Beauvoir

In Simone De Beauvoir’ Second Sex, the author aims to define what it is be a woman. It is difficult to pin down the definition of something that has a multitude of meanings to different people. The author makes the claim that although someone is female they may not identify as a woman. In an effort to define women, men have made the comparison against themselves. The essence of woman through the eyes of men is purely a sexual being. The Man views himself as the superior being while only viewing women in terms of personal benefit. De Beauvoir goes on to state a man can imagine himself without a woman yet, a woman cannot imagine herself without man. Not much has changed when it comes to the core argument that on a subconscious level men view

What Beauvoir is trying to make clear in her statement, is the fact that gender is something that has been constructed by culture. It is a false truth; it is not a part of the natural body of a person. Therefore, meaning a person has the ability to employ a gender role outside of the one that has been assigned to their sex. This would seem to imply a sense of freedom in which one may be able to decide their gender. Rather, it is alluding to the idea that a person can be a gender outside of the norms we have prescribed to that person's biological sex. In her saying that one becomes a woman she is implying that the woman does so because she learns through cultural norms what she is supposed to be, and thus has a yearning to do so. This brings about the understanding that this yearning the woman has is not something she was born with. Instead, it was something that she later desired to gain, as a result of cultural construct. Which, Butler would describe as a form of cultural determinism. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and cultural constructed genders" (Butler 6). In butler saying

In the first chapter Simone de Beauvoir discusses her beliefs on feminism. De Beauvoir emerged during the first wave of feminism and she believed that women were one hundred percent equal to men. She states, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute she is the other” (Schneir 8). De Beauvoir implies that what makes a man masculine is all the qualities he possesses that a female is supposed to lack. Thus, she did not want to do anything that would make her fit into the category of “other”.

Named “revolutionary and incendiary,” Simone de Beauvoir’s two-volume work, The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) published in France in 1949, made a significant contribution in furthering gender equality. In her work, she references the ancient world to offer historical perspective on the root of female oppression. De Beauvoir suggests a culprit for the perpetuation of Aristotelian theory: Aquinas, who adopted the Aristotelian notion of female deficiency and declared that woman was an ‘imperfect man,’ an ‘incidental being’ (5). Aquinas’ views were influenced by Aristotle’s reproductive biology.

Though both human beings, Simone claims that woman is not equal to man and that she may never achieve full independence from him. However, the author claims woman can and should claim for liberty. By her own nature woman is different than man. The author states that “woman has ovaries [and] a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature’ (4). Hence, to de Beauvoir her biology and even the way she thinks (4), woman is different from man and there is no reason to argue about equality. De Beauvoir states “a condition brought about a certain time can be abolished at some other time” (8); in that the author claims that it is impossible for women to break its condition of dependency

Beauvoir discusses woman’s evolution and how they are the Other. What was striking was Beauvoir saying a woman is waiting for Man. A woman shouldn’t wait for a man; she should be her own person. This is why a woman is downsized to the Other, because she is not being respected and needs to be at the feet of a man. By waiting for a man they are susceptible to defeatism. Women are oppressed in their development from girl to woman. Beauvoir explains the painful experience that women endure during menstruation. They go through torturous changes in order to be this “woman” that will only be treated like Other; an object. It is as though women need to go through the impossible in order to be Woman. It is also disturbing that a young man is allowed

The existentialist philosophy has one governing ideal: we are not born anything, in fact all that we are is the pure results of our choices. These choices, are constructed from our own resources as well as those that are given to us when we came into existence by society. We do not only create our values, we create ourselves. Simone De Beauvoir, for instance, creates a limit to this existential idea of self-creation, qualifying absolute liberty - an idea that is recurring in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. In opposition to this, de Beauvoir presents an ambiguous image of human liberty, in which women fight against the apparent inconveniences of the female figure. In The Second Sex, her most famous chef-d’oeuvre, de Beauvoir sketches an existential story of a woman’s life. A story revolving around the ways in which the female attitude towards her body and her corporal functions change throughout the years as well as the ways in which society influences her viewpoints. “One is not born, but becomes, a woman” is one of De Beauvoir’s most famous and revolutionary quotes. It focuses on the process in which both society and a woman’s personal identity defines her as a ‘woman’, in essence. In fact, De Beauvoir’s studies reveal that the woman body is presented in both a positive and a negative spectrum. The woman can be both oppressed, as well as free. She argues continuously on the ambiguity of women as their bodies can be both used as a vehicle for freedom and one for

Since the middle ages, women have always been perceived to be less than men. It is not a problem that has begun from one day to another but has been present for several years. Many women who had the opportunity to study did not fail to disclose injustice that resonates in the world towards women such as Christine de Pizan, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, Elsa Dorlin and so many other ones. Mary of gournay, the author of the text we are going to analyze wonders about the reasons that men have to believe that they are better than women. Her text titled "Equality of men and women" belongs to a set of texts titled initially the shadow of the Damoiselle de Gournay. “Equality of men and women"(1622) is a pamphlet attacking the opinions, customs and institutions designed to consolidate the dependence of women. De Gournay expresses her willingness to get rid of the cultural paradigm of her time, that advocates the essentialism and hierarchical differentiation of sexes. Her intention is not to prove the superiority of women over men, however it’s to counteract the multitude of theorists who are now scrambling to persuade otherwise.

First we are encountered with the theory of Classical Feminism. This theory is also referred to as “Liberal Feminism” which implies that all men and woman are to be regarded as “persons” first and gendered beings second (Rosenstand, 625). It is in classical feminism where we are introduced to another type of gender, which is referred to as Androgyny. This new gender category is one that is considered to be a combination of both feminine and masculine characteristics and is achieved through cultural changes rather than biological differences (Rosenstand, 627). Simone de Beauvoir believed that a man was considered a typical human being while women were viewed as atypical (Rosenstand, 627). Beauvoir believed

The Second Sex is a piece of literature that criticizes society, especially men for oppressing women. De Beauvoir believes that men limit women to their privileges by characterizing them as objects. Furthermore, Beauvoir sees that in society while men are considered dominant, and important, women, on the other hand, are considered, irrelevant, and insignificant. The main reason why woman are viewed this way is due to the roles they have in society. Their whole life they must appease to their husband’s commands and perform household responsibilities. The Second Sex highlights the vast imbalanced roles calling out what is wrong in society. De Beauvoir questions why an entire half of the human population is being discriminated against.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explains why women are oppressed. She asks if women exist as a single group. Simone de Beauvoir states that women have been defined as Other. Other to her says

Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and John Stuart Mill argued for women’s equality and independence from men. Their theses explored the beginnings of inequality between man and woman. While Mill places the root cause of women’s subordination as the result of prehistoric law of force, Woolf and de Beauvoir place blame with the Myth of Femininity and Chasity. All three theories have harmed women’s views of themselves and allowed for centuries of teaching women to be selfless, dutiful, and submissive to the males in their lives. The result is many women accepting their roles as and even finding meaning in being the other sex. de Beauvoir blames the myth of femininity for placing women at social and intellectual subordination to men as well as women’s acceptance of these positions. de Beauvoir’s views are supported with the works of Woolf and Mill.

ABSTRACT: Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoir's central theses: that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that 'one is not born a woman, but becomes one.' An analysis of Beauvoir's recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challenges this interpretation. In this diary, Beauvoir affirms her commitment to doing philosophy, defines the philosophical problem of 'the opposition of self and other,'

Therefore, it is evident that literary techniques are utilised to exploit the Beauvoirian idea of women “denying [their] feminine weakness” in order to justify their strength, while the “militant male... she wish[es] to be”.

De Beauvoir argues that women are marginalized as the ‘other’ and that a girl is forced to follow societal standards of femininity. She has to present herself in a specific way because that is what is expected of her. She says that women let society define their role and passively follow it, and therefore we are not truly free. However, De Beauvoir, also argues that women are free to break from this role and define who they are.