Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was a French philosopher, novelist and feminist. First published in French in 1949, The Second Sex (1952) was to become one of the iconic texts of modern feminism. In it, de Beauvoir argued that women were not fully human because femininity was defined by men, that they were the second sex or the ‘other’ in a world in which humanity was primarily defined in terms of the identity of man. Here, De Beauvoir theorises female gender roles:
Woman herself recognizes that the world is masculine on the whole; those who fashioned it, ruled it, and still dominate it today are men. As for her, [unlike men] she does not consider herself responsible for it; it is understood that she is inferior and dependent; she has not learned the lessons of violence, she has never stood forth as subject before the other members of the group. Shut up in her flesh, her home, she sees herself as passive before these gods with human faces who set goals and establish values. In this sense there is truth in the saying that makes her the ‘eternal child’. Workers, black slaves, colonial natives, have also been called grown-up children—as long as they were not feared; that meant that they were to accept without argument the verities and the laws laid down for them by other men. The lot of a woman is a respectful obedience …
[If] woman is earthy, commonplace, basely utilitarian, it is because she is compelled to devote her existence to cooking and washing diapers—no way to acquire as sense of grandeur! It is her duty to assure the monotonous repetition of life in all its mindless factuality. It is natural for woman to repeat, to begin again without ever inventing, for time to seem to her to go round and round without every leading anywhere. She is occupied without ever doing anything, and thus she identifies with what she has. This dependence on things, a consequence of the dependence in which men keep her, explains her frugality, her avarice. Her life is not directed towards ends: she is absorbed in producing or caring for things that are never more than means, such as food, clothing, and shelter … This utility reigns in the housekeeper’s heaven, above truth, beauty, liberty; and it is in this perspective that she envisages the entire universe … How could one expect her to show ardor, disinterestedness, grandeur? These qualities appear only when a free being strikes forward through an open future, emerging far beyond all given actuality. Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly …
When woman suffocates in a dull gynaecium—brothel or middle-class home—she is bound to take refuge in comfort and well-being; besides that, if she eagerly seeks sexual pleasure, it is very often because she is deprived of it. Sexually unsatisfied, doomed to male crudeness, ‘condemned to masculine ugliness,’ she finds consolation in creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caress of water, of sunshine, of a woman friend, of a young lover.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1952 (1993). The Second Sex. New York: Knopf. pp. xliii, xlix–l, 629, 636, 635. || Amazon || WorldCat