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