Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." With seven words, opening the second volume of The Second Sex in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir lit the fuse of modern feminism. The sentence looks simple, and it detonates an assumption as old as humanity: that there is such a thing as a female nature, a fixed essence of "woman," handed down by biology or by God, that determines what women are and what they are for. No, says Beauvoir. There is, of course, the biological female. But "woman," the creature of myth and expectation, the soft, nurturing, modest, dependent, decorative being that every society holds up as the feminine ideal, is not a fact of nature at all. She is made. A girl is not born a woman; she is slowly, relentlessly turned into one, by a thousand pressures she never chose, the toys she is handed and the games she is steered toward, the praise for prettiness and the warnings against boldness, the stories and the saints and the silent examples that teach her, year by year, to make herself small, to please, to wait, to define herself through others. And then, when the construction is complete, the result is pointed to as proof of her nature. Beauvoir took the deepest principle of her existentialism, that for human beings existence comes before essence, that we are not born as anything in particular but make ourselves, and turned it, with revolutionary force, on the oldest and most naturalized of all human hierarchies.

The second sex. Beneath this lay a structure Beauvoir saw more clearly than anyone before her, and it gives her book its title. In every domain of culture, she observed, man has quietly installed himself as the standard, the norm, the default human being, while woman is defined entirely in relation to him, as his opposite, his complement, his deviation. He is the Subject, the One, the essential; she is the Other, the inessential, the second sex. Notice, Beauvoir says, how "man" stands for humanity itself, how the male is simply "the human being" while the female is always the female human being, the special case, the departure from the norm. A man is a person; a woman is a woman. He does not define himself by reference to her, but she is forever defined by reference to him. And this casting of woman as the Other is no small slight; it is the denial of her very subjecthood, of her standing to be a free consciousness authoring her own existence, rather than an object in a world built by and for someone else. Beauvoir drew the structure partly from Hegel's analysis of how a self constitutes itself by setting up an other against which to define itself, and she used it to expose the deepest layer of women's subordination: not merely that they were denied rights or education, but that they had been refused the status of full human subjects, made into the permanent Other against which Man defined himself as the measure of all things. It is a lens of terrible power, and once Beauvoir had ground it, it could be turned anywhere, on any group a society casts as the deviation from its unmarked norm.

The eternal feminine. One of the most insidious forms the Othering takes, Beauvoir saw, is flattery, and she devoted the first half of her book to dismantling it. Men have wrapped woman in a dense fog of myths, she argued, exalted images of "the eternal feminine," that pretend to honor her while quietly imprisoning her. Woman as the pure angel of the home; woman as the mysterious, unknowable enigma; woman as Nature, as fertility, as the dark and powerful earth; woman as the muse who inspires the male artist, or the temptress who ruins him: each of these myths, however reverent it sounds, has the same effect. It replaces the actual, particular, living woman, a free human being with her own projects and contradictions, with a fixed idol, a symbol that exists only in relation to men's needs and fears and fantasies. The "mystery" of woman, Beauvoir noted with cold precision, is mostly a male invention, a convenient way of explaining away the failure to listen: call her unknowable, and you need never trouble to know her. And the pedestal is a cage like any other. To be worshipped as an eternal essence, the Madonna, the muse, the angel, is still to be denied the one thing that matters, recognition as a free and ordinary human subject, fallible and striving like any man. Beauvoir tore through these myths one by one, not to deny that women and men differ but to insist that no myth, however gorgeous, should be allowed to stand in for a real human being and tell her what she eternally is.

Trapped in repetition. What does it cost a person to be cast as the Other? Beauvoir's answer turns on a distinction at the core of her existentialism, between transcendence and immanence. To be a free human subject, she held, is to transcend, to reach beyond the given toward projects of one's own, to build, create, explore, make something new of the world and of oneself; this open-ended reaching is the very texture of an authentic, free existence. Its opposite is immanence, the condition of being shut up in the given, confined to maintenance and repetition, to the endless round of tasks that keep life going but lead nowhere and make nothing, the realm of the merely biological and domestic. And the tragedy of woman's situation, Beauvoir argued, is that she has been systematically confined to immanence while men claimed transcendence for themselves. Set to the unceasing, invisible, uncreative labor of the household, defined by her body and its reproductive function, discouraged from ambition and from large projects, woman has been trapped in repetition, denied the open future in which a human being makes itself. The famous second volume of The Second Sex walks, with merciless attention, through the stages by which this trap is built and sprung, girlhood, the awakening of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, each examined not through the soothing myths but through the lived, often bitter experience of actual women, to show how, step by step, a free human child is shaped into the Other and shut into the immanence men have reserved for her.

The freedom that needs yours. For decades Beauvoir was filed away as Sartre's brilliant companion, the woman beside the great man, and this is one of the lazier injustices in the history of philosophy. She was an original thinker of the first rank, and in one crucial respect she went where Sartre could not. Sartre's existentialism had a famous gap: it proclaimed our absolute freedom but struggled to explain why we should care about anyone else's, why, in a world of free individuals, there should be any ethics at all. It was Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, who built the bridge Sartre never could. The human condition, she argued, is irreducibly ambiguous: we are at once free subjects and objects in the world, at once soaring transcendence and stubborn flesh-and-bone facticity, and the mature response is not to deny either side but to live the tension honestly. And from this she drew the conclusion that completes existentialism as an ethics: that my freedom is not a private possession but is bound up with the freedom of everyone around me, that I cannot be genuinely free in a world where others are enslaved, and that to will my own freedom authentically is therefore to will the freedom of all. This is why her philosophy flowers naturally into political commitment, into feminism, into solidarity, where Sartre's threatened to curdle into isolation. The freedom Beauvoir prizes is not the lonely defiance of a single will against the world; it is a freedom that knows itself unfinished until it has helped to free others.

What was made can be unmade. The room reads Beauvoir from the wider record, since her work remains under copyright, and the chat says so. She lived the freedom she theorized, fiercely: she refused marriage and motherhood as the destinies prescribed for her, built an unconventional lifelong partnership of equals with Sartre, wrote prize-winning novels and several volumes of unsparing memoir, and in her later years threw herself into the women's liberation movement, lending her enormous prestige to the fight for the right to abortion and the freedom of women to own their own lives. The Second Sex was banned by the Vatican and savaged on its publication; within a generation it had become the founding text of modern feminism, the book from which the whole second wave drew its arguments and its energy. Her central insight, that "woman" is made and not born, became the seed of the modern distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, and her analysis of the Other has been borrowed by every later movement that found itself cast as the deviation from someone else's norm, by anti-colonial thinkers, by theorists of race, and by Beauvoir herself when she turned the same lens on the way societies discard and silence the old. She had taken the abstract freedom of the existentialists and shown exactly what it meant for the half of humanity who had been quietly denied it. And she left behind the demand that still unsettles: that no one is born into their assigned place in the human order, that what was made can be unmade, and that a person handed a destiny by their society retains, always, the freedom and the right to refuse it, and to become, instead, themselves.