Domhnall

This translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, published in 2011, is the best of two available English translations from the original French and the alternative translation by H.M.Parshley in 1953 is a disgrace, which abridged, simplified and often mistranslated the original. It really does matter which one you read.

Despite its forbidding length, this book is broken into manageable chapters and because of the way each handles a separate topic, it is practical and I think desirable to pause between chapters and read something else (or even not read; that is possible I imagine). The style is accessible; the translators mock Beauvoir’s long sentences sprinkled with semi-colons but this soon becomes part of the author’s distinctive voice and is not an obstacle; in fact, I will try it out below.

For anyone who might want to compare this with Sartre’s long and unimaginably abstract Being and Nothingness, the Second Sex is lively and above all concrete rather than abstract. It does assume a knowledge of Sartre’s major concepts without explaining them, so it is worth checking out an introduction to Sartre if he is not already familiar [YouTube will probably be good enough for this]. More than this, The Second Sex is a masterly demonstration of Sartre's model of existentialism and the methods of phenomenology on which he relied, arising indeed from a profound contemplation of the author's own life. I suspect that it was not intended at the outset to be quite what it became - a magnificent exposition of feminist analysis - because it started life as a self analysis by a woman and from that rock solid, but profoundly simple foundation, from the observation that she was indeed a woman, all else flowed.

The original 1949 publication date has to be kept in mind when reading and assessing the evidence used; for example, in discussing the biology of reproduction a more recent review would have to incorporate much more about genetics; her powerful discussion of abortion could certainly be updated to consider more recent methods and issues but none of her examples of shameful cruelty to women and the utter hypocrisy of moral barriers to abortion would need any updating whatever.

Beauvoir starts by examining and rejecting the notion that women’s lot is a product of determinism or destiny. She argues persuasively that biology does not determine human sexual behaviour, because the significance of biology is conditional on the social context; it can be a help or a hindrance and humanity has the capacity to make the difference. Her key point is that we will never grasp women’s potential by relying on what they have achieved in the past, or what they achieve under contemporary conditions, because the biological data fails to establish a serious barrier to her surpassing those benchmarks under favourable future conditions. That said, she gives an unblinking account of puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause, alongside health hazards arising from their malfunctions, that contribute to a very concrete experience for women which is not shared by men and not appreciated by them either.

Turning to human psychology, Beauvoir concentrates on psychoanalysis, in which ambitious claims about female psychological development from infancy through to adulthood are not only unsupported by serious evidence, indeed by any evidence whatsoever, but also contaminated by social prejudice, male ignorance and pure self-indulgent fantasy. Actually, they are not ambitious claims – they are destructive and harmful. In this chapter I think she produces a lively critique of psychotherapy, with arguments that I suggest remain valid for anyone exploring the topic today; I really would like to take this material further. Therapists rely on their technique to claim objectivity, as they study process rather than content, but in reality this technique gives them excessive power in the relationship with clients and permits them to indulge in grandiose self delusions. On the more relevant business of understanding women’s psychology, I take into account that in 1949, experimental psychology had yet to produce the work on development, or even the methodologies for research, that would be essential to a serious examination of this topic. However, it seems to me a serious defect that Beauvoir relies throughout this book on a psychoanalytic model for all her discussions of human psychology, which is simply not tenable; there are a range of far better psychological approaches today. Even psychoanalysis itself has matured; one approach that might have enhanced her analysis is called Object Relations Theory, which does explore the idea that the infant needs to discover the boundary between self and others; that is just the thing for an existentialist.

She makes short shrift of Engels and associated “dialectical-materialist” accounts of sex differences, pointing out in particular that the classical economists’ concept of economic man is not valid for any account of humanity, male or female. She also implies that a Stalinist approach seems to aspire to transform everyone into good workers, which is not her notion of freedom; surely an example of her inspired contribution to debate. I think Marx would have agreed with her; Stalin’s economics was not socialism so much as state capitalism.

Sociobiologists love to construct pseudo-scientific theories that amazingly endorse reactionary social value systems on the basis of self-fulfilling just-so-stories about human evolution. Beauvoir is perfectly entitled to use such methods for her own argument, as she does with style. She concludes that the labour involved in reproduction in all its facets is essentially circular and repetitive – which makes it fundamentally uninteresting. Humanity surpasses these basic cycles when engaged in creative activities, including hunting and fighting, where the point she highlights is not killing but risking your own life and overcoming the challenges in the process. Women lose out on the opportunities to surpass their constraints and that is their existential problem; they have been tied down to repetitive cycles while men run free.

Several chapters review attitudes to women in classical (Greek and Roman), medieval and early modern Europe. Exceptional women keep appearing in the record, always battling against intolerable burdens and ultimately faced with a wall of male hostility which escalates as women rise to the challenge. The very existence of such extraordinary women is sufficient evidence to demolish claims that they inherently lack the capacity for self fulfilment. It is clear that men have long had an interest in maintaining female oppression, amply articulated in the written record, and I think it is more important to hammer in this brute fact of oppression than to obsess over arcane details of their possible source. The available explanations are important but not so crucial; another explanation will do if it turns out to explain the facts of oppression as well or better.

In the material reviewed here, the intensity of oppression is directly correlated with property claims; women do better when their [limited] freedoms are not seen as a barrier to property rights. Sex role differences are frequently trivial among the poor and the artisans; when private property prevails and private wealth accumulates, women become objectified as part of the property portfolio; for their own survival, women even internalise these requirements and accept their status as objects in a world where men are the active agents. This concept of being an object rather than a subject is, of course, pivotal to existentialism. These chapters offer a fine exercise in social and cultural history, clearly paving the way for even more ambitious revisionist histories by feminist writers in the future. Her review of the 19th Century, the intensified exploitation of women and children in the industrial revolution, their status in socialist and other political movements, and finally the emergence of campaigns for women’s civil rights and for the vote – in France, America, Britain, Russia and other countries is detailed and informative. As an example of the complexities in play, she describes the Catholic Church moving to support women’s votes in France against the opposition of socialists out of a shared belief that they would vote on socially conservative lines and accept leadership from their priests. The currents are indeed murky at all times. The topic is like fractals – at each level of detail, new insights emerge. Again, Beauvoir surely sets an agenda for a generation of feminist historians.

Two major themes are now addressed in a series of superbly written polemics. She first examines in turn the lives and experiences of [Western] women in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and their initiation into sexual activity, including a chapter on lesbianism. She looks at marriage, motherhood and the social lives of mature women with blistering honesty. Her discussion of contraceptiona nd abortion is absolutely topical today. She considers prostitutes, mistresses, and the social lives of older women. Ultimately, she argues that women’s lives must be understood not in terms of their nature but their social situations. She insists that women are condemned to three particular choices: to live as narcissists, as lovers or as religious mystics. She explores each of these categories and attributes them to the unsatisfactory situation of their lives.

Turning in the closing two chapters to her positive proposals for change is not exactly inspirational or hopeful. If anything, these chapters enable her to review and insist on the intolerable constraints limiting the lives of women, with interesting remarks for example on the scarcity of great women artists or writers, let alone scientists. It is worth reiterating that she published this book in 1949. She notes that attitudes were starting to shift in her time, but comments that giving women access to new economic or social freedoms is going to be hopelessly inadequate if this simply means that women are invited to work, create and socialise with abandon while at the same time retaining sole responsibility for the full range of domestic and childcare responsibilities. Indeed, she predicts that there will be women who would prefer to retain or revert to their traditional roles rather than take up such an unfair challenge. It would be possible to update her discussion by describing changes over the subsequent eight decades, but I am not convinced it would change the assessment. She was not wrong, about this or anything else that matters in this stunning masterpiece.

The woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society... the question is, what humanity has made of the human female. [p48]

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined; what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; ... when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the book. [pp45. 46]

"The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature; but what is its importance in everyday life? ... if the definition given is contradicted by the behaviour of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong. It is said ... that women are not feminine." [p266]