In the Second Sex<\/i>, Beauvoir suggests that women, as the \u2018second sex\u2019, have nearly always been in a position of subordination to men. This marks a key difference between women and other oppressed groups: while enslaved or colonized communities throughout Western history have typically risked their lives in revolt or rebellion and can collectively remember a time prior to the event of their enforced subordination, the history of women\u2019s oppression has featured very few instances of matriarchy, and virtually no instances of collective female rebellion. On her account, there is no singular event in human history during which men gained the upper hand over women: across cultures and across times, women\u2019s subordination has been seemingly universal.<\/p>\n
As Beauvoir acknowledges, it has generally been presupposed that women\u2019s submission is attributable to natural or essential facts about women, specifically their apparent biological, rational, or psychological inferiority. In Chapters 1 and 2 of the Second Sex <\/i>(Book 1), she carefully considers these arguments. If one looks at the taxonomy of species in the animal kingdom, those biologically closest to us also have the most rigid sex roles, and the females also appear to be the most biologically disadvantaged. Moreover, Beauvoir claims that, among all mammals, it is women who appear to bear the physiological burden of their reproductive capacity most heavily: \u201cThis is the most striking conclusion of this study [of biological sex in the animal kingdom]: she [woman] is the most deeply alienated of all female mammals\u201d (1949: 44).<\/p>\n
Yet while Beauvoir holds that female physiology is important to explain women\u2019s current situation, she rejects the view that it determines women\u2019s destiny or renders inevitable and unalterable women\u2019s status as inferior to men: \u201cI deny that [biological considerations] establish for her [woman] a fixed and inevitable destiny. They do not constitute the basis for a hierarchy of the sexes, they fail to explain why woman is the Other, and they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever\u201d (1949: 44). This is because the woman subject is \u201clike all humans an autonomous freedom\u201d: women are existentially free in a sense that precludes any material fact about them as determining the nature of their existence (1949: 17).<\/p>\n
If women are inherently free in the manner Beauvoir outlines, one might still wonder why she feels that women have virtually never collectively revolted against male dominance. Why does the fact of male superiority appear to be natural, ahistorical, and necessarily true? On Beauvoir\u2019s view, the near-universal constancy of women\u2019s secondary status is attributable to the fact that it is only in part externally imposed; it is also a situation that, she claims, women accept, self-perpetuate, and in which they are complicit. That is, women in part choose <\/i>to take the \u201ceasy path\u201d: that of resisting the \u201cethical claim\u201d of one\u2019s self-assertion as a subject, and thus of accepting a limited domain of possible life-shapes and of possible human activity (1949: 10). While both children and women inhabit an \u201cinfantile world\u201d, \u201ccast into a universe which [they have] not helped to establish\u201d, the difference is that \u201cthe child\u2019s situation is imposed upon him, whereas the woman (I mean the Western woman of today) chooses it or at least consents to it\u201d and thereby manifests a \u201cdeep complicity with the world of men\u201d (1947: 37-41). Thus, Beauvoir<\/span>\u2019s indictment extends not just to men, but also to women: \u201cOnce there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies bad faith and which is a positive fault\u201d (1947: 40).<\/p>\n On the basis of such censure of victims of oppression, Beauvoir has been accused of a \u201cclassical form of voluntarism\u201d derived from her adherence to the existentialist dichotomy between authenticity and bad faith, on which \u201cevery feeling of inferiority derives from a free choice\u201d (Le D\u0153<\/span>uff 1980: 280). Consequently, Le D\u0153<\/span>uff takes the limitations of Beauvoir\u2019s analysis to demonstrate that the problem of oppression requires \u201canother perspective than that of ethics or ethical inquiry\u201d (1980: 288). Butler concurs that Beauvoir\u2019s invocation of the \u201cdoctrine of existential choice\u201d is \u201cassuredly insidious\u201d (1986: 40), while Sara Hein\u00e4maa attempts to defend Beauvoir on the grounds, not of her self-professed ethical <\/i>aim, but of her \u201cphenomenological aim\u201d, namely that of describing the \u201csexual difference\u201d (1999: 30, 22). Other studies of Beauvoir have tended to follow suit, focusing on her contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, or political philosophy rather than her ethics\u2014cementing Le D<\/span>\u0153<\/span>uff<\/span>\u2019s claim that Beauvoir\u2019s ethical intervention was largely a failure.<\/a>[1]<\/sup><\/p>\n This apparent scholarly consensus has, however, missed a nuance in Beauvoir\u2019s critique: the foreclosing of women\u2019s \u2018ethical claim\u2019 to freedom is also attributable to epistemic <\/span><\/i>restrictions in the domain of women\u2019s possible self-constitution. If \u201cthe definition of the human [homme<\/span><\/i>] is a being who is not given, who makes itself what it is\u201d, woman\u2019s \u201cpossibilities <\/i>have to be defined\u201d rather than dictated by natural fact (1949: 45). If woman is \u201creduced to what she was, to what she is today\u201d as opposed to what it is possible for her to become in the future, this impedes women\u2019s individual\u00a0capacit<\/span>ies to imagine how they might make themselves differently as agents pursuing their projects in the world (45).<\/a>[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n Beauvoir herself carries out this interrogation of taken-for-granted concepts, instantiating the interdependence of the ethical and the epistemic. She insists repeatedly on the lack of naturalness of structural social inequality: \u201cA situation of oppression… is never natural\u201d; \u201cone of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one cannot revolt against nature\u201d (1947: 87, 89). That is, Beauvoir\u2019s intervention is one of interrogating oppression as an apparently natural <\/span><\/i>state of affairs, revealing it to be dependent on collective activity<\/i>, and thus contingent. Achieving gender parity will require a change in women\u2019s collective action, thus constituting a shift practical in nature. In other words, ontology is permeated by ethics: what seems to be natural, the systemic subordination of women by men, is revealed to depend on one\u2019s actions<\/span><\/i>, and thus to be open to practical evaluation.<\/p>\n Beauvoir explicitly links the \u2018ruse\u2019 of the apparent naturalness or essentiality of oppression with the limitation of individual possibility. But this limitation is neither strictly material (the result of external imposition), nor voluntaristic and self-imposed. It is also conceptual or epistemic:<\/p>\n The slave is submissive when one has succeeded in mystifying him in such a way that his situation does not seem to him to be imposed by men, but to be immediately given by nature, by the gods, by the powers against whom revolt has no meaning; thus, he does not accept his condition through a resignation of his freedom since\u00a0he cannot even dream of any other <\/i>(1947: 91; my emphasis).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That is, one of the effects of taking one\u2019s situation to be natural or immutable is a limitation of one\u2019s ability to imagine, or \u2018dream\u2019, that things might be different: a limitation in one\u2019s \u2018possibilities\u2019 for oneself. If women are not brought to expect the full plethora of options as men in charting out their life\u2019s course, if there are no examples of individuals like them who have been able to succeed at the highest levels of society, they will not entertain the same range of possible options. Consequently, they may opt for a given course of action that they may not have given a broader range of live options. The redescription <\/span><\/i>of apparently natural concepts is thus intrinsically linked to the broadening of new <\/i>possible descriptions. <\/span><\/p>\n Beauvoir suggests a domain of collective responsibility distinct from the criterion of individual autonomy or moral permissibility. Apparently private or individual choices, taken collectively, can nevertheless either perpetuate or undo social hierarchies by expanding or restricting the epistemic bounds of the domain of possible action for women or other groups (that is, on what each woman takes to be intelligible, thinkable, or live options for her individual situation). If being a political leader, an artist, or a philosopher is not a possibility that women think to take up, the lack of such possibility can be construed as a collective moral failing (rather than, say, a natural or essential result of female physiology). Likewise, the individual self-directed effort to expand the limits on one\u2019s own practical deliberation (by, say, imagining how things might be otherwise) can also be conceived as a kind of virtue.<\/a>[3]\u00a0<\/sup><\/b>In short, the possibility of things being otherwise can be made newly morally or practically salient,<\/a>[4]\u00a0<\/sup>and the role one plays in broadening such possibilities for oneself or for others can be construed as a kind of virtue.<\/p>\n These considerations go some way to showing why Beauvoir frames the central intervention of the Second Sex\u00a0<\/i>as an explicitly moral one (1949: 16). Freedom, according to Beauvoir\u2019s existentialism, is to be described in terms of the \u201cexpansion\u201d of present existence \u201ctoward an indefinitely open future\u201d, of \u201cperpetual surpassing toward other freedoms\u201d (16). That is, what autonomy requires, on Beauvoir\u2019s analysis, is an attitude of conceptual openness towards new possibilities, as well as the agent\u2019s active involvement in opening up new possibilities for both oneself and others.<\/p>\n Construing Beauvoir<\/span>\u2019s perspective <\/span>in terms of the epistemic <\/i>dimension of practical reasoning allows us to better comprehend her own self-understanding of her project. Indeed, one of the most central aspects of Beauvoir\u2019s view was her insistence on the necessity of an ethics for existentialism, a project which preoccupied her from her early works Pyrrhus et Cin\u00e9<\/span><\/i>as <\/i>and the Ethics of Ambiguity\u00a0<\/i>to the Second Sex<\/i>, and which had been one of the central oversights of Sartre\u2019s conception of existentialism. Beauvoir <\/span>criticizes established moral frameworks, such as Kantian morality,\u00a0<\/b>as being \u201cabstract and formal\u201d (1949: 636). This criticism originates in part, I think, from her discovery that the failure to acknowledge epistemic\u00a0<\/i>restrictions\u00a0<\/b>on practical deliberation\u2014on the range of options we think of as viable to act on, or in terms of which we find it intelligible to constitute ourselves\u2014entails that many frequent forms of injustice (such as women\u2019s oppression,\u00a0<\/span>particularly in the complex and not always clearcut forms it sometimes takes) may not ultimately show up as moral\u00a0<\/i>concerns. Beauvoir<\/span>\u2019s analysis of women\u2019s oppression as being both epistemic and\u00a0<\/i>moral, modal and\u00a0<\/i>practical (about what we recognize <\/i>as moral concerns, and about our practical range of possibility\u2014the range of options for action that show up as viable to us) begins to give us grounds to acknowledge the moral standing of this capacity.<\/p>\n Beauvoir\u2019s purposeful juxtaposing of the ethical and epistemic dimensions of virtue allows us to recast the apparent voluntarism of her appeals to complicity and consent. Her seemingly moralistic critiques of individual comportment and actions, both women\u2019s and men\u2019s, should not be conceived as forms of individual moral reprobation, but as an intervention in collectively held assumptions of how women should behave. For example, Beauvoir analyzes the \u2018justifications<\/span>\u2019 women give of their situation in Part II, volume II, of the Second Sex<\/i>, as exemplified by three principal types of female comportment: the narcissist, the woman in love, and the mystic. All three \u2018types\u2019 shape their lives in accordance with deterministic tropes about what women are capable of and what is available to them, rather than opening such notions up to question. The effect of Beauvoir\u2019s description of these types is collective rather than individual, epistemic and modal rather than narrowly practical: it broadens the bounds of possible ways for her readership to constitute themselves as <\/i>women. The conclusion Beauvoir aims her readers to take away from the discussion is that they need not\u2014and indeed ought not\u2014accept the limits imposed on them without creatively experimenting with them, broadening them, and opening them up to question.<\/p>\n <\/a>[1]\u00a0<\/sup>Commentators such as Bauer (2001), Bergoffen (2008), Moi (2008), and Kruks (2012) note in passing Beauvoir\u2019s characterization of \u2018existentialist morality\u2019, but refrain from structuring their analysis in terms of the Second Sex<\/i>\u2019s specifically ethical<\/i>contribution; the main exception here is Arp (2001).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/a>[2]\u00a0<\/sup>Consequently, Beauvoir argues that all apparently natural, physiological facts about relations between men and women are subject to the meanings and values we imbue on them: \u201cPhysiology cannot ground values: rather, biological data take on those values the existent confers on them\u201d (1949: 47).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/a>[3]\u00a0<\/sup>See Michel Foucault, \u201cWhat Is Critique?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/a>[4]\u00a0<\/sup>Barbara Herman, \u201cThe Practice of Moral Judgment\u201d<\/p>\n Arp, Kristana. 2001. The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s Existential Ethics<\/i>. Chicago: Open Court.<\/p>\n Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism<\/i>. New York: Columbia UP.<\/p>\n Beauvoir, Simone de. 1947 [2018]. The Ethics of Ambiguity. <\/i>Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Open Road.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014. 1949. Le deuxi\u00e8me sexe, tomes 1 et 2: Les faits et les mythes, L\u2019Exp\u00e9rience v\u00e9cue<\/i>. Paris: Gallimard.<\/p>\n Bergoffen, Debra. 2008. \u201cGetting the Beauvoir We Deserve.\u201d In Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence<\/i>, edited by Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, 13\u201329. Bloomington: Indiana UP.<\/p>\n Butler, Judith. 1986. \u201cSex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s Second Sex.\u201d Yale French Studies <\/i>72: 35-49.<\/p>\n Foucault, Michel. 1978 [2015]. \u201cWhat Is Critique?\u201d [\u201cQu\u2019est-ce que la critique?\u201d]. Qu<\/span><\/i>\u2019<\/i>est-ce que la critique?: suivie de La culture de soi<\/span><\/i>. <\/i>Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini. Paris: Vrin.<\/p>\n Hein\u00e4maa, Sara. 1999. \u201cSimone de Beauvoir\u2019s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.\u201d Hypatia <\/i>14.4, 114-132.<\/p>\n Herman, Barbara. 1996. The Practice of Moral Judgment<\/i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.<\/p>\n Kruks, Sonia. 2012. Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford UP.<\/p>\n Le D\u0153uff, Michele. 1980. \u201cSimone de Beauvoir and Existentialism.\u201d Feminist Studies 6.2: 277-289.<\/p>\n Moi, Toril. 2008. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford UP.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Sabina Vaccarino Bremner In the Second Sex, Beauvoir suggests that women, as the \u2018second sex\u2019, have nearly always been in a position of subordination to men. This marks a key difference between women and other oppressed groups: while enslaved… Continue Reading \n
Notes<\/h1>\n
Works cited<\/b><\/h1>\n