Beauvoir and women
Sometimes I ask a question to myself. What is woman? How can we define woman? As a womb with ovaries? Or as a certain essence of abstract philosophical thoughts? According to Linda Nicholson, the author of the book, “The Second Wave,” there is no such thing as a fixed unchanging substance of being a woman, or of being a Black person, or a Jew.
The features of a woman, Black person or Jew come into being in response to circumstances. In history, the Enlightenment, rationalism and nominalism assert that a woman doesn’t have any specific content. Defining a woman as performing a certain function is not enough either.
Feminist theorists of the second wave of feminism tried to create theories to explicate the severity and pervasiveness of women’s oppression.
“The Second Sex,” written by Simone de Beauvoir, can be considered one of these efforts. Beauvoir explains how man becomes a subject, an autonomous individual, a human being, on the basis of biological sexual differences between man and woman, while woman is usually regarded as “other” in relation to man. Woman is usually not understood as a being of transcendence. This term of transcendence must have been derived from her philosophical bedrock of existentialism, which she shared with Jean Paul Sartre.
Though Beauvoir’s book, “The Second Sex,” was written in 1949, her explanations can be extended and applied even now. In ancient societies and myths, man was considered the absolute human being. This line of thinking is true with distinguished philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. The same goes for church fathers and theologians including Tertullian and Aquinas. Man defines woman, woman exists as a relative being to man, which means she is not viewed as an autonomous being. Even in the Bible, it is quite easy to find that women are depicted as the second subject and powerless.
Meanwhile, one conclusion of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French structural anthropologist, is that the passage from nature to culture is marked by humans’ ability to see biological relations as contrasts. The subject sets itself up as a contrast over and against the “other” object. But the more exchanges and trades happen among ancient societies, the more and better people realize that those contrasts, those relations are not absolute, but relative. Nonetheless, woman’s relativeness and otherness are still not widely recognized.
For instance, although Jews and Black people had been marginalized as “other,” they still had solidarity among themselves to transform society. The same doesn’t go for woman, though women have changed society quite a bit. Women have tended not to have as strong a bond as Black people or Jews.
There must be many reasons and circumstances for this phenomenon. But above all, the most crucial reason must be the institution of heterosexual marriage and family. Women live dispersed among men. Many women are much closer to men rather than to other women. Many women are connected in couples of heterosexual marriage and family. Thus, there seems to be not many means to organize women.