"The Other Sex" (Le Deuxième Sexe) by Simone de Beauvoir

A Woman in a Book

Simone de Beauvoir is a contemporary French writer with several works in which she sets forth her creed of existentialist philosophy after the manner of Jean-Paul Sartre — the philosophy whose axis is that man makes himself by himself. "It was Isam's own soul that made Isam a lord," as our Arabic proverb says. For man possesses absolute freedom and will: there are no overpowering inherited forces driving him, no fixed human nature shaping him; it is man himself who chooses his road, and he alone is responsible for his destiny. And every human being must toil to reach the summit of his humanity and rise above the raw material out of which he was formed.

On this existentialist foundation the author builds her long study of the subject of woman, in a book of two thick volumes, one running to 395 pages and the other to 576. This book has won an enormous circulation among French publications, despite its great bulk and its high price, because it is the best thing yet written on the subject of woman.

In these two volumes Simone de Beauvoir surveys woman's history through the ages, and then the views taken of woman by literature, fiction, and legend. She then examines woman's condition in the different stages of her life — childhood, girlhood, marriage and motherhood — and studies the various functions and occupations she has filled up to now: the wife and mistress of the house, the servant, the kept woman, the woman whom love has wounded, the mystic, the egoist, and finally, in the modern age, the woman independent through her profession or her own work.

Woman's history up to now — as Simone de Beauvoir presents it in a long and absorbing chapter — is a history of long enslavement. And her road to liberation is the existentialist doctrine, which can restore her confidence in herself and prepare for her the way to overcome her traditional weakness, because it says to her: man is master of his own soul, and it is he who leads it up to eminence or down to decline; he builds his self with his own hand, makes it out of nothing. The great man is not created great, but becomes so. Woman too holds her destiny in her hand. She was not created weak; her surroundings made her so, and confined her within a circle of stagnation and limitation. And she is capable of great things if she is well directed.

In the primitive ages women were — most probably — of stronger build than the women of today, as the reports of the Amazons, the warrior women, show us. But there is no doubt that their sexual characteristics — pregnancy, suckling, and what attends them — stood as a barrier in the way of their equality with man, because these limited their activity at certain times and made them dependent on man for their living.

And although woman's part in preserving the race matched man's part in the tribe, indeed surpassed it in importance, we see that woman did not then surpass man, nor equal him in value. Why? Because man's work was of greater consequence than hers. She gives life; he masters life by means of hunting, raiding, and war. He plunders lives and goods and returns bearing the laurels of pride and victory. Man's work was a creative activity, because it whetted his mind and drove him to create tools and means of livelihood; woman's work, by contrast, was a passive, repetitive activity, unvarying, which did not whet her powers of soul but confined them within the circle of the species. Man's work is human, because it is growth, renewal, ascent, and development from one condition to a better; woman's work is animal, because it is restricted to procreation. Hence man got the better of woman and became her master, though her function in preserving the species is of great importance.

In the ages of primitive life, and in the agricultural communities, before the coming of the Bronze Age, which freed man by grace of the tool, property was held in common by the tribe. Motherhood was a sacred function, and woman an object of respect and veneration, because she was the source of the children who till the land and inherit it. Man was then a hunter, while woman raised the children and did the work of gardening, cooking, and building. This era has been called the era of the matriarchate, because in it woman was very nearly man's equal: to her the children were traced, and through her passed the inheritance of the land. Yet even so, man was the actual ruler of the tribe, and woman was held in awe only because she was the symbol of the earth and the source of fertility, and because hidden powers had chosen her to preserve life and secure offspring.

But woman's decline began with the appearance of the great iron tools, which man was better able than woman to wield. Then began the era of private property: the single man became owner of the land and the slaves

and lord of his household, women included, holding over them absolute power, like the power of owner over owned. His rights over his daughters are absolute rights, passing from him by marriage to the husband, who is entitled to a plurality of wives and entitled to divorce whenever he pleases. He imposes upon the wife a chastity he does not impose upon himself, and punishes the adulteress with death, because she is his private property, and he the source of her livelihood and her children's. A trace of that right survives in the statutes of today — witness the fact that the Napoleonic codes, from which our penal law was drawn, prescribe a lightened penalty for the man who kills his wife, or one of his womenfolk, on suspicion of her conduct.

The era of private property set the paternal order in the place of the maternal order and sealed woman's enslavement, because ownership of the land became confined to man, and males, to the exclusion of females, began to inherit the land from their father, in order to continue tilling it and to perpetuate his memory by it. In one country alone, in ancient Egypt, woman equaled man in rights of inheritance, because the land belonged to the king, the priests, and the soldiers, while the common people were merely cultivators of the land, and therefore felt no difficulty in dividing their small possessions equally between sons and daughters. But in the other agricultural communities founded on ownership of the land, and in the warlike communities whose people depended on raiding for their living — as in the Arabian Peninsula, for example — woman's standing sank, and she was taken as an instrument of procreation, for the bearing of warriors and heirs.

Woman had certain rights in the laws of Hammurabi, and likewise in the laws of Pharaonic Egypt; but in the rest of the Eastern lands her enslavement was complete. In the land of the Greeks they set over her a guardian, or trustee, over her person or her property — when she had property in the form of a separate portion, or a dowry provided by the guardian to secure her living.

In Sparta, however, where ownership of real property and of children was held in common, woman was man's equal in rights: she was trained, like him, for soldiering; she was not shut up in her husband's house; and she was not called to account for adultery, because the children belonged not to the father but to the state.

The Roman woman enjoyed a respected station: she was her husband's partner, not his servant; she was entitled to appear in public places; and among the Romans the girl inherited like her brothers. But the Roman woman did not make good use of her liberties, because she was not educated and was not given the right to take part in politics and affairs.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the feudal order, resting on war and agriculture, woman's enslavement returned to its former state. In the Middle Ages appeared chivalrous love and the romantic courtship that makes woman an object of worship and deification; but that did not mean her liberation — rather her imprisonment in a lofty castle, and the rivalry of knights to protect her or to win her, like a precious treasure or a coveted possession. Woman was then an idol which man worships and shatters when he pleases, as Othello shattered poor Desdemona when he doubted her chastity.

When industry advanced and the first signs of the industrial revolution appeared, woman took the first step toward liberation, because wealth became monetary rather than landed, and hence transferable and convertible — unlike landed wealth, which bound man to his soil and kept him from sharing it with woman. And woman came earliest to liberation in the lands where the industrial revolution appeared first: in England and in America, and in the Anglo-Saxon lands before the Latin. To this day, industrial progress in any country is more favorable to the liberation of woman than agricultural progress.

The women's movement spread gradually, and women began to demand equality with man in civil and political rights. New Zealand was the first of countries to give woman the right to vote, in 1893.

The weakness of the women's movement arises

chiefly from the weakness of women's solidarity, since the interests of the bourgeois woman conflict with the interests of the working woman; and the liberation of women requires the abolition of the class system and their liberation from ignorance and idleness. The truth is that the peasant woman, or the woman working in the factory, is freer than the parasitic wife of the rich man, who depends on her husband for her living — so that he is able to shut her in a golden cage and tighten the noose upon her.

At last, after a long struggle and a gradual development, the women's movement won its victory, and the statutes in America and in most of the countries of Europe now make woman man's equal in the rights of property, inheritance, and work, in the penal law, in political rights, and then in civil rights, or the law of marriage and divorce. Even so, woman in the West still labors under the yoke of the old traditions: her wages are in most cases below the wages of man; her means of advancement are narrow and limited; and having won the change of the statutes, she finds herself compelled to change the mentality of society — above all the mentality of man, who still looks upon her with the look of the higher upon the lower.

As for the Arab lands, Lebanon among them, not the least change has occurred in the statutes concerning woman; indeed she remains subject, in the civil and penal law and elsewhere, to the statutes of the Middle Ages. The only change that has occurred is the spread of learning among women, and their knocking at new doors of work in the factories, the offices, the schools, and the other institutions newly established in our country. But their work is limited and narrow in scope, and is but one step of many steps which woman must take in the near future.