TY - JOUR
AU - Richmond, Sarah
AB - Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe was first published in France in 1949. Four years later, it was published in English (in the abridged and notoriously defective Parshley translation) as The Second Sex. A complete and more faithful English version, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier only came out in 2009, sixty years after its first publication. This momentous text is often classified—retrospectively, and with recourse to the widely used marine imagery—as a central contribution to ‘second wave’ feminism. As this imagery underwrites a received view of the development of feminist thinking, and in view of Manon Garcia’s ambition—to retrieve Beauvoir from her place in history, and to propose her insights as a resource for feminists today—it will be useful to remind readers of its substance. (Note that other accounts differ in detail.) The first wave, which spans the later years of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, is usually understood in terms of women’s demand for some basic legal equalities, the right to vote (only fully secured for women in the UK in 1928 and not until 1944 in France), and rights to property ownership. The second wave, at its height in the 1960s and 1970s, involved a wider scrutiny of women’s social role and subordination, including their economic inequality, their limited opportunities in the workplace, their unpaid domestic labour and childcare, their inadequate access to contraception and abortion, and the sexual double standard. All of these are cited, and some discussed at great length, in The Second Sex. ‘The personal is political’ is emblematic of this period, and implicit in Beauvoir’s work. The third wave began at some point in the 1990s. By virtue of its emphasis on the differences between women (of race, class, culture, sexuality, and so on) and, consequently, on the irreducibly different axes of oppression, it cast doubt on the earlier feminist supposition that women can be seen for political purposes as a single group with shared interests. Crenshaw’s 1989 paper on the intersection between race and sex was a driving force in this development. This period was also marked by the rise of other, theoretically complex feminisms, such as the postmodern approach. The putative existence of a fourth wave is still under discussion. (Garcia does not take a stand on this.) According to some, it emerged in the last twenty years or so; it includes a critical focus on social media-related abuses, the #MeToo movement, and debates about the relationship between transgender and cis women. In We Are Not Born Submissive, Manon Garcia presents a close reading of Beauvoir’s text, which, she argues, remains relevant to the condition of (Western) women today. (Garcia imposes this geographical restriction to avoid making assumptions about non-Western societies.) Garcia’s book, like the text which galvanizes it, was originally written in French; Garcia herself, who teaches philosophy at Yale, has translated it. Submission, Garcia suggests in her first chapter, is a ‘philosophical taboo’ that Beauvoir had the courage to breach. This awkward topic is also pertinent to contemporary fourth-wave concerns; Garcia cites the interventions in the #MeToo debate of dissidents who claim that many women seek out the sexual attentions of powerful men (where the subtext is that the complainants are partly responsible). The Harvey Weinstein scandal provides Garcia with a useful peg in her Preface. This is a well-organized and concise book, engaging, intelligent and attractively produced. (I wondered if the birdcage depicted on the cover was an allusion to Marilyn Frye’s clever metaphor for oppression.) Garcia conveys the originality of Beauvoir’s project and sets it into dialogue with the contributions—critical and admiring—of later feminist thinkers. In evaluating Garcia’s success, there are at least two important questions to consider. How persuasive is her claim about Beauvoir’s current relevance? And how strong is her defence of Beauvoir against (some of) her later feminist critics? At first sight, the claim to current relevance is dubitable. The French existentialism which informs Beauvoir’s thinking was at its height in the post-war years when The Second Sex was written: in France, from the 1960s onwards, this philosophy was largely rejected and comprehensively displaced by structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructive developments, while anglophone philosophy barely engaged with it. Within the narrower perspective of feminist theory, Judith Butler is often accredited with having revealed and surpassed Beauvoir’s theoretical limitations, setting the terms of a new agenda in her influential Gender Trouble (1990). The Second Sex has also been repeatedly criticized for its alleged pre-intersectional universalism. Moreover, and at the most mundane level, for any reader today, many of the details of women’s lives which Beauvoir so comprehensively documents will evoke a bygone age in which most married middle-class women were confined to the domestic sphere and their daughters were trained to follow suit. Beauvoir records a post-war regimen in which, as she sees it, women sought to compensate for their frustrations by wielding an unrewarding power in the home: ‘It is through housework that the wife comes to make her “nest” her own; this is why, even if she has “help”, she insists on doing things herself; at least by watching over, controlling, and criticizing, she endeavours to make her servants’ results her own. By administrating her home, she achieves her social justification’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 484). We can distinguish at least three (overlapping) aims with which one might approach a fresh look at Beauvoir. First, attention to what she actually wrote can dispel the misunderstandings that inevitably accrue over time, setting the record straight. Second, her methodology in The Second Sex—one of its most fascinating elements—can be clarified and assessed for its putative utility today. Third, her analysis of the mechanisms by which women are oppressed—the precursor to Garcia’s concept of submission—can be reconsidered. Garcia is most interested in the second and third of these aims; her book is structured thematically, the chapters successively exploring the various facets of submission. Still, the first aim is also of interest, and the influence of Butler’s representation(s) of Beauvoir is a case in point. For Butler, The Second Sex inaugurates the distinction, fundamental to so much feminist discussion, between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. This claim leans heavily on Beauvoir’s famous statement (echoed in Garcia’s title) that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’. As Butler construes it, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired’ (Butler 1986, p. 35). Unsurprisingly, Butler will argue, in many of her texts, that this distinction between sex and gender is itself in need of dismantling, that ‘sex’ is not, any more than is gender, a given or natural fact. Of course, Beauvoir’s dictum does not explicitly deploy the sex/gender distinction. (Interestingly, at the lexical level, the sex/gender distinction did not exist in the French language when Beauvoir was writing: the noun ‘sexe’ served (and still serves) for both sides of the distinction. Post-Beauvoir, many French theorists have plugged this gap by using the term genre to translate ‘gender’ in the sense in which anglophone feminists use it.) Moreover, and pace Butler, the distinction does not feature in Beauvoir’s text implicitly either. As it is usually deployed by feminists, ‘sex’ is biological and given, whereas ‘gender’ is the outcome of acculturation. But Beauvoir takes over the concept of ‘situation’ from other existentialist philosophers, and in her hands the situation encompasses the body; as she puts it, in a slightly odd formulation, ‘one might say … that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 46). Biological and socio-cultural elements, therefore, belong in the same category, where nothing is unmediated by freedom. Beauvoir cites Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as influences; indeed, the concept of ‘situation’ is central to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), although Beauvoir modifies it, and expands it to include the body.. The intersectional commitments of third-wave feminism have fuelled many retrospective readings of Beauvoir; from this perspective, she has been characterized for her alleged generalizations about women, for asking the wrong question—‘What Is a Woman?’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 3)—for presuming to speak on behalf of other women, for failing to acknowledge the specificity of her own white, middle-class standpoint. Elizabeth Spelman’s critique, in her Inessential Woman, is an influential instance; although she notes Beauvoir’s awareness of the multiple dimensions of human oppression, she charges her with ‘sabotag[ing] … her insights about … the multiple locations of women’ (Spelman 1988, p. 64) and overlooking the privileged position from which she writes. These charges bear in large part on Beauvoir’s methodology which Garcia—in the company of other admirers of Beauvoir—aims to defend. Noting that there is a prima facie presumptuousness, perhaps even an impossibility, in attempting to ‘speak for’ silent or silenced oppressed others, Garcia makes a virtue out of Beauvoir’s privileged standpoint. Her claim is that, qua woman, Beauvoir belongs to an oppressed group whose voices (especially in the 1940s) were rarely heard, but that, qua privileged woman—educated, and from a well-off background—Beauvoir was able to use her acquired intellectual tools to throw light on the condition of women more generally. This on its own hardly dissolves the charge, which relates to the accessibility of the entire spectrum of social experience. Garcia acknowledges, in passing, some ‘indisputable weaknesses’ (p. 108) in Beauvoir’s standpoint. Still, Garcia argues, Beauvoir’s methodology remains potent: Beauvoir takes the reader through an immense and erudite corpus of fact, myth, history and literature, clarifying and substantiating her account of sexual inequality; further, Beauvoir’s distinctive appropriation of the phenomenological tradition ‘solve[s] methodological problems’ (p. 99). These achievements notwithstanding, it is not clear to me how we are to understand the methodology which Garcia salutes; in particular, the boundary between social science and phenomenology is obscure. We are told that, in keeping with the strictures of phenomenology, Beauvoir relies on first-person experience while at the same time, through all her (armchair) research, she ‘multiplies the sources of first-person narratives’, thereby including and documenting experiences different from her own. On this interpretation, phenomenology seems to amount only to a collection of testimonies from a number of female subjects, a sort of amateur sociology which leaves untouched the problems of generalization, as well as the epistemological arguments of standpoint theory. Other scholars have served Beauvoir better, I think, with accounts of her approach that are more strongly philosophically committed. For Sara Heinämaa (1997), for instance, Beauvoir’s adoption of phenomenology, influenced in large part by Merleau-Ponty, renders her enquiry—into meanings rather than facts—orthogonal to the social sciences, while Nancy Bauer (2001)argues that The Second Sex introduces a new understanding of feminist philosophy, in which the staking of Beauvoir’s own subjectivity plays an important and performative role. Toril Moi (1999), pursuing a more textual strategy, has also persuasively argued that although Beauvoir’s approach addresses women, she does not presume to speak for them. We can park these methodological worries, to consider Garcia’s substantive aim, to elicit a concept of submission, ‘with the help’ of Beauvoir’s philosophy, that will throw light on ‘the complex ways in which patriarchy shapes women’s experience’ (p. xiv). Beauvoir states her question at the outset of The Second Sex: ‘Where does … submission in woman come from?’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 7). To answer it, she deploys a fundamental distinction between Self and Other which, she claims (leaning on Lévi-Strauss), is anthropologically universal; to this she adds Hegel’s insight that ‘a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 7). Beauvoir’s inspired move is to borrow antecedently existing philosophical materials about intersubjective relations, in order to gender them; in so far as women are positioned (by men) as Other, the Self–Other opposition takes the form of an asymmetrical power relation, of sexual inequality. In her own account of submission, Garcia prefers to begin from a more analytical, less historically encumbered, starting point; she wants to clarify a concept of submission that is politically appropriate for today’s feminism. But here things get tricky. In the first instance, Garcia identifies submission with the action, on the part of a dominated person or group, which domination typically elicits; it is domination’s correlative (p. 18). On this reading, submission is present in all successful cases of domination other than those which are violent or explicitly coercive. (This formulation coheres nicely with the methodological ambition Garcia ascribes to Beauvoir, and endorses: to understand women’s oppression from their point of view, rather than from the dominant, more familiar point of view; Beauvoir offers us an ‘analysis of power from the bottom up’, p. 73). On this minimal reading, submission is roughly equivalent to cooperation. However, in Beauvoir’s analysis, there is a further strand: women’s submission, she suggests, is (at least some of the time) complicit. This claim, which is a source both of Beauvoir’s originality and of the ‘taboo’ that Garcia associates with it, cannot be overlooked. But Garcia’s relationship to it is, in my view, obscure (perhaps because of political unease): how much ‘help’ from Beauvoir is she, in this instance, willing to accept? In ordinary language, a person can be complicit in many kinds of wrongdoing. In Beauvoir’s philosophy, complicity has specifically to do with an abdication of one’s freedom. This idea is owed to Sartre; in Being and Nothingness (1943), freedom and the evasions it prompts are central to human existence. (Like Sartre, Beauvoir also describes these evasions in terms of bad faith and inauthenticity.) Whereas Sartre judges bad faith to be endemic—the default attitude for most people in everyday life—Beauvoir argues that the presence of oppression, and especially sex-based oppression, invalidates that judgement. In a much-quoted sentence from her Introduction, she distinguishes between two ways in which a subject may ‘fall’ into unfreedom: ‘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’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 17). The trouble is that although the quotation suggests a neat disjunction, Beauvoir also indicates, at numerous points in The Second Sex, that women’s oppression in fact coexists with a degree of complicity. Only a few pages earlier, she claims, in very Sartrean terms, that women’s subordination to men affords some benefits: ‘the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence … are … avoided. The man who sets the woman up as an Other will thus find in her a deep complicity’ (Beauvoir [1949] 2011, p. 10). And the epigraph to volume 2 of The Second Sex quotes Sartre’s 1948 play Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales): ‘Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone’. I am doubtful whether a satisfactory interpretation of Beauvoir’s text which delivers a consistent account of complicity is possible; I do not know of one, and the topic is not often discussed (Knowles 2019 is an exception; her paper is in part a response to James’s 2003 discussion of complicity in Beauvoir). For feminists, of course, the theme of complicity is bound to be problematic: to describe a person or group as ‘complicit’ implies that there is fault on their part; the term is not ethically neutral; nor does Beauvoir mean it to be. Yet most feminists will reject this implication, in its application to women: the disadvantages suffered by women are not something for which they should be held responsible. In her own account of submission, Garcia is alive to an analogous difficulty: ‘that women could … choose and savor this submission appears as right wing, antifeminist, or even misogynistic’. (Remember the Weinstein debates.) Resolutely, she explores ways of accommodating this thought which will remove, or dilute, its sting. But each of these has problems of its own. Garcia proposes, for example, that the reason (some) women acquiesce in their oppression is that a ‘cost-benefit’ analysis shows the risks of rebellion to be outweighed by the gains: ‘even the most ambitious women sometimes prefer renouncing their freedom rather than paying the (high) price for it—for instance, taking on most of the housework to avoid the catastrophic economic consequences of a divorce’ (p. 193). Along similar lines, in a variant proposal, Garcia suggest that the immediacy of social norms makes it ‘easier’ for women to measure the costs of freedom than its benefits (p. 195). However, while each of these possibilities may be an adequate explanation of women’s cooperation, the uncomfortable phenomenon appears to have vanished from view: these are rational calculations, albeit fallible; where is the risk of misogyny here? Later, Garcia suggests that because of the sexist culture in which they are raised, submissive women do not really choose their social condition; again, such an attitude, with the innocent epistemic limitations it implies, seems to swerve from the problem. Nonetheless, an ambivalence is evident elsewhere: following Beauvoir’s lead, Garcia invokes some ‘temptations’ of submission; she cites, for example, the pleasure that women may take in making themselves attractive to men, or in abdicating to romantic love. Why, unless we felt there was something wrong about these pleasure-seeking pursuits, would we describe them as ‘temptations’? The ghost of Beauvoir’s complicity is apparent and, despite her efforts, Garcia’s account of submission is beset by a similar equivocation. Still, Garcia’s sympathetic revisiting of The Second Sex will encourage feminists to return to Beauvoir’s remarkable work and to read it with the seriousness it deserves. References Bauer , Nancy 2001 : Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism . New York : Columbia University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC de Beauvoir , Simone [1949] 2011 : The Second Sex . Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier . London : Vintage . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Butler , Judith 1986 : ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’ . Yale French Studies , 72 , pp. 35 – 49 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat —— 1990 : Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . London : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Crenshaw , Kimberlé 1989 : ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ . University of Chicago Legal Forum , 1 ( 8 ), pp. 139 – 67 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Heinämaa , Sara 1997 : ‘What Is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference’ . Hypatia , 12 ( 1 ), pp. 20 – 39 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat James , Susan 2003 : ‘ Complicity and Slavery in The Second Sex ’. In Claudia Card (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , pp. 149 – 67 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Knowles , Charlotte 2019 : ‘Beauvoir on Women’s Complicity in Their Own Unfreedom’ . Hypatia , 34 , pp. 242 – 65 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Moi , Toril 1999 : What Is a Woman? and Other Essays . Oxford : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Sartre , Jean-Paul 1943 : Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology . Translated by Sarah Richmond. Abingdon : Routledge , 2018. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Spelman , Elizabeth V. 1988 : Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought . Boston, MA : Beacon Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © Mind Association 2022 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © Mind Association 2022
TI - We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives, by Manon Garcia
JF - Mind
DO - 10.1093/mind/fzac040
DA - 2022-08-18
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/we-are-not-born-submissive-how-patriarchy-shapes-women-s-lives-by-dcYLqjTqaE
SP - 571
EP - 578
VL - 133
IS - 530
DP - DeepDyve
ER -