She built the most influential feminist philosophy of the twentieth century by joining insights from Existentialism and Marxism, but both of these rest on Hegel’s problematic Master/Slave dialectic.
“He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) brings Existentialism and Marxism to bear on the problem of women’s oppression. A basic tenet of Existentialism is that humans must create meaning for themselves through their life choices and projects. There is no pre-given meaning for a human life, no higher authority we can look to for direction. According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, we are radically free beings; “man is condemned to be free,” he tells us in Existentialism is a Humanism.
As for women, we might be free to make choices that give our lives meaning, but that freedom is not absolute. Beauvoir knew from experience that our choices and actions emerge from within concrete situations, circumscribed as they are by economic and political realities. In 1929 she passed the agrégation in philosophy, the youngest person ever to do so, but placed second behind Sartre on his second attempt; rumor has it they didn’t want to give the first place to a woman. When women are treated as second-class citizens, the truth is that they become second-class citizens, with limited rights and freedoms. Our ability to pursue meaning-making activities is limited to what patriarchy is willing to afford women in the first place, and that is what feminist struggle sets out to change.
Marxism is how Beauvoir tells the story of the systemic oppression of women, not as individuals, but as a class (since women are oppressed because of their membership in that group, under patriarchy). But the Marxist account of class rests on Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, and feminists have raised some doubts about whether this is a good model for us to work from. Was Beauvoir’s use of Marx and the underlying Master/Slave dialectic a mistake? I think it was, and Carla Lonzi saw why. But it was a mistake made with the only tools Beauvoir had, and it was her book, in its successes and its failures, that made Lonzi’s answer possible.
“Forcing the woman question into a master-slave concept of struggle, such as the class struggle, is a historical mistake” —Carla Lonzi, Let’s Spit on Hegel
Italian feminist Carla Lonzi argues, in her 1970 manifesto Let’s Spit on Hegel, that this use is like a category mistake, and she refuses to be drawn into a dialectic at all. The reason it is a mistake, she says, is that “Hegel’s master/slave relationship is a relationship internal to the male human world” (p. 279). It is a settling of accounts among men, deduced from the logic of seizing power. It has nothing to do with women.
To see why, recall how Hegel’s story goes. Two self-consciousnesses meet, each demanding recognition from the other, and the demand escalates into a struggle to the death. Consciousness is shaken to its foundations in facing death. One party chooses freedom over life and becomes the Master; the other chooses life over freedom and becomes the Slave. The whole drama depends on the possibility that one side could annihilate the other. Hegel did understand that the slave’s subjugation had a human, historical origin rather than a natural one, which is how the dialectic ultimately continues on the side of the Slave once he achieves independence through his labor. Hegel never extended that recognition to women, whose position he tied to an unchanging “principle of femininity.” Lonzi argues that if he had, he would have hit a wall:
“If Hegel had recognized the human origin of the oppression of woman, as he recognized the human origin of the oppression of the slave, he would have had to apply the master/slave dialectic to her case, too. And in so doing he would have run into a serious obstacle... On the level of the man-woman relationship there is no solution that eliminates the other, hence the seizure of power as a conclusive act becomes irrelevant.” (p. 281)
Men and women need each other for the species to continue at all, at least so far. There is no final battle between them, and no reversal in which the oppressed takes the oppressor’s place. For Lonzi, this is what marks the struggle against patriarchy as a different kind of struggle, one that runs alongside class struggle but can’t be folded into it. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, she writes poignantly, “is a phenomenology of the patriarchal spirit” (p. 281).
She also has concrete reasons for thinking the Marxist version of the frame fails women. Women’s oppression predates capitalism; capitalism inherited it. Marxist analysis never counted the work women do inside the family, reproducing the workforce, as essential to capital accumulation, and simply widening “class” to include women doesn’t repair that fatal flaw. Revolution hasn’t delivered either: “the dictatorship of the proletariat has sufficiently demonstrated that it is not the bearer of the dissolution of social roles: it maintained and consolidated the family as the central social institution” (pp. 282–83). In other words, in the historical examples we have where a class revolution more or less succeeded, women were not automatically liberated. Marxism is compatible with the patriarchal appropriation of women’s labor. Marx himself, Lonzi adds dryly, lived as a traditional husband and fathered a child with the family’s maid.
Lonzi then turns Beauvoir’s own vocabulary against her. “Woman is immanence, man transcendence” is, for Lonzi, philosophy’s idealized hierarchy of destinies, and it is a falsification. Man achieves his transcendence by casting woman as the static immanence he needs to push against in order to set history in motion. Woman’s transcendence was never denied in principle, only in practice, because she lacked the political power to back it up. Lonzi’s reply is brisk: “Woman must simply claim her own transcendence. Philosophers have really talked too much” (p. 295).
Beauvoir was not unaware. The introduction to The Second Sex already concedes that the comparison with class struggle breaks down: “a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other.” Later she takes on Hegel by name: “the woman is originally an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; there has never been combat between the male and her; Hegel’s definition applies singularly to her.” That is Lonzi’s objection, twenty years early.
Yet she keeps the frame, and with it Hegel’s measure of what counts. “The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions,” she writes; “it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal.” Where Lonzi reads women’s refusal to stake their lives as a relation to life that philosophy has never represented, Beauvoir counts it as a curse. Her way out stays inside the dialectic too. Just as the slave wins independence by claiming a self-consciousness of his own, woman is to claim her transcendence through work, projects, and politics, until the sexes recognize each other as equals. The last sentence of the book asks that men and women “unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.” Even her word for liberation belongs to men.
I don’t think this was a failure of insight. Beauvoir saw the danger. What she lacked was a language for women’s experience that men had not already written, and she says so herself. Women, she writes, “have no past, no history, no religion of their own”; “women’s entire history has been written by men”; and “the representation of the world as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth.” As one of the first to take up the woman question as a philosophical problem, she had to build with the vocabulary on hand: Hegel’s, Marx’s, Sartre’s. In 1949, Marxism was the common language of the Paris left, and the frame did work she needed. It showed that women’s subordination is made by people rather than given by nature, which is the premise of everything else in the book. And underneath the borrowed Hegelian vocabulary, she had a concept of her own doing the heavier lifting: situation.
Julie K. Ward’s essay “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of ‘Body’ in The Second Sex” argues that Beauvoir uses “body” in two senses. In the first, the body is a thing: inert matter (close to Descartes’s res extensa for those of you who participated in the Feminist Romp). In the second, the body is a situation. Beauvoir writes, “if the body is not a thing, it is a situation,” and she says she is adopting the perspective “of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.” The situated body is “our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects,” and its facts mean nothing outside a world of values.
Take physical weakness. Beauvoir grants that women on average have less muscle mass and lung capacity, but adds that “‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he imposes”; technology, she notes, “can cancel out the muscular inequality separating man and woman.” In Beauvoir’s formulation, “a situation does not depend on the body; it is rather the body that depends on it.”
The same reading changes how we see Beauvoir on motherhood. The Second Sex calls woman “prey to the species.” It describes morning sickness as “the body’s revolt against the species taking possession of it,” and says that in pregnancy a woman is “both herself and other than herself.” Critics such as Mary O’Brien and Charlene Seigfried read this as a masculinist contempt for the female body. On Ward’s account, “prey to the species” describes women pregnant again and again without adequate food, health care, or contraception, rather than reproduction as such. Beauvoir fills her chapter on the mother with accounts that pull in different directions. One of them is Colette’s wonder at her newborn daughter, whose nails resembled “in their transparency the convex scale of the pink shrimp.” From this range Beauvoir concludes that there is no maternal instinct: “The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.” Ward then turns the charge of classism around. The feminists who celebrate motherhood as such are the ones assuming that every woman gets pregnant voluntarily, in comfort, with good health care (p. 236).
This is the ground Beauvoir cleared. Biology is not destiny, maternal instinct is a myth, and weakness is a matter of aims, tools, and laws. Much of what passed for knowledge about women before 1949 does not survive her book.
Situation explains how women become women. It does not tell women where to go, and there Beauvoir falls back on the frame: transcendence as men have defined it, won through recognition. Lonzi refuses the destination along with the route. Women, she says, are not in a dialectical relationship with men. The task is to leave the fight’s terms behind rather than win it on better ones, and for women to claim a subjectivity the dialectic never imagined:
“The unexpected destiny of the world consists in starting out anew, on a new path where woman is subject... Those who are not part of the master-slave dialectic are coming into consciousness and are introducing into the world the Unexpected Subject.” (p. 295)
Lonzi is right to reject the framework entirely. But her rejection didn’t come from nowhere. She wrote in 1970, two decades into the life of The Second Sex, from inside a movement the book helped make possible, and she wrote against Beauvoir’s own vocabulary of immanence and transcendence. The call for the New was produced by Beauvoir’s successes and by her failures, and by those of the second wave that read her. Beauvoir’s big mistake was the frame. Her achievement was clearing enough ground that the mistake could be seen, and that the question of the otherwise could be raised at all.
REFERENCES
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Lonzi, Carla. “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Translated by Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine Maclachlan. In Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, edited by Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, edited by John Kulka, Yale University Press, 2007.
Ward, Julie K. “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of ‘Body’ in The Second Sex.” In Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 223–242.