Johns Hopkins University Press

In the years since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic The Second Sex, we have become increasingly wary of a priori, universalizing pronouncements about the way humans are and should be. Feminism, with its unwavering commitment to uncovering how such pronouncements may reflect the perspectives and interests of those making them, certainly deserves much of the credit for putting us on our guard. But, as has often been pointed out, feminism itself makes the same mistake when it takes the experiences, points of view, and conditions of privileged groups of women as representative of those of women tout court. Indeed, insofar as The Second Sex gives a general theory of woman’s condition, it has attracted its share of criticism on this count. 1 Although Beauvoir offers a dizzying, if selective, survey of gender relations through (mostly Western) history – from our hunter-gatherer ancestors through Ancient Greece and Rome, to medieval Europe, the French Revolution, and beyond – she dwells finally on modern French bourgeois women to such a degree that the feminist anthropologist Judith Okely was prompted to call the text an “anthropological village study” of mid-twentieth-century Parisian bourgeois women, “but without the anthropological theory and focus.”2 But Beauvoir may have another, related problem. After all, her theoretical framework derives from a grand Western philosophical tradition notorious not only for its sexism but also for a general disinclination to question whether its basic categories are as universal and necessary as they claim to be. Might The Second Sex err on this count as well?

That recent discussions of Beauvoir tend to ignore this question is perhaps not surprising, since many of them aim to secure a place for Beauvoir in this selfsame philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, Beauvoir herself was somewhat troubled by a related matter. In 1960, Beauvoir’s companion Jean-Paul Sartre published the Critique of Dialectical Reason, his attempt to reconcile existentialism with Marxism. Three years later, Beauvoir said this of The Second Sex: “As for the content, I should take a more materialist position today in the first volume. I should base the notion of women as other and the Manichaean argument it entails not on an idealistic and a priori struggle of consciences, but on the facts of supply and demand.” Significantly, she adds just after, “This modification would not necessitate any changes in the subsequent developments of my argument.”3 She would say the same thing again, almost in the same words, a decade later.4

Materialism aside, considerations internal to Beauvoir’s theory give her good reason to revise her original conception of the human condition, since this conception is in tension, at best, with her positive vision of gender relations – indeed of personal and social relations generally – as based on generosity and reciprocity. But what role, exactly, does this original notion play in her argument, and what might be the effects of changing it? Indeed, once the door is opened to a more “materialist” and less “idealistic” perspective, what further demands on her theory might suggest themselves?

My exploration of these questions will be, first and foremost, an opportunity to address the complicated role of Marxist thinking in The Second Sex, another matter that has received relatively little sustained attention of late. But beyond this, rereading The Second Sex in light of Marx challenges us to reconcile, if we can, the considerable attractions of Beauvoir’s powerful and sweeping theory with a nagging sense that such theories tend to overreach in troubling ways.

Beauvoir’s original view of human relations, the one she would question later, appears in the first pages of The Second Sex:

The category of Other is as original as consciousness itself.… No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travelers to become vaguely hostile “others.”… These phenomena could not be understood if human reality were solely a Mitsein, based on solidarity and friendship. On the contrary, they become clear if, following Hegel, a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself; the subject posits itself only in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object.5

This view is put to work in the text soon after, in the chapter devoted to Frederich Engels’s nineteenth-century classic The Origin of Private Property, the Family, and the State. Here Beauvoir deploys it against Engels’s claim that woman’s oppression, which, he argues, was unknown in the earliest human societies, is based on the development of private property. This claim is part of Engels’s larger argument that private property, the patriarchal family, and the state are all historical developments, arising from humankind’s changing material circumstances, especially the division of labor in the service of profit. Beauvoir does not quite reject outright the insights Engels’s historical materialism offers for understanding woman’s condition; she appreciates, for example, the close connection between the development of private property and women’s increasing oppression, and she praises a Marxist approach, in contrast to purely psychoanalytic and biological ones in particular, for understanding that “humanity is a historical reality,” not simply another animal species.6 But she faults Engels’s view, which she reads (or misreads) as narrowly technologically deterministic, first, for undermining the place of the free, autonomous individual in the making of history and, second, for failing to attend to the very particular sort of oppression that women face. The latter criticism, which would be echoed loudly, often, and in multiple ways by second-wave feminists, rests on the assumption, increasingly controversial of late, that it is unproblematic to talk simply about women’s oppression as women, universally and from prehistory to the present. Beauvoir’s version of this assumption, though, is careful not to posit unchanging male or female essences. What is fundamental for Beauvoir is not the gendered subject as such but the human one: part transcendence, we humans freely project plans, desires, and intentions into the future; and part immanence, we willingly succumb to embodiment and to social circumstance, content to deny our freedom and become objects. Thus, Beauvoir tells us, historical materialism, like biology and psychoanalysis, may illuminate various truths about women’s condition, but underlying these truths “is an existential infrastructure that alone makes it possible to understand in its unity the unique form that is a life.” 7 One element of this infrastructure is, moreover, the “imperialism of the human consciousness, which seeks to match its sovereignty objectively. Had there been no human consciousness of the original category of the Other and an original claim to domination over the Other, the discovery of the bronze tool could not have brought about woman’s oppression.”8

A comment is in order here on Beauvoir’s reading of Engels. She first takes him to claim that woman’s history “depends essentially on the history of technology” 9 and then criticizes him for technological determinism. I cannot undertake a detailed discussion of The Origin, but it should be said that in explaining the origins of male private property holdings, at least, Engels emphasizes not technology so much as another material circumstance, the natural increase in herds and flocks, which, in keeping with what he took (perhaps wrongly) to be the primitive division of labor by sex, were tended by men. In another part of his argument, which deals with the innovation of group marriage – a mode of organization in which particular subgroups of clans were obligated to marry only members of particular other subgroups – he departs from materialism altogether. Drawing on still-familiar gender stereotypes, he speculates that the move from group marriage to pre-patriarchal monogamy surely must have been woman’s idea.10 So whatever its faults, Engels’s view is not completely and consistently technologically deterministic in any narrow sense But even if The Origin is not quite as reductive as Beauvoir claims, it is an understandable target for her. While some Marxists have objected to the text for being insufficiently materialist, Lenin himself praised it as a model of socialist orthodoxy.11 Given the attack on Sartre by doctrinaire French Communist Party intellectuals, perhaps Beauvoir can be forgiven for giving a somewhat flattened reading of Engels.12

Unlike some later feminists, Beauvoir does not criticize Engels for taking as given the very division of labor according to sex that he should have explained;13 indeed, she too seems to regard this division of labor as natural. Instead, what Beauvoir objects to is his claim that woman’s oppression follows from the development of private property – the origin of which, she insists, itself needs explaining:

There is absolutely no indication of how [the transition to private property] was able to occur; Engels even admits that ‘for now we know nothing about it’; not only is he unaware of its historical details, but he offers no interpretation of it. Similarly, it is unclear if private property necessarily led to the enslavement of woman. Historical materialism takes for granted facts it should explain: it posits the interest that attaches man to property without discussing it; but where does this interest, the source of social institutions, have its own source? This is why Engels’s account remains superficial, and the truths he uncovers appear contingent.14

Once again, the alternative explanation Beauvoir offers invokes the imperialism of the human consciousness: For “the very idea of individual possession” to appear, “it is first necessary that there be in the subject a tendency to posit himself in his radical singularity, an affirmation of his existence as autonomous and separate.” As tools developed, so too did his sense of himself as “creator, dominating nature”; but although this dominance may have developed through history, on Beauvoir’s view it was present in germ from the very beginning, simply waiting for the opportunity to assert itself. Moreover, Beauvoir continues, even this fundamental tendency doesn’t by itself explain the innovation of private property. Drawing on Hegel, she argues that man “can only succeed in grasping himself by alienating himself.” First, the clan alienates itself in “the totem, the mana, and the territory it occupies”; at a later stage of development, it does so in the chief. Finally, as men come to think of themselves as individuals, each demands a private appropriation of “a piece of land, tools, or crops.”15 Here Beauvoir echoes Sartre, for whom, as Mark Poster has put it, “bourgeois, acquisitive man becomes Man as such.”16 On this view, consciousness seems to determine history, not, as Marx and Engels would have it, the other way around.

Whatever the merits of her criticism of Engels, Beauvoir may overstate the case when she claims that Engels gives no explanation of the transition from communal to private property. He does, at least, write that around the same time that pairing marriage arose (i.e., the early family form in which a man and a woman live together, along with what are assumed to be their biological children), so too did a surplus in the domains of agriculture and herding, both controlled by men. This, according to Engels, created in men an impulse to exploit the resulting increased male importance in the family and to overturn the traditional practice of inheritance through the female line.17 Instead, men’s children would henceforth inherit their fathers’ wealth – thus the “world-historical defeat of the female sex.“18 Only after giving this account does Engels admit: “As to how and when this revolution was effected among civilized peoples, we know nothing. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. That it was actually effected is more than proved by the abundant traces of mother right which have been collected, particularly by Bachofen.”19 But then, in the last pages of The Origin, Engels tells us something more: civilization achieved what it did “by playing on the most sordid instincts and passions of man, and by developing them at the expense of all his other faculties. Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth and wealth again, wealth not of society but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.”20

At first blush, Engels’s account may seem not so very far from Beauvoir’s; after all, greed is of a piece with the desire to appropriate and dominate. But there is an important difference between their views. Engels’s conception of human nature seems to allow for a host of varying, no doubt often competing, human traits and capacities, each to be nurtured, indeed even to be called into being, by some material circumstances and not by others. A communitarian, hunter-gatherer society, for example, presumably would not have had much use for the sort of greed that would soon drive history. On the other hand, Beauvoir’s view in The Second Sex invokes not just a psychological disposition or even a fundamental, incorrigible egoism (as a certain stripe of evolutionary psychology might); existentialism, after all, rejects claims about human nature. Instead, in this and related passages Beauvoir links egoism to the ontology of human consciousness itself – or perhaps I should say to its teleology, to the extent that Beauvoir, following Hegel, also believes that this consciousness develops, and comes to know itself, through history.21

Indeed, her insistence a priori on the fundamentally hostile character of this consciousness accounts for her otherwise rather odd complaint that Engels gives only a “contingent account” of the development of private property and of women’s subjection. Here I suspect she is not so much criticizing Engels for failing to live up to historical materialism’s claim to give necessary explanations – insofar as historical materialism does make such a claim – as arguing that only her explanation, and not Engels’s, has the force of necessity: that is to say, that only on her account are the twin necessities of private property and the oppression of women both deducible from human consciousness itself. 22 Whether such necessity is a point in favor of her account is, however, another matter.

The idea that each human consciousness confronts another with hostility, like the idea of transcendence itself, of course echoes both Hegel and Sartre. At times The Second Sex embraces this hostility outright, as in the text’s infamous celebration of the noble male warrior, ready to kill and be killed.23 Some recent Beauvoir scholars have gone to considerable lengths to argue either that this aggressive, hostile consciousness is incompatible with Beauvoir’s considered view that a full human life requires generosity and reciprocity,24 or that exercising transcendence need not necessarily involve such hostility.25 Whatever the merits of such arguments, however, an important element of Beauvoir’s larger theory seems bound up with the hostile, aggressive consciousness even as other elements are in tension with it. As Sonia Kruks has argued, Beauvoir’s great innovation in The Second Sex was to supplement the Sartrean notion of transcendence with Beauvoir’s own notion of immanence, which Kruks rightly views as a development of, and an advance on, Sartre’s view of the facticity of human existence – our bodies, our appearance to others, those aspects of ourselves over which we have no control.26 For Sartre, the inner freedom and transcendence of human consciousness is simply not threatened by this facticity. Even when we are reduced to objects through another’s look we are also free to turn the tables and, returning this look, again gain the upper hand. But can such a view make sense of the loss of agency that follows from systematic social oppression? As Kruks reminds us, this question was the crux of an important, early argument between Beauvoir and Sartre. Beauvoir writes in The Prime of Life:

I maintained that from the angle of freedom as Sartre defined it – that is, an active transcendence of some given context rather than mere stoic resignation – not every situation was equally valid: what sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve? Sartre replied that even such a cloistered existence could be lived in several quite different ways. I stuck to my point for a long time, and in the end made only a token submission. Basically I was right. But to defend my attitude I should have had to abandon the plane of individual, and therefore idealistic, morality on which we had set ourselves. 27

Looking beyond Beauvoir’s easy association of “the woman shut up in a harem” with the most degraded form of humanity – a matter I discuss elsewhere28— we can see here how the need to account for the harms of systematic social oppression led Beauvoir to introduce the notion of immanence. As Kruks explains, this notion, a major departure from Sartre’s view, allows Beauvoir to explain how, in spite of being a transcendence, woman can seem to herself, and become for others, an object, a thing. In short, human existence involves not only Sartrean freedom and transcendence but also immanence. And while this duality characterizes male as well as female existence, Beauvoir claims that woman’s reproductive capacity ties her to her body in a special way, a circumstance that has been used against her almost from the beginning.

Kruks is right to point out the power, originality and utility of Beauvoir’s response to Sartre. But this response raises a familiar concern: Beauvoir’s position rests on a sharp dualism, indeed a new version of the all-too-familiar dualism of mind and body. Rather than radically rethink and revise Sartre’s notion of freedom and agency, Beauvoir has yoked it to its opposite – an opposite, indeed, typified by the woman of the harem. Furthermore, even if we do not object to this dualism, it’s not at all clear how transcendence, without its dominating character, can explain woman’s oppression. Kruks focuses on the role immanence plays in explaining only how woman, a transcendence like man, can nevertheless become an object, not least in her own mind. But what happens in the oppressing consciousness? If transcendence is understood to involve the will to dominate, the explanation is clear enough; indeed, woman, like nature, makes a likely target: “Man does not merely seek in the sexual act subjective and ephemeral pleasure. He wants to conquer, take, and possess; to have a woman is to conquer her; he penetrates her as the plowshare in the furrow.… Woman is her husband’s prey, his property.” 29 But how does oppression come about if the oppressing consciousness is not in some way fundamentally hostile or dominating? Beauvoir might answer that men, who are as much immanent beings as transcendent ones, nevertheless would rather not confront their immanence. So woman, who reminds man of his immanence, universally inspires “horror in man: the horror of his own carnal contingence that he projects on her.”30 But then we must assume a basic aggression, for wouldn’t the male motivation to disavow his immanence need to be coupled with a measure of hostility (not to mention a dose of bad faith) if he is to project this immanence onto woman? Otherwise, his attitude toward her might just as well be one of commiseration or even of compassion. Unless immanence works in concert with an aggressive or hostile transcendence, the widespread, transhistorical, even universal oppression of woman Beauvoir describes would be difficult to explain.

Of course, one could always argue that this aggressive consciousness is itself a product of history; where and when it emerges, so too does woman’s oppression. Indeed, Beauvoir gestures towards something like this when, as we’ve seen, she proposes to replace the a priori idea of “hostile consciences” with a more materialist account based on the “laws of supply and demand.” Presumably, by this she means that hostility arises only under situations of competition and scarcity, conditions that, to be sure, characterize much of human history. Altering her view this way at least moves one aspect of human transcendence – its hostility and aggression – from, so to speak, an ontological to a more circumstantial, historical level. It also ties woman’s domination to this scarcity. But the immanence/transcendence ontological framework itself remains intact, expressing itself in, indeed underlying, human history.

The question that we are left with, then, is whether the critique of Beauvoir’s basic categories should go further, extending not only to the idea of aggressive transcendence but to the immanence/transcendence dualism itself. As we shall see presently, the early Marx suggests a way to formulate such a critique. And while it may be doubtful whether Beauvoir would have welcomed this move, she did at least give pride of place to this extended quotation from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which appears on the last page of The Second Sex:

“The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman,” said Marx. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. 31

Whereas Beauvoir argues against Engels’s view (or what she took it to be) even while appropriating a good bit of it, here she aligns herself with Marx in spite of some important differences between them. Throughout The Second Sex Beauvoir uses the male-female relationship as the primary expression of the great human challenge to replace antagonism with reciprocity, and this quotation, especially in the context of The Second Sex, might suggest that Marx does so as well. But for Marx, as for Engels, woman’s oppression is a consequence of patriarchal monogamy, which in turn grows out of the development of private property. Thus the relationship of man to woman, while significant in its own right, is hardly history’s engine. Instead, it is a sign and component of a particular level of historical development. Beauvoir, however, often implies that gender relations, indeed the gender relations of the Western, bourgeois, heterosexual couple, are the privileged site of the struggle to become fully human.32

But perhaps Marx’s term species being, implying, as Bertell Ollman puts it, an “integration of the individual into the group,” best suggests the distance between Marx and Beauvoir.33 Beauvoir, unlike the early Sartre, embraces the possibility of truly recognizing the other, of reciprocity, and indeed for her the heterosexual pair is not only an expression of humanity’s problem but also, finally, its solution. But even if, in keeping with Beauvoir’s later view, we presume that this relationship is free from an original will to dominance, the picture of sociality that emerges is anemic compared to Marx’s. One still has the sense of isolated individuals, perhaps not fundamentally ill-disposed toward each other but nonetheless distanced from each other and from collective life. Although Beauvoir does sometimes talk about the human species creating itself, her paradigm of transcendence is the individual consciousness.34 As for immanence, mortality describes first and foremost individual lives. We may, following Kruks, understand Beauvoir to associate immanence with social oppression as well, but even this suggests a crabbed, primarily inhibitory idea of the social. Indeed, aside from the above quotation from Marx, Beauvoir refers to the human species most often when she dwells on the female mammal’s slavery to it.

By contrast, a historicism inspired by Marx looks for the grounds of conceptual categories, especially normative philosophical ones concerning the nature and meaning of human existence, not in the a priori structure of consciousness but in the social – in particular, in the material organization of particular societies. Some of Beauvoir’s early feminist critics rejected Beauvoir’s valorization of transcendence over immanence, seeing in it an expression of covert misogyny, especially towards women’s bodies and reproductive activity; others, more radically, questioned the immanent/transcendent dualism itself, seeing in it a replication of our oppressive categories of gender rather than an explanation of them.35 But Beauvoir’s dualism can be approached in another way. While Marx and Engels both allow that the first division of labor was that between men and women, Marx also claims in The German Ideology that the first division of labor that mattered – the first historical one – was between mental and physical labor, a division that echoes through the history of Western thought.36 This implies that woman’s reproductive role in itself neither constitutes this decisive division of mental from physical labor nor even lays the basis for developing the corresponding conceptual distinction – a distinction of which the immanent/transcendent dualism certainly seems to be a version. Indeed, even a feminist reworking of Marx that views the sexual division of labor as the decisive moment will not penetrate to the heart of Beauvoir’s dualism; on Beauvoir’s view the male/female distinction becomes entwined with the transcendental/immanent one, but the latter distinction is the more basic, inherent to human existence itself.

Of course, it might be argued here that Marx himself subscribed to a dualism not unlike Beauvoir’s. For example, in the quotation with which Beauvoir ends The Second Sex, Marx distinguishes between our natural essence and our human essence, a distinction that is closely related to another one he draws, between our merely animal functions – eating, drinking, sleeping, sex – and our human ones. But there is an important difference between Beauvoir’s and Marx’s versions of these distinctions. For Marx, the distinction between our human and animal aspects not only takes shape in human history with the division of labor but resolves itself as humankind seizes control of this history. Indeed, this distinction appears most sharply when a large segment of society, the exploited producers, are systematically alienated from their most human capacities, the free development of which is trumped by the necessity of satisfying basic animal needs. Thus, in return for a wage, the worker will exercise some of these human capacities in whatever ways the capitalist demands; others will be neglected altogether. But once our “human nature has become natural” to us – that is, with the abolition of the division of labor for the sake of profit – the distinction between our animal and human aspects will not seem so sharp or compelling. As for Beauvoir’s existentialist insistence on freedom as basic to human ontology, one can’t help but think here of Marx’s comment that the bourgeoisie’s “brave words” about “freedom in general,” a notion grounded in selling and buying, has a meaning only “in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages.” When bourgeois conditions of production, and the bourgeoisie itself, are abolished, so too is this notion, with all of its paradoxes.37 For Beauvoir, however, the sharp distinction between transcendence and immanence, far from mirroring a particular form of the division of labor, expresses a necessary truth about human life.

But perhaps Marx should not have the last word here. Beauvoir’s perspective continues to be powerful and compelling, and the feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner suggests why this might be so. Ortner’s classic 1972 article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” used Beauvoir’s theory to answer questions being raised at that time in feminist anthropology; 38 in 1995, Ortner revisited the question asked in the 1972 title and revised her answer somewhat, admitting that the drive for mastery over nature is not universal to all societies and questioning whether all societies even draw a clear distinction between nature and culture to start with, let alone one that corresponds, neatly or otherwise, to the distinction between female and male. 39 Indeed, Ortner’s later work also voices doubts about her earlier certainty, echoing Beauvoir’s, that hunter-gatherer societies were invariably male dominated rather than gender egalitarian.40 And yet, in spite of these qualifications, Ortner believes that Beauvoir and the existentialists got something important right: We humans, without exception, are confronted by circumstances, social and natural, that are beyond our control; nevertheless, we deliberate and act. Despite our limitations, illusions, and miscalculations, we are agents. This tension underlies Beauvoir’s dualism, but it also characterizes human existence generally. Indeed, Ortner offers her own reminder of our agency, such as it is, in much the same spirit as Beauvoir revised Sartre’s existentialist framework: both are correctives, on the one hand, to the sort of voluntarist, individualist perspective espoused by the early Sartre and still very much with us today; and, on the other, to those perspectives, old and new, that threaten to do away with human agency altogether.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir explicitly rejected biologism, Freudianism, and historical materialism to the extent that they are incompatible with such agency; half a century later, Ortner criticized the most extravagant versions of post-structuralism for the same reason.41 But how should agency and its limits be understood? And how basic – and universal – is its association with maleness? According to Ortner, “The logic that de Beauvoir first put her finger on – that men get to be in the business of trying to transcend species-being, while women, seen as mired in species-being, tend to drag men down – still seems to me enormously widespread, and hardly an invention of “Western culture.”42 As for the distinction between nature and culture, it may not be universal, but where it is articulated it can “become a powerful language for talking about gender, sexuality, and reproduction, not to mention power and helplessness, activity and passivity, and so forth.” At the same time, however, Ortner also cautions that the linkage between such “large existential structures” and “any set of social categories – like that of male/female – is a culturally and politically constructed phenomenon,” varying widely across and within cultures.43 One project for Beauvoir criticism, then, is to determine which aspects of her framework and its application are peculiar to the modern West, which have somewhat broader application (in the way Ortner suggests), and which truly deserve to be called universal. To the extent that Beauvoir has conflated these levels, her work will obscure if not as much as it reveals, then at least enough to mislead and confuse. Undoing this conflation, moreover, will require us to go beyond philosophy as it is traditionally practiced.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir, as she herself later recognized, miscast the imperialist consciousness as one of the “large existential structures” Ortner talks about. Beauvoir’s revised view, as we have seen, finds the laws of supply and demand, rather than the ontology of human existence, to be responsible for the human relations of domination; with a nod to Marx, she calls this view “materialist.” But this understanding of materialism is both narrower and less pliable than Marx’s own, which suggests more generally that the origin of a society’s categories of thought can be found in the way that this society organizes its material life. Thus, the Marxist approach, further reaching in this respect than Beauvoir’s, casts a critical eye not only on the “imperialism of consciousness” but, as I have suggested, on the transcendence/immanence dualism itself. Now, whether the form that the division of labor takes in a particular society can fully explain that society’s understanding of such basic categories as gender and agency is, of course, a complex and vexed question – and one to which I suspect neither Beauvoir nor Ortner would give an unqualified “yes.” 44 But even if we don’t fully accept its explanation of cultural and historical variation, a Marxist perspective at least calls attention to the possibility of such variation – and to our disinclination to recognize it. Perhaps the trick is to know where philosophy must give way to more empirical approaches – or, better yet, to find a way for these approaches to work together.

Sally Markowitz

Sally Markowitz is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University, where she was a co-founder, in 1992, of Willamette’s Women’s Studies Program. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Signs, Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Hypatia. She is currently finishing a book on intersectionality. Sally may be contacted at smarkowi@willamette.edu

Notes

1. See, for example, Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 57–79. For a slightly different critique of Beauvoir’s feminist ethnocentrism, see my “Occidental Dreams: Orientalism and History in The Second Sex,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, 2 (2009): 271–94.

2. Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir (Pantheon: New York, 1986), 71.

3. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (G. Putnam’s Sons, 1964), 192.

4. Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done. [1972], trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Warner Books, 1975), 62–3. For a discussion of Sartre’s relationship to Marxism, see Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) 109–208. For a discussion of Beauvoir’s influence on the evolution of this relationship, see Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society (Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1990), 83–112.

5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 6–7.

6. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 62.

7. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 68.

8. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 66.

9. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 63.

10. Frederich Engels [1884], The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Robert Vernon, (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 64.

11. Michelle Barrett, Introduction to Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 13.

12. Poster, Existential Marxism, 109–60. It’s worth noting that even though Beauvoir criticizes Engels for giving a technologically deterministic view, she adopts the very view she attributes to him once she has given it a sufficiently existentialist basis.

13. This is a fairly common feminist criticism of Engels. See Catherine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 13–36; the essays in Janet Sayers, Mary Evans, and Nanneke Redclift, Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987); and Barrett’s Introduction to The Origin, all of which have useful bibliographies.

14. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64.

15. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 65.

16. Poster, Existential Marxism, 101.

17. Engels, The Origin, 66–7.

18. Engels, The Origin, 68.

19. Engels, The Origin, 67.

20. Engels, The Origin, 164–5.

21. For an account of the tension between Beauvoir’s use of, on the one hand, the ahistorical frameworks of structuralism and existentialism and, on the other, the historicism of Hegel and Marx, see my “Occidental Dreams,” 271–94.

22. In the next chapter, she gives a slightly different explanation of patriarchy’s necessity: “it is as a father that a man will choose to affirm himself when such affirmation becomes possible. And this is why every society tends toward a patriarchal form as its development leads man to gain awareness of himself and to impose his will” 82.

23. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 74.

24. Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

25. Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

26. Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence, 99–112.

27. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 346.

28. For an extended discussion of Beauvoir’s orientalism, see my “Occidental Dreams.”

29. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 171.

30. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 167.

31. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 766.

32. For more on this, see my “Occidental Dreams.”

33. Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 108.

34. As Kruks points out, even before The Second Sex Beauvoir went further than Sartre in recognizing the need for others to appreciate and take up one’s projects, but of course this still assumes an antecedent, solitary self (Kruks, 86–94).

35. For a critique of the valorization of mind over body, see Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman As Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” Feminist Studies 8 (1) Spring 1982, 109–131. For a critique of Beauvoir’s sharp distinction between reproduction and other human activities see Allison Jaggar and William McBride, “Reproduction as Male Ideology,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 8 (1985), 185–96.

36. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, trans. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 51–2.

37. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Ed. Richard Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 486.

38. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Feminist Studies I(2): 5–13, reprinted in Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 21–42.

39. Ortner, “So Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Making Gender, 173–80.

40. Ortner, “Gender Hegemonies,” in Making Gender, 139–72. Ortner explains that her earlier insistence on the universality of patriarchy was directed against the Marxist insistence that before early private property, gender relations were egalitarian. Like Beauvoir, Ortner looked for a deeper explanation, and one that did not reduce feminism to Marxism.

41. Ortner, “Making Gender: Towards a Feminist, Minority, Postcolonial, Subaltern, etc., Theory of Practice,” in Making Gender, 1–20.

42. Ortner, “So Is Male to Female as Culture is to Nature?” 180.

43. Ortner, “So Is Male to Female as Culture is to Nature?” 180.

44. Beauvoir, as we’ve seen, tends towards the view that human consciousness imposes its own structure, while Ortner, I suspect, would find both this approach and Marx’s reductive.

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