Ordinary People. Simone de Beauvoir. Writer. Intellectual. Existentialist Philosopher. Political Activist. Feminist. Social Theorist

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Ordinary People. Simone de Beauvoir. Writer. Intellectual. Existentialist Philosopher. Political Activist. Feminist. Social Theorist

The Second Sex. 1949. Simone de Beauvoir

Introduction 

I hesitated a long time before writing a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore. Yet it is still being talked about. And the volumes of idiocies churned out over this past century do not seem to have clarified the problem. Besides, is there a problem? And what is it? Are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its followers: they whisper, ‘Even in Russia, WOMEN are still very much women’; but other well-informed people – and also at times those same ones – lament, ‘Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.’ It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all, what place they hold in this world, what place they should hold. ‘Where are the women?’ asked a short-lived magazine recently. But first, what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb.’ Some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, ‘They are not women’, even though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. 

It is typically described in vague and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. In St Thomas’s time it was an essence defined with as much certainty as the sedative quality of a poppy. But conceptualism has lost ground: biological and social sciences no longer believe there are immutably determined entities that define given characteristics like those of the woman, the Jew or the black; science considers characteristics as secondary reactions to a SITUATION. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. 

Does the word ‘woman’, then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment, philosophy, rationalism or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’; American women in particular are inclined to think that woman as such no longer exists. If some backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to undergo psycho-analysis to get rid of this obsession. Referring to a book – a very irritating one at that – Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, Dorothy Parker wrote: ‘I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women. My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.’ But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for anti-feminists to show that women ARE not men. 

Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. Rejecting the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. 

Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. A few years ago, a well-known woman writer refused to have her portrait appear in a series of photographs devoted specifically to women writers. She wanted to be included in the men’s category; but to get this privilege, she used her husband’s influence. Women who assert they are men still claim masculine consideration and respect. 

I also remember a young Trotskyite standing on a platform during a stormy meeting, about to come to blows in spite of her obvious fragility. She was denying her feminine frailty; but it was for the love of a militant man she wanted to be equal to. The defiant position that American women occupy proves they are haunted by the sentiment of their own femininity. And the truth is that anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, movements, interests and occupations; these differences are perhaps superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that for the moment they exist in a strikingly obvious way. 

If the female function is not enough to define woman, and if we also reject the explanation of the ‘eternal feminine’, but if we accept, even temporarily, that there are women on the earth, we then have to ask: what is a woman? 

Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. If I want to define myself, I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious. 

The categories ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ appear as symmetrical in a formal way on town hall records or identification papers. The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and the neuter to such an extent that in French ‘hommes’ designates human beings, the particular meaning of the word ‘homo’. Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity. I used to get annoyed in abstract discussions to hear men tell me: ‘You think such and such a thing because you’re a woman.’ 

But I know my only defence is to answer, ‘I think it because it is true.’ Thereby eliminating my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, because it is understood that being a man is not a particularity; a man is in his right by virtue of being man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. In factm, just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical that defined the oblique, there is an absolute human type that is masculine. Woman has ovaries and a uterus; some even say she thinks with her hormones. 

Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world and he believes he apprehends in all objectivity whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. 

‘The female is female by virtue of a certain LACK of qualities’, Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being. ‘Woman, the relative being...’ writes Michelet. Thus Monsieur Benda declares in Uriel’s Report: ‘A man’s body has meaning by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the woman’s body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the male. Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man.’ And she is nothing other than what man decides; she is thus called ‘the sex’, meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the absolute. She determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute. She is the Other. 

The category of OTHER is as original as consciousness itself. The duality between Self and Other can be found in the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies; this division did not always fall into the category of the division of the sexes, it was not based on any empirical given: this comes out in works like Granet’s on Chinese thought, and Demezil’s on India and Rome. In couples such as Varuna-Mitra, Ouranos-Zeus, Sun-Moon, Day-Night, no feminine element is involved at the outset; neither in Good-Evil, auspicious and inauspicious, left and right, God and Lucifer; alterity is the fundamental category of human thought. No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travellers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travellers to become vaguely hostile ‘others’. Village people view anyone not belonging to the village as suspicious ‘others’. 

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For the native of a country, inhabitants of other countries are viewed as ‘foreigners’; Jews are the ‘others’ for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes. After studying the diverse forms of primitive society in depth, Levi-Strauss would conclude: The transition from Nature to Culture is determined by man’s ability to think of biological relationships as systems of oppositions; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether presented in definite forms or in imprecise forms, are not so much matters to be explained as basic and immediate data of social reality. 

These phenomena could not be understood if human reality were solely a Mitsein based on solidarity and friendship. On the contrary, they become clear if, following Hegel, a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object. 

But the other consciousness has an opposing reciprocal claim: travelling, a local is shocked to realise that in neighbouring countries locals view him as a foreigner, between villages, clans, nations and classes there are wars, potlatches, agreements, treaties and struggles that remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the other and bring out its relativity; whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups have no choice by to recognise the reciprocity of their relation. How is then that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure alterity? 

Why do women not contest male sovereignty? No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view. Where does this submission in women come from? 

There are other cases where, for a shorter or longer time, one category has managed to dominate another absolutely. It is often numerical inequality that confers this privilege: the majority imposes its law on or persecutes the minority. But women are not a minority like American blacks, or like Jews: there are as many women as men on earth. Often, the two opposing groups concerned were once independent of each other; either they were not aware of each other in the past or they accepted each other’s autonomy; and some historical event subordinated the weaker to the stronger: the Jewish diaspora, slavery in America, or the colonial conquests are facts with dates. 

In these cases, for the oppressed there was a BEFORE: they share a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion, or a culture. In this sense, the parallel Bebel draws between women and the proletariat would be the best founded: proletarians are not a numerical minority either and yet they have never formed a separate group. 

However, not ONE event, but a whole historical development, explains their existence as a class and accounts for the distribution of THESE individuals in this class. They have not always been proletarians: there have always been women: they are women by their physiological structure; as far back as history can be traced, they have always been subordinate to men; their dependence is not the consequence of an event or a becoming, it did not HAPPEN. 

Alterity here appears to be an absolute, partly because it falls outside the accidental nature of historical fact. A situation created over time can come undone at another time – blacks in Haiti for one are a good example; on the contrary, a natural condition seems to defy change. In truth, nature is no more an immutable given than is historical reality. If woman discovers herself as the inessential, and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. 

Proletarians say ‘we’. So do blacks. Positing themselves as subjects, they thus transform the bourgeois or whites into ‘others’. Women – except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences – do not use ‘we’; men say ‘women’ and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. The proletarians made the revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indochinese are fighting in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. 

They lack the concrete means to organise themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labour or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, or the Jews in ghettos, the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests and social conditions to certain men – fathers or husbands – more closely than to other women. 

As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. The proletariat could plan to massacred the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black; but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. 

The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: cleavage of society by sex is not possible. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. 

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One might think that this reciprocity would have facilitated her liberation: when Hercules spins wool at Omphale’s feet, his desire enchains him. Why was Omphale unable to acquire long-lasting power? Medea, in revenge against Jason, kills her children: this brutal legend suggests that the bond attaching the woman to her child could have given her a formidable upper hand. In Lysistrata, Aristophanes light-heartedly imagined a group of women, who, uniting together for the social good, tried to take advantage of men’s need for them: but it is only a comedy.

The legend that claims that the ravished Sabine women resisted their ravishers with obstinate sterility also recounts that by whipping them with leather straps, the men magically won them over into submission. Biological need – sexual desire and desire for posterity – which makes the male dependent on the female, has not liberated women socially. Master and slave are also linked by a reciprocal economic need that does not free the slave. 

That is, in the master-slave relation, the master does not POSIT the need he has for the other; he holds the power to satisfy this need and does not mediate it; the slave, on the other hand, out of dependence, hope or fear, internalises his need for the master; however equally compelling the need may be to them both, it always plays in favour of the oppressor over the oppressed: this explains the slow pace of working-class liberation, for example. 

Now woman has always been, if not man’s slave, at least his vassal; the two sexes have never divided the world up equally; and still today, even though her condition is changing, woman is heavily handicapped. In no country is her legal status identical to man’s (1949), and often it puts her at a considerable disadvantage. Even when her rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs. 

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, etc. And they hold the most important positions. In addition to their concrete power they are invested with a prestige whose tradition is reinforced by the child’s whole education: the present incorporates the past, and in the past all history was made by males. At the moment that women are beginning to share in the making of the world, this world still belongs to men: men have no doubt about this, and women barely doubt it. 

Refusing to be the Other, refusing complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them. Lord-man will materially protect liege-woman and will be charge of justifying her existence: along with the economic risk, she eludes the metaphysical risk of a freedom that must invent its goals without help. 

Indeed, beside every individual’s claim to assert himself as subject – an ethical claim – lies the temptation to flee freedom and to make himself into a thing: it is a pernicious path because the individual, passive, alienated and lost, is prey to a foreign will, cut off from his transcendence, robbed of all worth. 

But it is an easy path: the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence are thus avoided. The man who sets the woman up as an Other will thus find in her a deep complicity. Hence woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she senses the necessary link connecting her to man without positing its reciprocity, and because she often derives satisfaction from her role as Other. 

But a question immediately arises: how did this whole story begin? It is understandable that the duality of the sexes, like all duality, be expressed in conflict. It is understandable that if one of the two succeeded in imposing its superiority, it had to establish itself as absolute. It remains to be explained how it was that man won at the outset. It seems possible that women might have carried off the victory, or that the battle might never be resolved. Why is it that this world has always belonged to men and that only today are things beginning to change? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal sharing of the world between men and women or not?

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These questions are far from new; they have already had many answers; but the very fact that woman is OTHER challenges all the justifications that men have ever given: these were only too clearly dictated by their own interest. 

‘Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,’ wrote Poulain de la Barre, a little-known seventeenth century feminist. Males have always and everywhere paraded their satisfaction of feeling they are kings of creation. ‘Blessed be the Lord our God, and the Lord of all worlds that has not made me a woman’. Jews say in their morning prayers; meanwhile their wives resignedly murmur; ‘Blessed by the Lord for creating me according to His will’. Among the blessings Plato thanked the gods for was first being born free and not a slave, and second, a man and not a woman. But males could not have enjoyed this privilege so fully had they not considered it as founded in the absolute and in eternity: they sought to make the fact of their supremacy a right. ‘Those who made and compiled the laws, being men, favoured their own sex, and the jurisconsults have turned the laws, being men, favoured by their own sex, and the jurisconsults have turned the laws into principles,’ Poulain de la Barre continues. 

Lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers and scholars have gone to great lengths to prove that woman’s subordinate condition was willed in heaven and profitable on earth. Religions forged by men reflect this will for domination: they found ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora. They have put philosophy and theology in their service, as seen in the previously cited words of Aristotle and St Thomas. 

Since ancient times, satirists and moralists have delighted in depicting women’s weaknesses. The violent indictments brought against then all through French literature are well known: Montherlant, with less verve, picks up the tradition from Jean de Meung. This hostility seems more times founded but is often gratuitous; in truth, it covers up a more or less skilfully camouflaged will to self-justification. ‘It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other,’ says (Michel de) Montaigne. In certain cases, the process is transparent. It is striking, for example, that the Roman code limiting a wife’s rights invokes ‘the imbecility and fragility of the sex’ just when a weakening family structure makes her a threat to male heirs. 

It is striking that in the sixteenth century, to keep a married woman under wardship, the authority of St Augustine affirming ‘the wife is an animal neither reliable nor stable’ is called on, whereas the unmarried woman is recognised as capable of managing her own affairs. Montaigne well understood the arbitrariness and injustice of the lot assigned to women: ‘Women are not at all wrong in refusing the world’s rules especially since men made them without women. There is a natural plotting and scheming between them and us.’ 

But he does not go so far as to champion their cause. It is only in the eighteenth century that deeply democratic men begin to consider the issue objectively. Diderot, for one, tries to prove that, like man, woman is a human being. A bit later, John Stuart Mill ardently defends women. But these philosophers are exceptional in their impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel once again becomes a partisan quarrel; one of the consequences of the industrial revolution is that women enter the labour force: at that point, women’s demands leave the realm of the theoretical and find economic grounds; their adversaries become all the more aggressive; even though landed property is partially discredited, the bourgeoisie clings to the old values where family solidity guarantees private property: it insists all the more fiercely that woman’s place should be in the home as her emancipation becomes a real threat; even within the working class, men tried to thwart women’s liberation because women were becoming dangerous competitors – especially as women were used to working for low salaries. 

To prove women’s inferiority, anti-feminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant ‘separate but equal status’ to the OTHER sex. That winning formula is most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into practise with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance; whether it is race, caste, class or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same. 

‘The eternal feminine’ corresponds to ‘the black soul’ or ‘the Jewish character’. However, the Jewish problem on the whole is very different from the two others; for the anti-Semite, the Jew is more an enemy than an inferior and no place on this earth is recognised as his own; it would be preferable to see him annihilated. But there are deep analogies between the situations of women and blacks; both are liberated today from the same paternalism, and the former master caste wants to keep them ‘in their place’, that is, the place chosen for them; in both cases, they praise, more or less sincerely, the virtues of the ‘good black’, the carefree, childlike, merry soul of the resigned black, and the woman who is a ‘true woman’ – frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman subjugated to man. 

In both cases, the ruling caste bases its argument on the state of affairs it created itself. The familiar line from George Bernard Shaw sums it up; ‘The white American relegates the black to the ranks of shoeshine boy and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes.’ The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances; when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they ARE inferior. But the scope of the verb TO BE must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic; TO BE is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. 

Yes, women in general ARE today inferior to men, that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities; the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated. 

Many men wish it would be; not all men have yet laid down their arms. The conservative bourgeoisie continues to view women’s liberation as a danger threatening their morality and their interests. Some men feel threatened by women’s competition. In Hebdo-Latin the other day, a student declared; ‘Every woman student who takes a position as a doctor or lawyer is STEALING a place from us.’ That student never questioned his rights over this world. Economic interests are not the only ones in play. 

One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels SUPERIOR; in the USA, a ‘poor white’ from the South can console himself for not being a ‘dirty nigger’; and more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride. Likewise, the mot mediocre of males believes himself a demigod next to women. 

It was easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero in front of women (hand-picked, by the way) than to act the man among men, a role that many women assumed better than he did. Thus, in one of his articles in Figaro Litteraire in September 1948, M Claude Mauriac – whom everyone admires for his powerful originality – could write about women: ‘We listen in a tone of polite indifference…to the most brilliant one among them, knowing that her intelligence, in a more or less dazzling way, reflects ideas that come from US.’ Clearly his female interlocutor does not reflect M Mauriac’s own ideas, since he is known not to have any; that she reflects ideas originating with men is possible: among males themselves, more than one of them takes as his own opinions he did not invent; one might wonder if it would not be in M Claude Mauriac’s interest to converse with a good reflection of Descartes, Marx or Gide rather than with himself; what is remarkable is that with the ambiguous we, he identifies with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin and Nietzsche, and from their heights he looks down on the herd of women who dare to speak to him on an equal footing: frankly, I know of more than one woman who would not put up with M Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference.’ 

I have stressed this example because of its disarming masculine naivety. Men profit in many other more subtle ways from woman’s alterity. For all those suffering from an inferiority complex, this is a miraculous liniment; no one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or more disdainful, than a man anxious about his own virility. Those who are not threatened by their fellow men are far more likely to recognise woman as a counterpart; but even for them the myth of the Woman, of the Other, remains precious for many reasons; 

(The article by Michel Carrouges on this theme in Cahiers du Sud, is significant. He writes with indignation: ‘If only there were no feminine myth but only bands of cooks, matrons, prostitutes and blue-stockings with functions of pleasure or utility!’ So, according to him, woman has no existence for herself; he only takes into account her FUNCTION in the male world. Her finality is in man; in fact, it is possible to prefer her poetic ‘function’ to all others. The exact question is why she should be defined in relationship to the man. For example, man declares that he does not find his wife in any way diminished just because she does not have a profession; work in the home is just as noble, etc. Yet, at the first argument he remonstrates, ‘You wouldn’t be able to earn a living without me’. Footnote in The Second Sex)

they can hardly be blamed for not wanting to light-heartedly sacrifice all the benefits they derive from the myth: they know what they lose by relinquishing the woman of their dreams, but they do not know what the woman of tomorrow will bring them. 

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It takes great abnegation to refuse to posit oneself as unique and absolute Subject. 

Besides, the vast majority of men do not explicitly make this position their own. They do not POSIT woman as inferior; they are too imbued today with the democratic ideal not to recognise all human beings as equals. Within the family, the male child and then the young man sees the woman as having the same social dignity as the adult male; afterwards, he experiences in desire and love the resistance and independence of the desired and loved woman; married, he respects in his wife the spouse and the mother, and in the concrete experience of married life, she affirms herself opposite him as a freedom. 

He can thus convince himself that there is no longer a social hierarchy between the sexes and that on the whole, in spite of their differences, woman is an equal. As he nevertheless recognises some points of inferiority – professional incapacity being the predominant one – he attributes them to nature. 

When he has an attitude of benevolence and partnership towards a woman, he applies the principle of abstract equality; and he does not POSIT the concrete inequality he recognises. But as soon as he clashes with her the situation is reversed. He will apply the concrete inequality theme and will even allow himself to disavow abstract equality. This is how many men affirm, with quasi-good faith, that women ARE equal to man and have no demands to make, and AT THE SAME TIME that women will never be equal to men and that their demands are in vain. It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant from the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. 

The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even fathom. We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks on women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the ‘real woman’; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share. 

We must not, however, be any less mistrustful of feminists’ arguments; very often their attempt to polemicise robs them of all value. If the ‘question of women’ is so trivial, it is because masculine arrogance turned it into a ‘quarrel’; when people quarrel, they no longer reason well. What people have endlessly sought to prove is that woman is superior, inferior or equal to man: created after Adam, she is obviously a secondary being, some say; on the contrary, say others, Adam was only a rough draft, and God perfected the human being when he created Eve; her brain is smaller, but relatively bigger. Christ was made man; but perhaps out of humility. Every argument has its opposite and both are often misleading. To see clearly, it is necessary to get out of these ruts; these vague notions of superiority, inferiority and equality that have distorted all discussions must be discarded in order to start anew. 

But how, then, will we ask the question? And in the first pace, who are we to ask it? Men are judge and party; so are women. Can an angel be found? In fact, an angel would be ill qualified to speak, would not understand all the givens of the problem; as for the hermaphrodite, it is a case of its own: it not both a man and a woman, but neither man nor woman. I think certain women are still best suited to elucidate the situation of women. It is a sophism to claim that Epimenides should be enclosed within the concept of Cretan and all Cretans within the concept of liar: it is not a mysterious essence that dictates good or bad faith to men and women: it is their situation that disposes them to seek the truth to a greater or lesser extent. Many women today, fortunate to have had all the privileges of the human being restored to them, can afford the luxury of impartiality; we even feel the necessity of it. We are no longer like our militant predecessors, we have more or less won the game; in the latest discussions on women’s status, the UN has not ceased to imperiously demand equality of the sexes, and indeed many of us have never felt our femaleness to be a difficulty or an obstacle; many other problems seem more essential than those which concern us uniquely; this very detachment makes it possible to hope our attitude will be objective. 

Yet we know the feminine world more intimately than men do because our roots are in it; we grasp more immediately what the fact of being female means for a human being; and we care more about knowing it. I said that there are more essential problems; but this one still has a certain importance from our point of view: how will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us and which ones have been denied? 

What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them? It is striking that most feminine literature is driven today by an attempt at lucidity more than by a will to make demands; coming out of an era of muddled controversy, this book is one attempt among others to take stock of the current state. 

But it is no doubt impossible to approach any human problem without partiality; even the way of asking the questions, of adopting perspectives, presupposes hierarchies of interests; all characteristics comprise values; every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background. Instead of trying to conceal those principles that are more or less explicitly implied, it would be better to state them from the start; then it would not be necessary to specify on each page the meaning given to the words: superior, inferior, better, worse, progress, regression, etc. if we examine some of the books o women, we see that one of the most frequently held points of view is that of public good or general interest: in reality, this is taken to mean the interest of society as each one wishes to maintain or establish it. In our opinion, there is no public good other than one that assures the citizens’ private good; we judge institutions from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals. But neither do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness: that I another frequently encountered point of view; are women in a harem not happier than a woman voter? Is a housewife not happier than a woman worker? We cannot really know what the word happiness means and still less what authentic values it covers; there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy; in particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the pretext that happiness is immobility. This is a notion, then, we will not refer to. 

The perspective we have adopted is one of existentialist morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into ‘in itself’, of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil. 

Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. 

Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women’s freedom and can she overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like to elucidate. This means that in focusing on the individual’s possibilities, we will define these possibilities not in terms of happiness but in terms of freedom. 

Clearly this problem would have no meaning if we thought that a physiological, psychological or economic destiny weighed on woman. So we will begin by discussing woman from a biological, psychoanalytical and historical materialistic point of view. We will then attempt to positively demonstrate how ‘feminine reality’ has been constituted, why woman has been defined as Other, and what the consequences have been from men’s point of view. Then we will describe the world from the woman’s point of view such as it is offered to her, and we will see the difficulties women are up against just when, trying to be part of the human Mitsein. 

(Mitsein – I looked it up – but Germanically, it means to be with. With being. Sort of thing.)

Human existence is also essentially social: Being— in-the-world, Heidegger maintains, is always also “being—with” (Mitsein). 

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The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir 

The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. One of her best-known books, it deals with the treatment of women throughout history and is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting point of second-wave feminism. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months when she was 38 years old.

She published it in two volumes and some chapters first appeared in Les Temps modernes. The Vatican placed it on its List of Prohibited Books. 

As Nancy Bauer described it in 2004, the book is an exposition of "the pervasiveness and intensity and mysteriousness of the history of women's oppression". 

Volume One, Facts and Myths

Destiny

Part One "Destiny" has three chapters. The first, "Biological Data", describes the relationship of ovum to sperm in all kinds of creatures (fish, insects, mammals). Then Beauvoir proceeds to the human being, comparing the physiology of men and women, and saying that women are weaker than men (for example, in muscular strength, with fewer red blood cells, and a lesser respiratory capacity). 

In chapter 2 "The Psychoanalytical Point of View", Beauvoir first expounds the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. She then rejects them both, for example, finding that a study of eroticism in the context of perception goes beyond the capabilities of the psychoanalytic framework. In chapter 3 "The Point of View of Historical Materialism", Beauvoir relates The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels but ultimately finds it lacking any basis or reasons for its claims to assign "the great historical defeat of the female sex" to the invention of bronze and the emergence of private property. She quotes Engels, "for now we know nothing about it" and rejects him because he "dodges" the answers. 

History

Part Two "History" has five chapters which are unnamed in the unabridged, second translation. According to Beauvoir, two factors explain the evolution of women's condition: participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery. 

In chapter 1, Beauvoir states the problem that motherhood left woman "riveted to her body" like an animal and made it possible for men to dominate her and Nature. 

In chapter 2, she describes man's gradual domination of women, starting with the statue of a female Great Goddess found in Susa, and eventually the opinion of ancient Greeks like Pythagoras who wrote, "There is a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman." Men succeed in the world by transcendence, but immanence is the lot of women. 

In chapter 3, explaining inheritance historically, Beauvoir says men oppress women when they seek to perpetuate the family and keep patrimony intact. A comparison follows of women's situation in ancient Greece with Rome. In Greece, with exceptions like Sparta where there were no restraints on women's freedom, women are treated almost like slaves. Menander writes, "Woman is a pain that never goes away." In Rome because men were still the masters, women enjoyed more rights but, still discriminated against on the basis of their gender, had only empty freedom.

In chapter 4, Beauvoir says that with the exception of German tradition, Christianity and its clergy served to subordinate women, quoting Paul the Apostle, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom (who wrote, "Of all the wild animals, none can be found as harmful as women.") She also describes prostitution and the changes in dynamics brought about by courtly love that occurred about the twelfth century. Beauvoir then describes from the early fifteenth century "great Italian ladies and courtesans" and singles out the Spaniard Teresa of Ávila as successfully raising "herself as high as a man". Through the nineteenth century women's legal status remained unchanged but individuals (like Marguerite de Navarre) excelled by writing and acting. Some men like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Molière, the Marquis de Condorcet, and François Poullain de la Barre helped women's status through their works. 

In chapter 5, Beauvoir finds fault with the Napoleonic Code and criticizes Auguste Comte and Honoré de Balzac. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is described as an antifeminist who valued a woman at 8/27th the value of a man. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century gave women an escape from their homes but they were paid little for their work. Beauvoir then traces the growth of trade unions and participation by women. She then examines the spread of birth control methods from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century, and then touches on the history of abortion. She then relates the history of women's suffrage in France, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and the U.S.S.R. 

Beauvoir writes that women who have finally begun to feel at home on the earth like Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie "brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority".

Myths

Part Three "Myths" has three chapters. Chapter 1 is a long, wide-ranging presentation about the "everlasting disappointment" of women for the most part from a male heterosexual's point of view. It covers female menstruation, virginity, and female sexuality including copulation, marriage, motherhood, and prostitution. 

To illustrate man's experience of the "horror of feminine fertility", Beauvoir quotes the British Medical Journal of 1878 in which a member of the British Medical Association writes, "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." She quotes poetry by André Breton, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Michel Leiris, Paul Verlaine, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Valéry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Shakespeare (Hamlet) along with other novels, philosophers, and films (Citizen Kane). 

Beauvoir writes on the last page of the chapter that sexual division is maintained in homosexuality, presumably to indicate that she thinks her work applies to all humans.

Chapter 2 examines the bodies of work of five example writers, in six sections, Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust, D. H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride, Claudel or the Handmaiden of the Lord, Breton or Poetry, Stendhal or Romancing the Real, and an unnamed summary. Beauvoir writes that these "examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in each singular writer". "Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice...." She finds that woman is "the privileged Other", that Other is defined in the "way the One chooses to posit himself", and:

"But the only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex, and female animal is always man."

The chapter closes with the thought, "The absence or insignificance of the female element in a body of work is symptomatic... it loses importance in a period like ours in which each individual's particular problems are of secondary import."

In Chapter 3, Beauvoir says that "mystery" is prominent among men's myths about women. She also says mystery is not confined by sex to women but instead by situation, and that it pertains to any slave. She thinks it disappeared, for example, during the eighteenth century when men however briefly considered women to be peers. To close Part One, she quotes Arthur Rimbaud who writes that hopefully one day, women can become fully human beings when man gives her her freedom.

Volume Two, Lived Experience

Formative Years

Part One has four chapters. In chapter 1 "Childhood", sometimes quoting Colette Audry, Helene Deutsch, Thyde Monnier, and Dr. W. Liepmann, Beauvoir presents a child's life beginning with birth and attachment to maternal flesh. She contrasts a girl's upbringing with a boy's, who at age 3 or 4 is told he is a "little man".

She describes and rejects Freud's "female castration complex" and says that girls do learn to envy aspects of boys' urination. Girls are given a doll as an alter ego and in compensation. A girl is taught to be a woman and her "feminine" destiny is imposed on her by her teachers and society. She has, for example, no innate "maternal instinct". Because housework can be done by a young child, sometimes her mother asks her to do it. 

A girl comes to believe in and to worship a male god and to create imaginary adult lovers. The discovery of sex is a "phenomenon as painful as weaning" and she views it with disgust. When she discovers that men, not women, are the masters of the world the revelation "imperiously modifies her consciousness of herself".

Beauvoir concludes this chapter with a description of puberty and starting menstruation as well as the way girls imagine sex with a man.

In chapter 2 "The Girl", Beauvoir describes ways that girls in their late teens accept their "femininity". Girls might do this by running away from home, through fascination with the disgusting, by following nature, or by stealing.

Chapter 3 "Sexual Initiation" is a description of sexual relations with men. Along with numbers of psychiatrists, Beauvoir believed that the repercussions of the first of these experiences informs a woman's whole life.

Chapter 4 "The Lesbian" is a description of sexual relations with women, which Beauvoir believed that society thought was a "forbidden path". She wrote that "homosexuality is no more a deliberate perversion than a fatal curse"

Situation

Part Two "Situation" has six chapters. In chapter 5 "The Married Woman" Beauvoir demonstrates her negative thoughts about marriage saying that "to ask two spouses bound by practical, social and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity".

She then describes the work of married women, beginning with several pages about housecleaning which she says is "holding away death but also refusing life". She thinks, "what makes the lot of the wife-servant ungratifying is the division of labor that dooms her wholly to the general and inessential".

Beauvoir says a woman finds her dignity only in accepting her vassalage which is bed "service" and housework "service". A woman is weaned away from her family and finds only "disappointment" on the day after her wedding.

Beauvoir points out various inequalities between a wife and husband (in, for example, age) and finds they pass the time not in love but in "conjugal love". She thinks that marriage "almost always destroys woman". She quotes Sophia Tolstoy who wrote in her diary: "you are stuck there forever and there you must sit". Beauvoir thinks marriage is a perverted institution oppressing both men and women.

Chapter 6 "The Mother" is two-thirds not about children. The first nine pages or so are an exposition on abortion arguing that abortions performed legally by doctors would have little risk to the mother and highlighting the plight of families and children born to unsuitable homes.

She argues that the Catholic Church cannot make the claim that the souls of the unborn would not end up in heaven because of their lack of baptism because that would be contradictory to other Church teachings. For example, the Church taught that the souls of men who were fatally injured without baptism would still be with God.

She states that the issue of abortion is not an issue of morality but of “masculine sadism” toward woman. The following fourteen pages describe pregnancy. Pregnancy is viewed as both a gift and a curse to woman. In this new creation of a new life the woman loses her Self, seeing herself as “no longer anything...[but] a passive instrument”.

When she arrives at children, Beauvoir continues in negative mode with, "maternal sadomasochism creates guilt feelings for the daughter that will express themselves in sadomasochistic behavior toward her own children, without end". She finishes with an appeal for socialist child rearing practices, "in a properly organized society where the child would in great part be taken charge of by the group".

In chapter 7 "Social Life", Beauvoir describes a woman's clothes, her girlfriends and her relationships with priests, doctors, famous performers, and lovers, concluding that "...adultery, friendships, and social life are but diversions within married life...."

She also thinks, "marriage, by frustrating women's erotic satisfaction, denies them the freedom and individuality of their feelings, drives them to adultery...." In chapter 8 "Prostitutes and Hetaeras", Beauvoir describes prostitutes and their relationships with pimps and with other women, as well as hetaeras. In contrast to prostitutes, hetaeras can gain recognition as an individual and if successful can aim higher and be publicly distinguished. This can be observed in movie stars like Rita Hayworth.

(In ancient Greece, hetaerae (singular /hɪˈtaɪrə/, plural /hɪˈtaɪriː/; in Greek ἑταῖραι, hetairai) were courtesans—highly educated, sophisticated companions. Although most engaged in sexual relations with their patrons, hetaerae were not simple prostitutes.)

Chapter 9 "From Maturity to Old Age" is women's path to menopause which might arouse woman's homosexual feelings (which Beauvoir thinks are latent in most women). When she agrees to grow old she becomes elderly with half of her adult life left to live. Woman might choose to live through her children (often her son) or her grandchildren but she faces "solitude, regret, and ennui".

To pass her time she might engage in useless "women's handiwork" (which can't be a diversion because the "mind is vacant"), watercolors, music or reading, or she might join charitable organizations. While a few rare women are committed to a cause and have an end in mind, Beauvoir concludes that "the highest form of freedom a woman-parasite can have is stoic defiance or skeptical irony".

In chapter 10 "Woman's Situation and Character", Beauvoir says a woman knows how to be as active, effective and silent as a man. She says Stendhal said that woman handles masculine logic "as skillfully as man if she has to". But her situation keeps her being useful, preparing food, clothes, and lodging. She worries because she does not do anything, she complains, she cries, and she may threaten suicide. She protests but doesn't escape her lot.

She may achieve happiness in "Harmony" and the "Good" as illustrated by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. She is the target of religion. Beauvoir thinks it is pointless to try to decide whether woman is superior or inferior, and that it is obvious that the man's situation is "infinitely preferable". She writes, "for woman there is no other way out than to work for her liberation".

Justifications

Part Three "Justifications" is brief and has three chapters. Chapter 11 "The Narcissist" describes narcissistic women who might find themselves in a mirror and in the theater. Chapter 12 "The Woman in Love" describes women in and outside marriage: "The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger."

Chapter 13 "The Mystic" talks about the lives of among others, Mme. Guyon, Mme. Krüdener, Saint Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Marie Alacoque, Catherine Emmerich, and Therese Neumann, some of whom developed stigmata. Beauvoir says these women may develop a relation "with an unreal"— with their double or a god, or they create an "unreal relation with a real being".

Toward Liberation

Part Four "Toward Liberation" has one chapter and a conclusion. In chapter 14 "The Independent Woman", Beauvoir describes the difference for a male, who might, for example, move to a hotel in a new city, and a female who would feel the need to set up a household.

She also mentions women with careers who are able to escape sadism and masochism. A few women have successfully reached a state of equality, and Beauvoir, in a footnote, singles out the example of Clara and Robert Schumann. Beauvoir says that the goals of wives can be overwhelming: as a wife tries to be elegant, a good housekeeper and a good mother. Singled out are "actresses, dancers and singers" who may achieve independence. Among writers, Beauvoir chooses only Emily Brontë, Woolf and ("sometimes") Mary Webb (and she mentions Colette and Mansfield) as among those who have tried to approach nature "in its inhuman freedom". 

Beauvoir then says that women don't "challenge the human condition" and that in comparison to the few "greats", woman comes out as "mediocre" and will continue at that level for quite some time. A woman could not have been Vincent Van Gogh or Franz Kafka. Beauvoir thinks that perhaps, of all women, only Saint Teresa lived her life for herself. She says it is "high time" woman "be left to take her own chances".

In her conclusion, Beauvoir traces a future when women and men are equals, something the "Soviet revolution promised" but did not ever deliver:

...women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries; erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, but the sexual act would no longer be considered a remunerable "service"; women would be obliged to provide another livelihood for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them.

Beauvoir explains "a basic law of political economy" to stop "endless debate" about "the ambiguity of the words 'give' and 'take'". She says that a woman needs to understand that "an exchange...is negotiated according to the value the proposed merchandise has for the buyer and not for the seller: she was duped by being persuaded she was priceless...." Beauvoir takes time to answer skeptics and her critics but quickly reaches the end:

...to carry off this supreme victory, men and women must, among other things and beyond their natural differentiations, unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.

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Simone de Beauvoir. A Biography 

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, commonly known as Simone de Beauvoir (French: [simɔn də bovwaʁ]; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986), was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. While she did not consider herself a philosopher, Beauvoir had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is best known for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

Early Years 

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the elder daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise (née) Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Simone's sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child —- at one point intending to become a nun -— until she experienced a crisis of faith at age 14, after which she remained an atheist for the rest of her life.

Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father’s encouragement; he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!” After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg.

She first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or beaver). The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.

Middle Years

Sartre

During October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him. One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease". Near the end of her life, Beauvoir said, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry." So they entered a lifelong relationship. Beauvoir chose never to marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre. She never had children. This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes, to travel, to write, to teach, and to have lovers (both male and female – the latter often shared).

Sartre and Beauvoir always read each other's work. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay. However, recent studies of Beauvoir's work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz.

Beauvoir was known to have a number of young female lovers (and to have introduced them to Sartre). The nature of some of these relationships, some of which she began while working as a professor, has led to a biographical controversy. A former student, Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld), in her book, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée, wrote that, while she was a student, she had been sexually exploited by her teacher Simone de Beauvoir, who was in her thirties at the time. In 1943, Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had, in 1939, seduced her 17-year-old lycee pupil Nathalie Sorokine. Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against Beauvoir for abducting a minor and as a result she had her licence to teach in France permanently revoked.

She Came to Stay

Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943. It is a fictionalized chronicle of her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during the early 30s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she denied him, so he began a relationship with her sister Wanda, instead. Upon his death, Sartre was still supporting Wanda. He also supported Olga for years, until she met and married Jacques-Laurent Bost, Beauvoir's lover.

In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, Beauvoir creates one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalized versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois.

Beauvoir's metaphysical novel She Came to Stay was followed by many others, including The Blood of Others, which explores the nature of individual responsibility.

Existentialist Ethics 

In 1944 Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay, The Ethics of Ambiguity, (1947); it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the abstruse character of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. In the essay Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance.

Les Temps Modernes

At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes, a political journal which Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death.

Sexuality, existentialist feminism, and The Second Sex

Chapters of Le deuxième sexe (translated as The Second Sex) were originally published in Les Temps modernes, in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France. It was very quickly published in America as The Second Sex, due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message. For years Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars. Only in 2009 was there a second translation, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation, reinstating a third of the original work.

Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of Erica Jong and Germaine Greer.

In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that this also happened on the basis of other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.

The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. The capitalized 'O' in "other" indicates the wholly other.

Beauvoir argued that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir said that this attitude limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.

Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.

A new translation of The Second Sex for the first time gives access to the entire text in English, as Irene Gammel writes in a Globe and Mail review: "The single most important advantage of this new translation is its completeness, combined with the translators' courage to transpose Beauvoir's existential language, thereby giving readers a sense of Beauvoir's channelling of Hegel, Marx and others."

The Mandarins

Published in 1954, The Mandarins is set just after the end of World War II and won her France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The book follows the personal lives of philosophers and friends among Sartre and Beauvoir's intimate circle, including her relationship with American writer Nelson Algren, to whom the book was dedicated. Algren was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir described their sexual experiences in both The Mandarins and her autobiographies.

Dunes cottage where Algren and Beauvoir summered in Miller Beach, Indiana.

He vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of her work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.

Later Years 

Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about her travels in the United States and China, and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging.

In 1980 she published When Things of the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories centered around and based upon women important to her earlier years. The stories were written long before the novel She Came to Stay, but Beauvoir did not think they were worthy of publication until about forty years later.

Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les Temps Modernes. Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions.

Beauvoir also notably wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: After the War and Hard Times); and All Said and Done.

In the 1970s Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a list of famous women who claimed to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. Some argue most of the women had not had abortions, including Beauvoir, but given the secrecy surrounding the issue, this cannot be known. Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Poupette. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France.

Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age) is a rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about age 60.

In about 1976 Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon made a trip to New York in the USA to visit Kate Millett on her farm.

In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years. In the opening of Adieux, Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication.

After Sartre died, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm would not let many of Sartre's letters be published in unedited form. Most of Sartre's letters available today have Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren.

Beauvoir died of pneumonia in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Wikipedia

Warrior Vl (Artwork) 

Temujin Rao Digital Darkroom Art From Original

A PROFILE: TEMUJIN RAO 

FEMINIST. METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST. ARTIST 

TEMUJIN RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™

The Super Sacred Brother Lover™ 

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me. 

Temujin Rao © 2013

Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser. 

I can help you grow power, from nothing. 

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. 

Temujin Rao © 2013

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last. 

Temujin Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™. 

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts. 

Temujin Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy. 

Temujin Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company. 

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Temujin Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Temujin Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living. 

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Temujin Rao © 2012 

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 (+) years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live. 

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived. 

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 + years. 

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world. 

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 + years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life. 

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love. 

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the Light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth. 

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants. 

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you. 

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done. 

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul. 

Temujin Rao © 2012 

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift. 

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife. 

Temujin Rao © 2012 

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Temujin Rao © 2012 

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Temujin Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Temujin Rao © 2011

Temujin Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Temujin Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Temujin Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Temujin Rao © 2012

Thank you to outside sources for photography and artwork.

Temujin Rao © Digital Darkroom Art