Simon De Beauvoir

1. Simon De Beauvoir CS 204 Common Lecture Drs. Nadia Bou Ali and Angela Harutyunyan

2. qu’estcequ’une femme? What is a woman? • masculinity is synonymous with the abstract subject , it is the positive and neutral pole: man is both the definition of man and the human, (both the hommesand the homo of homo sapiens) while women is the Other , the negative pole that requires to be domesticated within the imaginary wholeness and identity of the masculine.

3. “If a theory convinced me, it did not remain exterior to me, it changed my relation to the world, colored my experience. In short, I had a sound capacity to adopt, a critical sense to develop; for me philosophy is a living reality.” (La force de l’age) • “It is impossible to define an object apart from the subject by whom and for whom it is the object; and the subject reveals itself only in relation to the objects that it is engaged with.”

4. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute, she is the Other” • “Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she ― a free and autonomous being like all human creatures ― nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) ― who always regards the self as the essential ― and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman's situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her?. Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman's liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty"

5. Motherhood as patriarchal ideology • “The species takes residence in the women’s body and asserts itself against her separateness.” • “first violated, the female is then alienated—she becomes in part, another than herself.”

6. “… this consciousness among women that the class struggle does not embody the sex struggle – is what is new. Yet most women in the struggle know that now. That’s the greatest achievement of the feminist movement. It’s one which will alter history in the years to come. • Interviewer: But such a consciousness is limited to the women who are in the left, that is, women who are committed to the restructuring of the whole society. • Beauvoir: Well, of course, since the rest are conservative, meaning they want to conserve what has been or what is. Women on the right do not want revolution. They are mothers, wives, devoted to their men. Or, if they are agitators at all, they want a bigger piece of the pie. They want to earn more, elect more women to parliaments, see a woman become president. They fundamentally believe in inequality, except they want to be on top rather than on the bottom. But they will fit fine into the system as it is or as it will change a bit to accommodate such demands. Capitalism can certainly afford to allow women to join an army, allow women to join a police force. Capitalism is certainly intelligent enough to let more women join the government. Pseudosocialism can certainly allow a woman to become secretary-general of its party. Those are just reforms, like social security or paid vacations. Did the institutionalization of paid vacations change the inequality of capitalism? Did the right of women to work in factories at equal pay to the men change the male orientation of the Czech society? But to change the whole value system of either society, to destroy the concept of motherhood: that is revolutionary.

7. A feminist, whether she calls herself leftist or not, is a leftist by definition. She is struggling for total equality, for the right to be as important, as relevant, as any man. Therefore, embodied in her revolt for sexual equality is the demand for class equality. In a society where the male can be the mother, where, say, to push the argument on values so it becomes clear, the so-called “female intuition” is as important as the “male’s knowledge” – to use today’s absurd language – where to be gentle or soft is better than to be hard and tough, in other words, in a society where each person’s experiences are equivalent to any other, you have automatically set up equality, which means economic and political equality and much more. Thus, the sex struggle embodies the class struggle, but the class struggle does not embody the sex struggle. Feminists are, therefore, genuine leftists. In fact, they are to the left of what we now traditionally call the political left