It is only in strongly integrated civilizations and classes that the woman looks so intransigent. Generally, as her faith is blind, she respects the laws simply because they are laws; the laws may change, but they keep their prestige; in the eyes of women, power creates law since the laws they recognize in men come from their power; that is why they are the first to throw themselves at the victors’ feet when a group collapses. In general, they accept what is. One of their typical features is resignation. When the ashes of Pompeii’s statues were dug out, it was observed that the men were caught in movements of revolt, defying the sky or trying to flee, while the women were bent, withdrawn into themselves, turning their faces toward the earth. They know they are powerless against things: volcanoes, policemen, employers, or men. “Women are made to suffer,” they say. “That’s life; nothing can be done about it.” This resignation engenders the patience often admired in women. They withstand physical suffering much better than men; they are capable of stoic courage when circumstances demand it: without the aggressive daring of the male, many women are distinguished by the calm tenacity of their passive resistance; they deal with crises, misery, and misfortune more energetically than their husbands; respectful of duration that no haste can conquer, they do not measure their time; when they apply their calm stubbornness to any undertaking, they are sometimes brilliantly successful. “Whatever woman wants,” says the proverb.* In a generous woman, resignation looks like indulgence: she accepts everything; she condemns no one because she thinks that neither people nor things can be different from what they are. A proud woman can make a lofty virtue of it, like Mme de Charrière, rigid in her stoicism. But she also engenders a sterile prudence; women always try to keep, to fix, to arrange rather than to destroy and reconstruct anew; they prefer compromises and exchanges to revolutions. In the nineteenth century, they constituted one of the biggest obstacles to the effort of women workers’ emancipation: for every Flora Tristan or Louise Michel, how many utterly timid housewives begged their husbands not to take any risk! They were afraid not only of strikes, unemployment, and misery; they also feared that the revolt was a mistake. Submission for submission, it is understandable that they prefer routine to adventure: they eke out for themselves a more meager happiness at home than on the streets. Their lot is one with that of perishable things: they would lose everything in losing them. Only a free subject, asserting himself beyond time, can foil destruction; this supreme recourse is forbidden to the woman. It is mainly because she has never experienced the powers of liberty that she does not believe in liberation: the world to her seems governed by an obscure destiny against which it is presumptuous to react. These dangerous paths that she is compelled to follow are ones she herself has not traced: it is understandable that she does not take them enthusiastically.3 When the future is open to her, she no longer hangs on to the past. When women are concretely called to action, when they identify with the designated aims, they are as strong and brave as men.4
Many of the faults for which they are reproached—mediocrity, meanness, shyness, pettiness, laziness, frivolity, and servility—simply express the fact that the horizon is blocked for them. Woman, it is said, is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but first she was enclosed in it. The slave imprisoned in the harem does not feel any morbid passion for rose jelly and perfumed baths: she has to kill time somehow; inasmuch as the woman is stifling in a dismal gynaeceum—brothel or bourgeois home—she will also take refuge in comfort and well-being; moreover, if she avidly pursues sexual pleasure, it is often because she is frustrated; sexually unsatisfied, destined to male brutality, “condemned to masculine ugliness,” she consoles herself with creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caresses of water, sun, a woman friend, or a young lover. If she appears to man as such a “physical” being, it is because her condition incites her to attach a great deal of importance to her animality. Carnality does not cry out any more strongly in her than in the male: but she watches out for its slightest signs and amplifies it; sexual pleasure, like the wrenching of suffering, is the devastating triumph of immediacy; the violence of the instant negates the future and the universe: outside of the carnal blaze, what is there is nothing; during this brief apotheosis, she is no longer mutilated or frustrated. But once again, she attaches such importance to these triumphs of immanence because it is her only lot. Her frivolity has the same cause as her “sordid materialism”; she gives importance to little things because she lacks access to big ones: moreover the futilities that fill her days are often of great seriousness; she owes her charm and her opportunities to her toilette and beauty. She often seems lazy, indolent; but the occupations that are offered her are as useless as the pure flowing of time; if she is talkative or a scribbler, it is to while away her time: she substitutes words for impossible acts. The fact is that when a woman is engaged in an undertaking worthy of a human being, she knows how to be as active, effective, and silent, as ascetic, as a man. She is accused of being servile; she is always willing, it is said, to lie at her master’s feet and to kiss the hand that has beaten her. It is true that she generally lacks real self-regard; advice to the “lovelorn,” to betrayed wives, and to abandoned lovers is inspired by a spirit of abject submission; the woman exhausts herself in arrogant scenes and in the end gathers up the crumbs the male is willing to throw her. But what can a woman—for whom the man is both the only means and the only reason for living—do without masculine help? She has no choice but to endure all humiliations; a slave cannot understand the meaning of “human dignity”; for him it is enough if he manages to survive. Finally, if she is “down-to-earth,” a homebody, simply useful, it is because she has no choice but to devote her existence to preparing food and cleaning diapers: she cannot draw the meaning of grandeur from this. She must ensure the monotonous repetition of life in its contingence and facticity: it is natural for her to repeat herself, to begin again, without ever inventing, to feel that time seems to be going around in circles without going anywhere; she is busy without ever doing anything: so she is alienated in what she has; this dependence on things, a consequence of the dependence in which she is held by men, explains her cautious management, her avarice. Her life is not directed toward goals: she is absorbed in producing or maintaining things that are never more than means—food, clothes, lodging—these are inessential intermediaries between animal life and free existence; the only value that is attached to inessential means is usefulness; the housewife lives at the level of utility, and she takes credit for herself only when she is useful to her family. But no existent is able to satisfy itself with an inessential role: he quickly makes ends out of means—as can be observed in politicians, among others—and in his eyes the value of the means becomes an absolute value. Thus utility reigns higher than truth, beauty, and freedom in the housewife’s heaven; and this is the point of view from which she envisages the whole universe; and this is why she adopts the Aristotelian morality of the golden mean, of mediocrity. How could one find daring, ardor, detachment, and grandeur in her? These qualities appear only where a freedom throws itself across an open future, emerging beyond any given. A woman is shut up in a kitchen or a boudoir, and one is surprised her horizon is limited; her wings are cut, and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly. Let a future be open to her and she will no longer be obliged to settle in the present.
The same foolishness is seen when, closed up in the limits of her self or her home, she is criticized for her narcissism and egotism with their corollaries: vanity, touchiness, meanness, and so forth. All possibility of concrete communication with others is removed from her; in her experience she does not recognize either the appeal or the advantages of solidarity, since, separated, she is entirely devoted to her own family; she cannot be expected therefore to go beyond herself toward the general interest. She obstinately confines herself in the only familiar area where she has the power to grasp things and where she finds a precarious sovereignty.
Although she might close the doors and cover the windows
, the woman does not find absolute security in her home; this masculine universe that she respects from afar without daring to venture into it involves her; and because she is unable to grasp it through technology, sound logic, or coherent knowledge, she feels like a child and a primitive surrounded with dangerous mysteries. She projects her magic conception of reality: the flow of things seems inevitable to her, and yet anything can happen; she has difficulty differentiating the possible and the impossible, she is ready to believe anyone; she welcomes and spreads rumors, she sets off panics; even in calm periods she lives in worry; at night, half-asleep, the inert body is frightened by the nightmare images reality acquires: so for the woman condemned to passivity, the opaque future is haunted by phantoms of war, revolution, famine, and misery; not being able to act, she worries. When her husband and son embark on a job, when they are passionately involved in an event, they take their own risks: their projects and the orders they follow show them a sure way even in darkness; but the woman struggles in the blurry night; she “worries” because she does not do anything; in imagination all possibilities are equally real: the train may derail, the operation may be unsuccessful, the affair may fail; what she vainly tries to ward off in her long, despondent ruminations is the specter of her own powerlessness.
Worry expresses her mistrust of the given world; if it seems threatening, ready to sink into obscure catastrophes, it is because she does not feel happy in it. Most often, she is not resigned to being resigned; she knows what she is going through, she goes through it in spite of herself: she is woman without being asked; she does not dare revolt; she submits against her will; her attitude is a constant recrimination. Everyone who receives women’s confidences—doctors, priests, social workers—knows that complaint is the commonest mode of expression; together, women friends groan individually about their own ills and all together about the injustice of their lot, the world, and men in general. A free individual takes the blame for his failures on himself, he takes responsibility for them: but what happens to the woman comes from others, it is others who are responsible for her misfortune. Her furious despair rejects all remedies; suggesting solutions to a woman determined to complain does not help: no solution seems acceptable. She wants to live her situation exactly as she lives it: in impotent anger. If a change is suggested to her, she throws her arms up: “That’s all I need!” She knows that her malaise is deeper than the pretexts she gives for it, and that one expedient is not enough to get rid of it; she takes it out on the whole world because it was put together without her, and against her; since adolescence, since childhood, she has protested against her condition; she was promised compensations, she was assured that if she abdicated her opportunities into the hands of the man, they would be returned to her a hundredfold, and she considers herself duped; she accuses the whole masculine universe; resentment is the other side of dependence: when one gives everything, one never receives enough in return. But she also needs to respect the male universe; if she contested it entirely, she would feel in danger, and without a roof over her head: she adopts the Manichaean attitude also suggested to her by her experience as a housewife. The individual who acts accepts responsibility for good and evil just like the others, he knows that it is up to him to define ends, to see that they triumph; in action he experiences the ambiguity of all solutions; justice and injustice, gains and losses, are inextricably intermingled. But whoever is passive puts himself on the sidelines and refuses to pose, even in thought, ethical problems: good must be realized, and if it is not, there is wrongdoing for which the guilty must be punished. Like the child, the woman imagines good and evil in simple storybook images; Manichaeism reassures the mind by eliminating the anguish of choice; deciding between one scourge and a lesser one, between a benefit today and a greater benefit tomorrow, having to define by oneself what is defeat and what is victory: this means taking terrible risks; for the Manichaean, the wheat is clearly distinguishable from the chaff, and the chaff has to be eliminated; dust condemns itself, and cleanliness is the absolute absence of filth; cleaning means getting rid of waste and mud. Thus the woman thinks that “everything is the Jews’ fault” or the Masons’ or the Bolsheviks’ or the government’s; she is always against someone or something; women were even more violently anti-Dreyfusard than men; they do not always know what the evil principle is; but what they expect from a “good government” is that it get rid of it as one gets rid of dust from the house. For fervent Gaullists, de Gaulle is the king sweeper; they imagine him, dust mops and rags in hand, scrubbing and polishing to make a “clean” France.
But these hopes are always placed in an uncertain future; meanwhile, evil continues to eat away at good; and as woman does not have Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks to hand, she seeks someone against whom she can rise up concretely: the husband is the perfect victim. He embodies the masculine universe, it is through him that the male society took the woman in hand and duped her; he bears the weight of the world, and if things go wrong, it is his fault. When he comes home in the evening, she complains to him about the children, the suppliers, the housework, the cost of living, her rheumatism, and the weather: and she wants him to feel guilty. She often harbors specific complaints about him; but he is particularly guilty of being a man; he might well have illnesses and problems too—“It just isn’t the same thing”—he is privy to a privilege she constantly resents as an injustice. It is noteworthy that the hostility she feels for the husband or the lover binds her to him instead of moving her away from him; a man who begins to detest wife or mistress tries to get away from her: but she wants to have the man she hates nearby to make him pay. Choosing to recriminate is choosing not to get rid of one’s misfortunes but to wallow in them; her supreme consolation is to set herself up as martyr. Life and men have conquered her: she will make a victory of this very defeat. Thus, as she did in childhood, she quickly gives way to the frenzy of tears and scenes.
It is surely because her life takes place against a background of powerless revolt that the woman cries so easily; she undoubtedly has less physiological control of her nervous and sympathetic systems than the man; her education taught her to let herself go: orders and instruction play a great role here since, although Diderot and Benjamin Constant shed rivers of tears, men stopped crying when custom forbade it for them. But the woman is still inclined to be defeatist vis-à-vis the world because she has never frankly assumed it. The man accepts the world; even misfortune will not change his attitude, he will cope with it, he will “not let it get him down,” while a little setback is enough for the woman to rediscover the universe’s hostility and the injustice of her lot; so she throws herself into her safest refuge: herself; this moist trace on her cheeks, this burning in her eyes, are the tangible presence of her suffering soul; gentle on one’s skin, barely salty on one’s tongue, tears are also a tender and bitter caress; the face burns under a stream of mild water; tears are both complaint and consolation, fever and soothing coolness. They are also a supreme alibi; sudden as a storm, coming out in fits, a cyclone, shower, deluge, they metamorphose the woman into a complaining fountain, a stormy sky; her eyes can no longer see, mist blurs them: they are no longer even a gaze, they melt in rain; blinded, the woman returns to the passivity of natural things. She must be vanquished: she is lost in her defeat; she sinks, she drowns, she escapes man who contemplates her, powerless as if before a cataract. He judges this way of behaving as unfair: but she thinks that the battle has been unfair from the beginning because no effective weapon has been put into her hands. She resorts once again to magical conjuration. And the fact that these sobs exasperate the male provides her with one more reason to indulge herself in them.
If tears are not sufficient to express her revolt, she will carry on in such incoherent violence that it will disconcert the man even more. In some circles, the man might strike his wife with actual blows; in others, because he is the stronger and his fist an effective instrument, he will forgo all violence. But the woman, like the child, indulges in symb
olic outbursts: she might throw herself on the man, scratch him; these are only gestures. But above all, through nervous fits in her body she attempts to express the refusals she cannot carry out concretely. It is not only for physiological reasons that she is subject to convulsive manifestations: a convulsion is an interiorization of an energy that, thrown into the world, fails to grasp any object; it is a useless expenditure of all the powers of negation caused by the situation. The mother rarely has crying fits in front of her young children because she can beat or punish them: it is in front of her older son, her husband, or her lover, on whom she has no hold, that the woman gives vent to furious hopelessness. Sophia Tolstoy’s hysterical scenes are significant; it is true that she made the big mistake of never trying to understand her husband and in her diary she does not seem generous, sensitive, or sincere, she is far from coming across as an endearing person; but whether she was right or wrong does not change the horror of her situation at all: she never did anything in her whole life but submit to the conjugal embraces, pregnancies, solitude, and mode of life that her husband imposed on her while receiving constant recriminations; when new decisions of Tolstoy’s worsened the conflict, she found herself weaponless against the enemy’s will, which she rejected with all her powerless will; she threw herself into rejection scenes—fake suicides, false escapes, false illnesses—unpleasant to her family and friends, exhausting for herself: it is hard to see any other solution available to her since she had no positive reason to silence her feelings of revolt and no effective way of expressing them.