The Second Sex

  Thus woman’s fate is intimately bound to the fate of socialism as seen also in Bebel’s vast work on women. “Women and the proletariat,” he writes, “are both oppressed.” And both must be set free by the same economic development resulting from the upheaval caused by the invention of machines. The problem of woman can be reduced to that of her capacity for work. Powerful when technology matched her possibilities, dethroned when she became incapable of benefiting from them, she finds again equality with man in the modern world. Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. It already has broken down in the U.S.S.R., Soviet propaganda affirms. And when socialist society is realized throughout the whole world, there will no longer be men or women, but only workers, equal among themselves.

  Although the synthesis outlined by Engels marks an advance over those we have already examined, it is still disappointing: the most serious problems are dodged. The whole account pivots around the transition from a communitarian regime to one of private property: there is absolutely no indication of how it was able to occur; Engels even admits that “for now we know nothing about it”;1 not only is he unaware of its historical details, but he offers no interpretation of it. Similarly, it is unclear if private property necessarily led to the enslavement of woman. Historical materialism takes for granted facts it should explain: it posits the interest that attaches man to property without discussing it; but where does this interest, the source of social institutions, have its own source? This is why Engels’s account remains superficial, and the truths he uncovers appear contingent. It is impossible to go deeper into them without going beyond historical materialism. It cannot provide solutions to the problems we indicated, because they concern the whole man and not this abstraction, Homo economicus.

  It is clear, for example, that the very idea of individual possession can acquire meaning only on the basis of the original condition of the existent. For that idea to appear, it is first necessary that there be in the subject a tendency to posit himself in his radical singularity, an affirmation of his existence as autonomous and separate. Obviously this claim remained subjective, interior, and without truth as long as the individual lacked the practical means to satisfy it objectively: for lack of the right tools, at first he could not experience his power over the world, he felt lost in nature and in the group, passive, threatened, the plaything of obscure forces; it was only in identifying with the whole clan that he dared to think himself: the totem, the mana, and the earth were collective realities. The discovery of bronze enabled man, tested by hard and productive work, to find himself as creator, dominating nature; no longer afraid of nature, having overcome resistance, he dares to grasp himself as autonomous activity and to accomplish himself in his singularity.2 But this accomplishment would never have been realized if man had not originally wanted it; the lesson of labor is not inscribed in a passive subject: the subject forged and conquered himself in forging his tools and conquering the earth. On the other hand, the affirmation of the subject is not enough to explain ownership: in challenges, struggles, and individual combat, every consciousness can try to rise to sovereignty. For the challenge to have taken the form of the potlatch, that is, of economic rivalry, and from there first for the chief and then for the clan members to have laid claim to private goods, there had to be another original tendency in man: in the preceding chapter we said that the existent can only succeed in grasping himself by alienating himself; he searches for himself through the world, in the guise of a foreign figure he makes his own. The clan encounters its own alienated existence in the totem, the mana, and the territory it occupies; when the individual separates from the community, he demands a singular embodiment: the mana is individualized in the chief, then in each individual; and at the same time each one tries to appropriate a piece of land, tools, or crops. In these riches of his, man finds himself because he lost himself in them: it is understandable then that he can attribute to them an importance as basic as that of his life itself. Thus man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relationship. But clearly the tool alone is not enough to explain it; the whole attitude of the tool-armed man must be grasped, an attitude that implies an ontological infrastructure.

  Similarly, it is impossible to deduce woman’s oppression from private property. Here again, the shortcomings of Engels’s point of view are obvious. While he clearly understood that woman’s muscular weakness was a concrete inferiority only in relation to bronze and iron tools, he failed to see that limits to her work capacity constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only from a certain perspective. Because man is transcendence and ambition, he projects new demands with each new tool: after having invented bronze instruments, he was no longer satisfied with developing gardens and wanted instead to clear and cultivate vast fields. This will did not spring from bronze itself. Woman’s powerlessness brought about her ruin because man apprehended her through a project of enrichment and expansion. And this project is still not enough to explain her oppression: the division of labor by sex might have been a friendly association. If the original relation between man and his peers had been exclusively one of friendship, one could not account for any kind of enslavement: this phenomenon is a consequence of the imperialism of human consciousness, which seeks to match its sovereignty objectively. Had there not been in human consciousness both the original category of the Other and an original claim to domination over the Other, the discovery of the bronze tool could not have brought about woman’s oppression. Nor does Engels account for the specific character of this oppression. He tried to reduce the opposition of the sexes to a class conflict: in fact, he did it without real conviction; this thesis is indefensible. True, the division of labor by sex and the oppression resulting from it bring to mind class division in some ways: but they should not be confused; there is no biological basis for division by class; in work the slave becomes conscious of himself against the master; the proletariat has always experienced its condition in revolt, thus returning to the essential, constituting a threat to its exploiters; and the goal of the proletariat is to cease to exist as a class. We have said in the introduction how different woman’s situation is, specifically because of the community of life and interests that create her solidarity with man, and due to the complicity he encounters in her: she harbors no desire for revolution, she would not think of eliminating herself as a sex: she simply asks that certain consequences of sexual differentiation be abolished. And more serious still, woman cannot in good faith be regarded only as a worker; her reproductive function is as important as her productive capacity, both in the social economy and in her personal life; there are periods in history when it is more useful to have children than till the soil. Engels sidestepped the problem; he limits himself to declaring that the socialist community will abolish the family, quite an abstract solution; everyone knows how often and how radically the U.S.S.R. has had to change its family policy to balance out production needs of the moment with the needs of repopulation; besides, eliminating the family does not necessarily liberate woman: the example of Sparta and that of the Nazi regime prove that notwithstanding her direct attachment to the state, she might still be no less oppressed by males. A truly socialist ethic—one that seeks justice without restraining liberty, one that imposes responsibilities on individuals but without abolishing individual freedom—will find itself most uncomfortable with problems posed by woman’s condition. It is impossible to simply assimilate gestation to a job or service like military service. A deeper breach is created in a woman’s life by requiring her to have children than by regulating citizens’ occupations: no state has ever dared institute compulsory coitus. In the sexual act and in maternity, woman engages not only time and energy but also essential values. Rationalist materialism tries in vain to ignore this powerful aspect of sexuality: sexual instinct cannot be regulated; according to Freud, it might even possess an inherent denial of
its own satisfaction; what is certain is that it cannot be integrated into the social sphere, because there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time, of the individual against the universal: to try to channel and exploit it risks killing it, because live spontaneity cannot be disposed of like inert matter; nor can it be compelled in the way a freedom can be. There is no way to directly oblige a woman to give birth: all that can be done is to enclose her in situations where motherhood is her only option: laws or customs impose marriage on her, anticonception measures and abortion are banned, divorce is forbidden. These old patriarchal constraints are exactly the ones the U.S.S.R. has brought back to life today; it has revived paternalistic theories about marriage; and in doing so, it has asked woman to become an erotic object again: a recent speech asked Soviet women citizens to pay attention to their clothes, to use makeup, and to become flirtatious to hold on to their husbands and stimulate their desire. Examples like this prove how impossible it is to consider the woman as a solely productive force: for man she is a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object, an Other through whom he seeks himself. Although totalitarian or authoritarian regimes may all try to ban psychoanalysis and declare that personal emotional conflicts have no place for citizens loyally integrated into the community, eroticism is an experience where individuality always prevails over generality. And for democratic socialism where classes would be abolished but not individuals, the question of individual destiny would still retain all its importance: sexual differentiation would retain all its importance. The sexual relation that unites woman with man is not the same as the one he maintains with her; the bond that attaches her to the child is irreducible to any other. She was not created by the bronze tool alone: the machine is not sufficient to abolish her. To demand for woman all the rights, all the possibilities of the human being in general does not mean one must be blind to her singular situation. To know this situation, it is necessary to go beyond historical materialism, which only sees man and woman as economic entities.

  So we reject Freud’s sexual monism and Engels’s economic monism for the same reason. A psychoanalyst will interpret all woman’s social claims as a phenomenon of “masculine protest”; for the Marxist, on the other hand, her sexuality only expresses her economic situation, in a rather complex, roundabout way; but the categories clitoral and vaginal, like the categories bourgeois and proletarian, are equally inadequate to encompass a concrete woman. Underlying the personal emotional conflicts as well as the economic history of humanity there is an existential infrastructure that alone makes it possible to understand in its unity the unique form that is a life. Freudianism’s value derives from the fact that the existent is a body: the way he experiences himself as a body in the presence of other bodies concretely translates his existential situation. Likewise, what is true in the Marxist thesis is that the existent’s ontological claims take on a concrete form based on the material possibilities offered to him, particularly based on those that technology opens to him. But if they are not incorporated into the whole of human reality, sexuality and technology of themselves will fail to explain anything. This is why in Freud prohibitions imposed by the superego and the drives of the ego appear as contingent facts; and in Engels’s account of the history of the family, the most important events seem to arise unexpectedly through the whims of mysterious chance. To discover woman, we will not reject certain contributions of biology, psychoanalysis, or historical materialism: but we will consider that the body, sexual life, and technology exist concretely for man only insofar as he grasps them from the overall perspective of his existence. The value of muscular strength, the phallus, and the tool can only be defined in a world of values: it is driven by the fundamental project of the existent transcending itself toward being.

  1. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

  2. Gaston Bachelard in La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Earth and Reveries of Will) carries out, among others, an interesting study of the blacksmith’s work. He shows how man asserts and separates himself from himself by the hammer and anvil. “The temporal existence of the blacksmith is both highly particular and larger than life. Through momentary violence, the worker, uplifted, gains mastery over time”; and further on: “Those who forge take on the challenge of the universe rising against them.”

  | PART TWO |

  HISTORY

  | CHAPTER 1 |

  This world has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient. By reviewing prehistoric and ethnographic data in the light of existentialist philosophy, we can understand how the hierarchy of the sexes came to be. We have already posited that when two human categories find themselves face-to-face, each one wants to impose its sovereignty on the other; if both hold to this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either hostile or friendly, but always tense. If one of the two has an advantage over the other, that one prevails and works to maintain the relationship by oppression. It is thus understandable that man might have had the will to dominate woman: but what advantage enabled him to accomplish this will?

  Ethnologists give extremely contradictory information about primitive forms of human society, even more so when they are well-informed and less systematic. It is especially difficult to formulate an idea about woman’s situation in the preagricultural period. We do not even know if, in such different living conditions from today’s, woman’s musculature or her respiratory system was not as developed as man’s. She was given hard work, and in particular it was she who carried heavy loads; yet this latter fact is ambiguous: probably if she was assigned this function, it is because within the convoy men kept their hands free to defend against possible aggressors, animals or humans; so their role was the more dangerous one and demanded more strength. But it seems that in many cases women were robust and resilient enough to participate in warrior expeditions. According to the accounts by Herodotus and the traditions of the Amazons from Dahomey as well as ancient and modern testimonies, women were known to take part in bloody wars or vendettas; they showed as much courage and cruelty as males: there are references to women who bit their teeth into their enemies’ livers. In spite of this, it is likely that then as now men had the advantage of physical force; in the age of the clubs and wild animals, in the age when resistance to nature was at its greatest and tools were at their most rudimentary, this superiority must have been of extreme importance. In any case, as robust as women may have been at that time, the burdens of reproduction represented for them a severe handicap in the fight against a hostile world: Amazons were said to mutilate their breasts, which meant that at least during the period of their warrior lives they rejected maternity. As for ordinary women, pregnancy, giving birth, and menstruation diminished their work capacity and condemned them to long periods of impotence; to defend themselves against enemies or to take care of themselves and their children, they needed the protection of warriors and the catch from hunting and fishing provided by the males. As there obviously was no birth control, and as nature does not provide woman with sterile periods as it does for other female mammals, frequent pregnancies must have absorbed the greater part of their strength and their time; they were unable to provide for the lives of the children they brought into the world. This is a primary fact fraught with great consequence: the human species’ beginnings were difficult; hunter, gatherer, and fishing peoples reaped meager bounty from the soil, and at great cost in effort; too many children were born for the group’s resources; the woman’s absurd fertility kept her from participating actively in the growth of these resources, while it was constantly creating new needs. Indispensable to the perpetuation of the species, she perpetuated it too abundantly: so it was man who controlled the balance between reproduction and production. Thus woman did not even have the privilege of maintaining life that the creator male had; she did not play the role of ovum to his spermatozoid or womb to his phallus; she played only one part in the human species’ effor
t to persist in being, and it was thanks to man that this effort had a concrete result.

  Nonetheless, as the production-reproduction balance always finds a way of stabilizing itself—even at the price of infanticide, sacrifices, or wars—men and women are equally indispensable from the point of view of group survival; it could even be supposed that at certain periods when food was plentiful, his protective and nourishing role might have subordinated the male to the wife-mother. There are female animals that derive total autonomy from motherhood; so why has woman not been able to make a pedestal for herself from it? Even in those moments when humanity most desperately needed births—since the need for manual labor prevailed over the need for raw materials to exploit—and even in those times when motherhood was the most venerated, maternity was not enough for women to conquer the highest rank.1 The reason for this is that humanity is not a simple natural species: it does not seek to survive as a species; its project is not stagnation: it seeks to surpass itself.

  The primitive hordes were barely interested in their posterity. Connected to no territory, owning nothing, embodied in nothing stable, they could formulate no concrete idea of permanence; they were unconcerned with survival and did not recognize themselves in their descendants; they did not fear death and did not seek heirs; children were a burden and not of great value for them; the proof is that infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples; and many newborns who are not massacred die for lack of hygiene in a climate of total indifference. So the woman who gives birth does not take pride in her creation; she feels like the passive plaything of obscure forces, and painful childbirth a useless and even bothersome accident. Later, more value was attached to children. But in any case, to give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny. Because housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood, she is condemned to domestic labor, which locks her into repetition and immanence; day after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it produces nothing new. Man’s case is radically different. He does not provide for the group in the way worker bees do, by a simple vital process, but rather by acts that transcend his animal condition. Homo faber has been an inventor since the beginning of time: even the stick or the club he armed himself with to knock down fruit from a tree or to slaughter animals is an instrument that expands his grasp of the world; bringing home freshly caught fish is not enough for him: he first has to conquer the seas by constructing dugout canoes; to appropriate the world’s treasures, he annexes the world itself. Through such actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and projects paths to them: he realizes himself as existent. To maintain himself, he creates; he spills over the present and opens up the future. This is the reason fishing and hunting expeditions have a sacred quality. Their success is greeted by celebration and triumph; man recognizes his humanity in them. This pride is still apparent today when he builds a dam, a skyscraper, or an atomic reactor. He has not only worked to preserve the given world: he has burst its borders; he has laid the ground for a new future.