So That Woman May Be Free (2) — Continuing the Review of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

A Woman in a Book

In the previous installment I presented a summary of the history of woman as Simone de Beauvoir recounts it in her book "The Second Sex," where she showed that it is a long history of enslavement. After the author finishes with the historical side, she proceeds to examine the present condition, and says: woman in the West has been somewhat emancipated thanks to the amendments made to the laws that concern her. But — despite this — woman has not been fully emancipated, because society does not make her man's equal even if the laws do, and because there are traditions, judgments, and social institutions that must be changed if the desired freedom is to be reached.

What are the tasks that woman has performed, and still performs to this day?

The author answers this question as follows:

Housework and motherhood and what attaches to them, such as nursing and the raising of children; assisting the man in some of the work of the field or the factory; holding gatherings of amusement and appearing in social clubs. Beyond this, some women took, and still take, prostitution as a profession, or become the favorites of kings and rich men, or delight men with dancing and song. And some of them have made up for the trivial condition in which society confined them with various forms of revolt or reaction. Among these rebels against their condition are: the egoist, who worships her own self and gives herself over to adornment, domination, and the love of display; the lover, who melts away into the one she loves; and the mystic nun, who loses herself in the love of God. The author reviews these occupations or functions one by one and gives her opinion of each:

Housework — in the author's view — does not fill a woman's life nor grant her contentment and sufficiency, for it is repetitive, tedious work, with no creation in it and no renewal. The whole of it is cleaning, wiping, and sweeping. Creative activity is reserved to the man, who builds the house, makes the furniture, plows the earth, gathers the harvest, invents the machines, and devises the vessels the woman uses. Among the merits of the modern age is that, through its various inventions, it has lightened woman's household labors to a great degree and prepared for her the means of varying her work outside the house, just as it has compelled the man to help her with the housework when necessary.

As for motherhood, it is woman's traditional function; but — says Simone de Beauvoir — it is a mistake to consider motherhood alone a function sufficient to fill the emptiness of a woman's life. "Parents who want children from a selfish motive are mistaken, for children are not their parents' property, to be disposed of at their whim; nor are they a means of appropriation or a compensation for repressed dreams and thwarted hopes; nor are they an instrument of amusement and play, or of boasting and vainglory. Cornelia erred when she displayed her children to the women and said, boasting: 'These are my treasures'... Many women become the slaves of their children in order to fill the emptiness of their own souls; their excessive tenderness and constant anxiety prevent the child from growing independently, and they dominate him... The woman fit for motherhood is the cultivated woman, calm of nerve and full of energy, who divides her time between work in the house and work outside it; for through work she forgets herself and does not make her body the axis of her life, and she is the fitter to raise her child and teach him the strength and firmness that mark her, because she does not make of him the object of a sick love and an excessive attachment. But since it is difficult for the wife to reconcile motherhood and work, it is incumbent upon governments to establish proper institutions to look after the working mother, to care for the children in her absence, and to prepare the right atmosphere for her to continue at her work..."

Then the author speaks of woman's role in the salons, in the clubs, in visits and assemblies. She points to the time and money woman spends on adornment and on the sewing of the clothes required for parties and gatherings, and adds: had woman sufficient work and an independent personality, she would not give herself over to the idle, frivolous life, full of luxury, affectation, and hypocrisy.

As for prostitution, it is an ancient profession of women. Its chief causes are the scarcity of work and the abundance of misery. Statistics have shown that half of all prostitutes were first servant girls, come from village milieus where honor is not hedged about with all the means of preservation after the bourgeois fashion. The chief means of combating it are

the combating of poverty and ignorance, and that every woman should have a respectable occupation that enables her to earn her living and keeps her from trafficking in her body and arriving at the calamitous end that awaits the prostitute.

Dancing and singing were of old the profession of the slave girls of the palaces, or of bondswomen put up for sale. For this reason they were counted among the despised occupations, although they belong to the fine arts, which open to woman the path of creative activity. The craft of dancing, singing, and acting by women developed in the West, and free and cultivated women took it up; but dancers, singers, and actresses have remained exposed to moral decline and to servitude, because with them the profession becomes a means of display and self-exhibition for the sake of gain and empty fame, strengthening in them the powerful inclination toward adornment and the worship of their own bodies. Few among them have known — like Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt — how to reconcile personal freedom with the profession, and to make of the latter a true and pure art, not an instrument for extorting money and preying upon the hearts of men.

We come now to feminine types that existed in the past and still exist today: the narcissistic or egoistic woman, who worships her own self because she finds nothing else to worship, and busies herself with her adornment and her clothes because she finds nothing else to busy her. She is infatuated with displaying herself in society and in the salons, after the fashion of decorated dolls; the mirror, the implements of adornment, people's glances and their opinion of her beauty hold her in bondage. She lives in perpetual anxiety, longing to draw the eye and win the approval of others, though she gives others no weight, for she sees nothing in existence but herself. She lives out her life wretched, because she stirs up hatred and envy around her and strives, to no avail, to keep a beauty that is quick to fade.

The second type: the woman enslaved by the love of a man, as the egoist is enslaved by the love of herself. It is not strange that a woman should drown in the love of some person — in love of husband or lover or children — spending herself in this love and making of it an outlet for her feelings and her pent-up energies; for in her narrow, closed world she is more governed by emotion than man, and more exposed than he to melting away into another person, of whom she makes a god to be worshipped.

The third type: the mystic woman, who melts away into the love of God. History shows us many examples of devout women whose souls the divine love filled, and at whose hands the marvels of mysticism came to pass: Angela of Foligno, Saint Teresa, Marie Alacoque, Saint Catherine, and so on — ascetic women whose lives were an astonishing sacrifice, a service that knew no rest, and an excess in the mortification of self.

Three kinds of love: love of self; love of another person and dissolution in him; love of God and union with Him — woman takes them as an escape or a refuge in which she drowns an anxious or empty or tormented soul. And in all three cases she lives in

a state of illusion and severs her tie with reality, and the illusion leads her to enslavement and the extinction of personality. It goes without saying that none of these kinds of extreme love, in which the self is drowned, can be counted a natural or a sound love. For true love is that which preserves for the lover his personality and his freedom; and in that case it becomes for the personality a source of richness, growth, and elevation — not a means of weakness, surrender, and self-effacement.

The last type: the independent woman — a type we find only in our present age. By her we mean a woman with a profession, by which she secures her economic independence and, in consequence, her social and personal freedom. She is no one's property. If she marries, her relation to the man is a relation of equality and mutual respect, not the relation of the parasite who depends upon another; and with this new feeling — the feeling of the sound creature who lives by her own self — the woman's personality is made whole and she becomes a sound human being.

But the woman with a profession does not cut her way through life easily; she meets with hardships that sometimes drive her to retreat, because the doors of work open to her are few and narrow, and so too are the paths of advancement. Above this, she is faced with the problem of reconciling her work with the performance of her duties as wife and mother; and if she grows weary under the multitude of duties, she sacrifices the one for the sake of the other.

Yet the working woman's problems are on the way to solution. Legislation protects her on one side, since the laws applied to men are applied to her; and where injustice touches her, we find her pressing her demand for equality in the matter of wages. Justice for workers and employees — women among them — in the fixing of hours of work, the raising of wages, and compensation in case of sickness or unemployment: all this is apt to draw woman to work, and to move her to share with man the burdens of livelihood and to join with him in building a better world.

As for the problem of household tasks, the working woman has solved it by several means: among them, working part of the time rather than all of it, so that she may have leisure enough to attend to her house; and among them, the use of machines and ready-prepared foods, and cooperation with husband and children in the work of the house.

And if I may be allowed to comment on what Simone de Beauvoir has presented on the subject of woman's functions through the ages, I would say: the three types she has set forth, which represent woman's revolt against her lowly condition — I mean the narcissistic woman, the mystic woman, and the woman who drowns in the love of another person — are a development through which the women of the West passed in the middle stage that preceded their modern development, and we rarely find its counterpart among our own women. For the Eastern woman, generally speaking, has not in her development gone beyond the primitive stage — that is, housework, the rearing of the child, and helping the husband in the work of the field and certain other tasks. In olden times there existed favorites and slave girls who played a role in the palaces of the caliphs and sultans; then this class died out with the dying out of its masters. And woman among us today passes suddenly from her primitive condition to the stage of the independent profession and creative work; and for this reason we find her transition slow when measured against the age of speed in which we live.