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Moi
states:

Beauvoir's main thesis in the epochal work is simple:

throughout history, women have been reduced to objects
for men; woman has been constructed as man's other,
divide the right to her own subjectivity and the
responsibility to her own actions. . . . (P)atriarchal
ideology presents woman as immanence, man as
transcendence. Beauvoir shows how these fundamental
assumptions dominate all aspects of social, political and
cultural life and, equally important, how women
themselves internalize this objectified vision. . . .143

It is interesting to note that after writing such a ground breaking treatise on female
plight and predicament, Beauvoir did not consider herself a feminist. Beauvoir
asserts:

At the end of The Second Sex I said that I was not a

feminist because I believed that the problems of
women would resolve themselves automatically in
the context of socialist development. By feminist I
meant fighting on specifically feminine issues
independently of the class struggle. I still hold the
same view today. In my opinion, feminists are
women- or even men too - who are fighting to change
women's condition, in association with the class
struggle independently of it as well without making
the changes they strive for totally dependent on
changing society as a whole. I would say that, in that
sense, I am a feminist today, because I realized that

142
Ibid., "The Mother", p. 541.
143
Toril Moi, Sexual/Texual Politics, p. 90.

54
 we must for the situation of women, here and now,
before our dreams of socialism come true.144

Beauvoir gave two most significant interviews in 1985 with Francis

Jeanson and explained her notion of sexual difference as being a 'cultural fact' which
is constituted as a major social difference. She, for the first time, declared herself
"radicalement feministe" (completely feminist) in that the fundamentally discounts
the determining importance of sexual difference. 145

Between 1972 and 1982, Beauvoir gave a number of interviews with Slice
Schworzer, a German feminist, Where we come to know about her feminist thoughts
developed after The Second Sex. Schworzer interviewed Beauvoir for two reasons:
one was to publicize Beauvoir's conversion to feminism, and the other was to make
money for the M.L.F. (Women's Liberation Movement). In her first interview,
Beauvoir reveals that the main cause of her joining M.L.F. in November 1971 was to
fight for the right to abortion. She condemns the reformist and legalistic groups of
women prior to M.L.F. and reveals that she was attracted towards the radical nature
of the post 1968 materialistic feminism. Estimating the political limitations of her
statement in The Second Sex that women’s condition would improve in the context of
socialist development, Beauvoir approves the struggle gender equality. She argues
that women should analyse this; and contests the notion that all heterosexual relations
are necessarily oppressive. She again stresses the need of paid work as the necessary
precondition for women's liberation from male tyranny; women must organise
themselves collectively to accomplish their autonomy of both body and mind. She
favours for "the limited use of violence in self-defence so that woman can counter
male aggression."146

In her interview in 1976 with Schworzer after the legal acceptance of

abortion, Beauvoir "works against the potential back cash of free abortion'. . . (for) it
can be used against women as a means to pressurize them into having sex." 147 Here
she comments on a range of current debates in feminist politics. She rejects wages
for domestic work, saying that domestic responsibility should be shared by everyone.
She accepts lesbianism as a temporary political strategy and also believes that
homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality. In another interview, Beauvoir
rejects the emergence of "new femininity" and the mystification of motherhood.
Being asked if feminism has failed, she argues that it has only reached a small
number of women.

144
Simone de Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir Today: Conversations with
Slice Schwartzer 1972-1982. (London: Chatto, 1984), p. 32.
145
Jeanson Francis, Simone de Beauvoir on enterprise drive (Paris: Sevil,
1966), p. 258.
146
Ursula Tidd, "Feminist Praxis", p. 77.
147
Ibid.

55
 In an interview with John Gerassi in 1975, she comments on the impact of
The Second Sex and her feminism. She rejects the view that her study of women
constituted the beginning of second wave feminism, specially in the United States
because the majority of feminist activists were too young to have been influenced by
it.148 She states that sexism is equally present in left wing organisations as elsewhere
in patriarchal society. Consequently, feminism's fight for gender equality has to take
place independently of the class struggle. 149 Now she realizes and rejects the
proposition that socialist revolution would bring sexual equality because patriarchal
values remain unchallenged in socialist countries like Soviet Union and
Czechoslovakia.

Beauvoir calls a feminist a left-wing, because she fights for total equality
- social equality is implied in the fight for gender equality. She also depends on
feminist separatism and the use of consciousness raising groups for women to
discover their identity as women. She makes the similarity between lesbian
separatism as a political strategy and the black power movement in United States.
However, other radical lesbian separatists, in her view, also show solidarity with
other political struggles.

In 1978, Beauvoir gave another interview to a daily newspaper, Le

Monde. Here she once again asserts her original notion that femininity and
masculinity are social constructions. 150 She noticed that women's situation had
deteriorated in 1970s because of increased male hostility towards women's liberation.
The new abortion law is not sufficiently enforced because abortions were still
widespread.

The significance of Beauvoir ideas expressed in The Second Sex and

elsewhere can be traced out by its impact on several studies like post-colonialism.
Though Frantz Fanon does not explicitly mention any debt from Beauvoir's critical
notions, yet its influence can easily be noticed in his ground breaking Black Skin
White Masks published in 1952. Considered by many to be the founder of the
postcolonial studies, Fanon draws on Hegelian philosophy, Sartrean existentialism,
anthropology and psychoanalysis to theorize black alienation/ segregation in a racist
regime. It is possible, Fanon might have come across to some extracts of The Second
Sex because Beauvoir makes explicit connections between the aspect of oppression
of the Jews, blacks and women in The Second Sex which encouraged a postcolonial

148
Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex: 25 Years Later", Society 13, (2)
(1976), p. 79.
149
Ibid., p. 80.
150
Simone de Beauvoir, "Entretion avec Simone de Beauvoir", eds. C.
Francis and F. Gontier, Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard,
1979), p. 563.

56
engagement with her work. Toril Moi 151, Gertrude Mianda152, and Tidd153 are some of
the scholars who have supported this notion. Beauvoir's stature as a leading feminist
critical thinker can be measured by the fact that her thought is thriving across the
world as new generations of readers engage with what Toril Moi calls “the embelic
intellectual woman of the twentieth century." 154 She makes all the latent manifest and
points out how one is not a woman by birth or by the virtue of some biological
attributes, rather one is compelled to become a woman by culture and civilization
pervaded by patriarchy.



151
Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman,
pp. 204-207.
152
Gertrude Mianda, "Le Fe'minisme Postcolonial et Le Deuxieme Sexe:
rupture on continuite ?, eds C. Coderre and Marie-Blanche Tahon, Le Deuxieme
Sexe: Une relecture en trois temps 1949-1971 (Montreal : Editions du Remue -
Menage, 2001), pp. 143-160.
153
Ursula Tidd, "Le Deuxieme Sexe, la conscience noire et la conscience
lesbienne", eds. C. Delphy and S. Chaperon, Cinquantenoire du Deuxieme Sexe
(Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2002).
154
Toril Moi, Sexual/Texual Politics, p. 1.

57
58