Thinking Politically with Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir is seldom recognized by critics as a political thinker.¹ In interviews and public statements, Beauvoir always identified herself as a writer, rather than as an activist, philosopher, or political person. ² Yet even if we think about politics in its most conventional sense—as the art of governance, the study of how power works, or as the interaction between people and states—we notice that Beauvoir was always thinking about political questions and responding to the historical-political events that unfolded in her lifetime (1908–1986). ³ In essays, novels, and longer theoretical reflections, she discussed Stalinism, the disappointments of communism, and the purge trials; German occupation of France and the politics of collaboration and resistance; post World War II trials for collaborators and the articulation of crimes against humanity; racism in America; France’s war in Algeria and the politics of colonization; and the politics of embodiment, specifically addressing the aging body and women’s experience. ⁴ Moreover, when responding to and writing about all these situations, Beauvoir provoked and engaged the public in ethical and political debates that probed subjects typically considered outside the realm of the political. For example, she investigated the multiple (many personal) reasons for the actions of collaborators; she brought the Algerian militant, Djamila Boupacha’s, rape by French soldiers to light in the French public in 1960; and she argued that Robert Brasillach’s crime (a Nazi-identified journalist executed for treason in 1945) was a violation against specific embodied Jewish victims rather than a crime against the French state.⁵ If we think of politics a bit more expansively, we could say that as a political thinker, Beauvoir made publicly visible what ought to be, but often was not, a matter of public concern.

Of all her writings, however, Beauvoir is by far best known for The Second Sex. ⁶ Her seven hundred plus page magnum opus on male theorization of “Woman” and the challenges women’s lived experience poses to any attempt to fix a feminine essence launched her reputation as a specifically feminist, rather than a more broadly political, thinker. The intense focus on this one book ironically served to obscure the importance of her other work, and its organic links to her political ideas.⁷ In the sixty-plus years following publication of The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s reputation has been even more firmly associated specifically with feminist theory, and her work has been mostly ignored by other political theorists. ⁸ Yet, by thinking politically with Beauvoir, we will see that The Second Sex offers a sophisticated and compelling theory of situated freedom challenging several assumptions prevalent in the mainstream canon. Her work on situated freedom and the political meanings of embodiment push us to understand how freedom is always situated by context and the reality of social identities.

I articulate the challenge The Second Sex poses for political thinking by looking at three related moves that are central to Beauvoir’s argument. First, while most political theorists claim authority by attempting to deny, or at least transcend, their embodiment, Beauvoir embraces hers: she studies her own situation as a woman alongside a multitude of differently situated women in order to claim authority. Her method thus debunks the disavowal of embodiment perpetuated in the canon and undermines the “universal” voice. Second, claiming we are self and other, body and mind, transcendence and facticity all simultaneously, Beauvoir’s theorization of ambiguity as manifest in women’s situation illuminates the pernicious political meanings assigned to certain bodies. Furthermore, her political call to “assume” rather than seek to transcend our human ambiguity undoes the master/slave confrontation, as well as reductive theories of human existence that give priority either to sovereign selves or the movement of History. And finally, making concrete freedom for individuals her standard for judgment, Beauvoir offers a sophisticated version of existentialism that promises individual freedom, but only as linked to the freedom of all.⁹ Theorizing the situated freedom of women in their role as mothers, Beauvoir illuminates how difficult it is for the oppressed to embrace (or even desire) their freedom. Her political theory demands that we prioritize equality of conditions as the first step towards enhancing freedom for everyone.

Embracing Embodiment: Speaking from a Woman’s Perspective

For over two thousand years, male political theorists have sought to leave their bodies behind, at least when occupying public space. Although thinkers as diverse as Socrates, St. Augustine, Hobbes, and Rousseau (just to name a few) do indeed speak about bodies and the human struggle with passion and desire (sometimes even personally), political space is consistently theorized as wiped clean of these struggles and limitations which constitute the too human proclivities blocking the way of the self’s or the community’s full realization in political goals. Most male political thinkers win their war with the body by assigning it wholesale to the feminine. In a desperate attempt to theorize from a space uncluttered by the desires and realities of bodies, male thinkers align the needs, passions, desires, and messiness of the body all with the figure of Woman.

This process, of making Woman into Body and Man into Mind, is documented by Beauvoir in the first volume of The Second Sex. Volume I, appropriately titled “Facts and Myths” is a searing critique of the work that men of science and intellect have produced on the subject of women. The dominant philosophical perspective of the first volume establishes that men have set women up as the Other, the inessential, and as sexed being, in an attempt to secure men’s position as the Subject, the absolute human type, the universal. Establishing woman in a state of dependence undoubtedly serves men’s economic interests, but Beauvoir insists that it suits men’s ontological and moral ambitions as well (2010: 159). In relationship with women established in their role as Other, men are able to skirt the difficulties and confrontations central to those between two subjects. And they are able to trap women in their embodiment while transcending their own: “an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence” (2010: 17).

This trapping of women in immanence and condemning them to their bodies is not, however, just a philosophical concern. It is a significant hindrance even in everyday conversation:

Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity. I used to get annoyed in abstract discussions to hear men tell me: “You think such and such a thing because you’re a woman.” But I know my only defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, “And you think the contrary because you are a man,” because it is understood that being a man is not a particularity

(2010: 5).

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir says both that she is a woman, and that what she says is true. Her strategy consists of claiming her own and other women’s situated bodies as the source of authority (rather than hindrance to it) to establish truth from this very ground. Consider her very first sentences that have confounded readers from many quarters:

I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore

(2010: 3).

Two of Beauvoir’s typical writing practices, both a challenge to mainstream political theory, emerge in these opening lines. First, the subjective voice is claimed as the voice of authority. As she recalls in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance: “Wanting to talk about myself, I became aware that to do so I should first have to describe the condition of woman in general.” (1968: 195) Beauvoir is present everywhere in The Second Sex and she makes no secret of it; in fact, she claims that “certain women are still best suited to elucidate the situation of women” (2010: 15). These women, intellectual women like Beauvoir herself, are those “fortunate to have had all the privileges of the human being restored to them, [and] can afford the luxury of impartiality” (ibid.). Intellectual women have their roots in the feminine world but have also had all the advantages of moving and being accepted in the male world, and this accords these specific women the authority to “elucidate the situation of women.” Knowing the “feminine world more intimately than do men because our roots are in it” (ibid.) will be an advantage. What is remarkable here, in terms of challenging how political theorists regularly claim authority, is that Beauvoir asserts her authority not only via research and textual interpretation (plentiful in The Second Sex) but also by virtue of her own experience, her subjective knowledge, and the compilation and interpretation of an overwhelming multitude of anecdotes and testimonies from the lives of diversely situated women.

Missing completely is the Archimedean perspective, the “view from nowhere,” or any claim to universal truth. Beauvoir’s claim that she is a woman (“If I want to define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth” 2010:5) posits a vital, and unexpected, connection between the metaphysical question “What is a woman?” and the ordinary, everyday response “I am.”¹⁰ She dispenses with the authority of metaphysical truth, or even “public good” or “general interest” (2010: 16). In contrast, she acknowledges her own everyday life perspective, which is her specific situation as a woman, and promises she will judge institutions from “the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals” (ibid.). Abstract equality, such as the right to vote, often fails to deliver concrete freedom to women: Beauvoir will judge in accordance with how women actually live their lives and what they are able to do—if they have money, education, reproductive freedom, fulfilling and challenging work, for example—to determine whether freedom is available to be embraced.

Returning again to those first important lines of The Second Sex, another curious feature of the way Beauvoir claims authority emerges. Throughout both volumes, even though Beauvoir situates authority as embedded within her own and other women’s experiences, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between when she is speaking in her own voice, in the voice of another source, or mimicking the male voice which considers the serious exploration of women’s lives as unworthy of study or interest. In a way that can be confusing for readers, Beauvoir often asserts and extends voices and arguments that she then refutes a few paragraphs or pages on. Moreover, she never adheres to any one already established philosophical or political perspective. She cites and argues with a huge host of authors throughout, including Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Marx, Engels, Blanchot, Husserl, Levi-Strauss, Descartes, Bergson, Freud, Rousseau, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Sartre. She also works with several multivalent definitions of the central concepts that she utilizes, drawing on and sometimes converting the ideas of other thinkers to shape her own concepts.¹¹

Again, the first lines of Beauvoir’s text offer one example of how her methodology, particularly this style of moving quickly between claiming her own authority and mimicking the voice of male authority, has posed some problems for interpreters of this text, even for sympathetic feminist readers.¹² In those first lines, she mimics the critics of feminism who find the “problem” of women to be no problem at all, who deride the various positions taken by feminists as simply a “quarrel” of little consequence, and who hope this issue is “almost over,” not to be talked about anymore. Though Beauvoir says “I” here, she does so only to go on to immediately dispute the imputed position. In fact, she did not hesitate a long time before writing a book on woman: from her autobiography it is clear that she got right down to work on researching myths of femininity upon discovering that to write about herself she would need to explore the question of how being a woman affected her more generally (1968:103). Whether or not she finds the topic irritating, she devoted several years of her life to it, and what she has to say is new indeed. In fact, the quarrel over feminism is about to be re-energized upon publication of The Second Sex, as Beauvoir, already a well-known public figure, likely suspects. So, although Beauvoir employs the “I,” she mimics the voice of those whom she seeks to discredit. Reading those first few lines in the context of the entire introduction explaining why exploring women’s lives is urgently important, it is clear that Beauvoir neither denigrates the topic nor feminist exploration of it. Indeed, she claims her own and other women’s embodiment, explores the ambiguity that embodiment illuminates, and links these to the situated freedom that reveals the truth of our existence and the political thinking that should follow from it.

Assuming Ambiguity: Interpreting the “Facts” of Biology

What makes Beauvoir’s political perspective so compelling is her ability to keep concrete individual’s unique and embodied lives and desires, and the larger forces and political contingencies that situate individuals within group existence (class, race, gender, history, culture, movements, location, etc.) simultaneously in view. Her ethical call to embrace ambiguity in the human condition—the fact that we are beings who exist simultaneously as subject and object, transcendence and facticity, beings in ourselves and for others, unpredictable and habitual, solitary and connected—reveals human desire to impose meaning (or achieve Being) as always bound to fail. Collective political action towards enhancing freedom for others, and hence for ourselves, emerges as the best way to embrace human existence.

The necessity of “assum[ing] our fundamental ambiguity” in the “knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life” (1948: 9) is for Beauvoir, linked very strongly to the acknowledgment that we are embodied beings who are both mind and matter at the same time.¹³ Philosophers have previously tried to “mask” the human condition, usually by giving priority to mind, but sometimes to matter, or sometimes to a reconciliatory force such as History. For Beauvoir, we exist in an ongoing tension: we are not consciousness alone, nor are we subject only to the brute forces of nature or matter. Fundamental to existence is the irresolvable tension between our existence as the “I” of consciousness and desire versus the body that others see and judge; between being an absolutely free self versus being subject to the actions of other individuals and the collectivity; and to living in a world of nature and other forces (death being one of these) that we cannot control. We are always embodied as biological beings, subject to time and nature, as well as to shifting yet durable political meanings of embodiment (race, gender, and aging as examples). The evasion of ambiguity is made more difficult in late modernity because forms of thought that traditionally gave us coherence and meaning (religion, metaphysics, consoling forms of ethics, tradition) are collapsing just at the moment when the oppositions become most stark: though we are “masters of the atomic bomb,” it is “created only to destroy” us (1948: 9).¹⁴

The situation of women provides a good example for disclosing one particular aspect of ambiguity, how we are subject not only to the constraints of embodiment universally—we age, we can get sick, we die—but in addition some individuals and groups are interpreted through biological “data” that is infused with political and social meaning. As Beauvoir says of women: “[a woman is] like all humans, an autonomous freedom, [but] she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other” (2010: 17). Women’s frustrated, or blocked, access to opportunities to exercise freedom is certainly due in part to their biological role in reproduction, but it cannot wholly explain women’s systematic oppression. Below, I quote an early description of female biology from Beauvoir’s chapter on “Biological Data” to again illustrate Beauvoir’s style of citing pejorative male descriptions that sometimes serve to confuse readers, as well as show the power of biological and scientific authority to confine women in their sexual bodies and deny them agency and freedom.¹⁵

The word “female” evokes a saraband of images: an enormous round egg snatching and castrating the agile sperm; monstrous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over the servile males; the praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing their partners and gobbling them up; the dog in heat running through back alleys, leaving perverse smells in her wake; the monkey showing herself off brazenly, sneaking way with flirtatious hypocrisy. And the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie down slavishly under the male’s imperial embrace, inert, impatient, shrewd, stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated

(2010: 21).

These images trap women in biology, make it her destiny, and serve to justify her limited access to freedom. Beauvoir’s chapter on biological data challenges every piece of this picture, not by arguing that biology is not important, or that we can move beyond it through technology, or that women and men are complementary. Instead, she demonstrates the contingency without denying the facticity of biology. First, she shows that the division of the species into two sexes does not occur universally in nature, citing asexual multiplication, self-fertilization, cross-fertilization, and intersexuality, and noting that the “superiority of one system over another involve highly contestable theories concerning evolution” (2010: 23). Yet, thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas take sexual differentiation for granted without trying to explain it, while Hegel tries to offer logical justifications. Beauvoir stresses that a body is necessary for consciousness, but not that sexual differentiation is necessary for reproduction. Social myths have long penetrated scientific discovery: women were long thought to have no active role in reproduction, merely carrying and fattening the living seed (2010: 25); other evidence points to men’s passive role (2010: 27). Pondering these contradictions, Beauvoir insists that “nothing warrants universalizing life’s specific processes” (2010: 26); moreover, “if one is a bit scrupulous, one has to agree that it is a long way from ovum to woman” (2010: 29).

Nevertheless, Beauvoir does concede that “female individuality is fought by the interest of the species” (2010: 38): “woman, the most individualized of females, is also the most fragile, the one who experiences her destiny the most dramatically and who distinguishes herself the most significantly from her male” (ibid.). Another controversial passage of Beauvoir’s, this time describing menstruation, is cited below:

This is when she feels most acutely that her body is an alienated opaque thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that makes and unmakes a crib in her every month; every month a child is prepared to be born and is aborted in the flow of the crimson tide; woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her

(2010: 41, Beauvoir’s emphasis).

Beauvoir goes on to describe childbirth as painful and dangerous, sometimes leaving a woman “misshapen and aged,” breastfeeding is said to be “exhaustive servitude,” and the gestation of a child is like the “species eating away at them” (2010: 42). These and other descriptions of women’s biology have been singled out for intense scrutiny and critique, some scholars casting Beauvoir as male-identified, others lamenting Beauvoir’s failure to recognize any creative potential in reproductive labor.¹⁶ While these debates are important, the point I want to emphasize here is that in her description of how biology influences women’s destiny, Beauvoir continually stresses how the forces of biology are given political meaning via interpretations that can be challenged and transformed. We might recall Beauvoir’s most quoted line, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (2010: 283).¹⁷ While this line has been read as inventing or reinforcing a sex/gender distinction, no such duality exists in Beauvoir’s thinking. ¹⁸ In contrast, her work undoes the distinction, reuniting body and its meanings in order to think creatively and anew about biology’s political meaning. Biology is clearly a human fact; we are embodied and subject to nature and time, but we also possess the freedom –in fact freedom demands that we take on the responsibility—to rethink the meanings of our situation and embodiment. Men have exercised bad faith by denying ambiguity in strictly identifying women with bodies, reproduction of the species, and particularity, so that men can transcend the body as consciousness, freedom, and universality.

The chapter on biological data thus offers just one example of how Beauvoir seriously ponders embodiment and the acknowledgment of ambiguity by dissecting how physical or physiological facts are also political. Biology is especially pernicious for women because while women and men both arise as historical formations, as Beauvoir is keen to demonstrate, they do so unequally. While women are constituted as “other” systematically, many (not all) men are able to avoid the experience of reciprocity, or completely disavow it, thus not having to face up to or experience ambiguity.¹⁹ It is important to emphasize again, however, that Beauvoir does not argue for simply according feminine biological functions, especially reproductive labor, a positive value, thus turning the tables. Only in the section on “Sexual Initiation” is there a positive affirmation of women’s embodiment described as female eroticism, buried in a chapter otherwise coded quite negatively. Acknowledging that a woman’s sexual desire depends on “her whole social and economic situation” in addition to “these facts” [of embodiment], (2010: 415), Beauvoir describes the potential of a sexual encounter that affirms ambiguity when the woman recognizes herself as both sexual object and desiring subject:

The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes; they can easily be settled when a woman feels both desire and respect in a man; if he covets her in her flesh while recognizing her freedom, she recovers her essentialness at the moment she becomes object, she remains free in the submission to which she consents . . . The words “receive” and “give” exchange meanings, joy is gratitude, pleasure is tenderness. In a concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the keenest consciousness of the other and the self

(2010: 415).

Above, ambiguity is coded positively. If we could affirm this ongoing tension, rather than seek to overcome or resolve it, we might abandon the urge to subjugate and oppress. This sounds both too easy, a naïve response to the reasons for oppression and violence, and too difficult.²⁰ Writing of these difficulties in a universal register, Beauvoir describes the “tragic ambiguity” of the human condition (1948: 7): we are never fully free, never in control, always in a web of relationships and contingencies, subject to time, nature, and the actions of others. These “human” restrictions become even more challenging when oppression of others becomes one way for those in power to mask their human limitations. We can conclude that to disclose and affirm ambiguity in a world permeated by sexual, racial, and other multiple markers of oppression is exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, Beauvoir maintains freedom as the highest good, always linked to the freedom of others. How individuals are constituted and often oppressed by situation, the contingency of these meanings and relationships, and how situation constitutes and enables an individual’s concrete freedom is the focus of the next section.

Situating Freedom: Learning from the Experiences of Mothers

To put it in its most simple terms, situated freedom describes self chosen action that is always already constrained. These constraints refer to history, social conditions, ideology, the existence of others, and the web of discourse that all produce and position subjects (think again of Beauvoir’s language of becoming women) and their experiences. To explore women’s situation in Volume II of The Second Sex, Beauvoir combs hundreds of texts, as well as drawing on her own and other women’s experiences, several of them fictional, to document thousands of women’s complex and contradictory experiences of youth, adolescence, sexual initiation, menstruation, pregnancy, motherhood, love, abortion, romance, menopause, social roles, housework, paid work, beauty, aging, fluctuations and variability in sexual desire as influenced by multiple situations, and more. These are recounted in an anecdotal way, and although the experiences and stories demonstrate and appreciate the plurality of experiences women have throughout their lives and in their different situations, the meaning Beauvoir derives from this multitude points to what she will theorize as women’s “situation.” To be human is to enjoy only situated freedom, rather than radical and unrestrained freedom, but not all individuals are situated equally.

How Beauvoir sometimes talks about women’s situation can make it seem a thoroughly reductive category. For example, she speaks of “blacks,” of “women,” and of “men” as if these were not multiple and cross-cutting categories, a fact that has troubled many critics. Indeed, Beauvoir is often guilty of obscuring how race, culture, class and location intersect with gender, and of not considering conceptually how the plurality of these forms of difference serve to fragment subjectivity. Influenced by Richard Wright, who she befriended on her trip to the United States in 1947, ²¹ Beauvoir also often depicts women’s experiences as analogous to those of Blacks in the United States. Writing that “Richard Wright showed in Black Boy how blocked from the start the ambitions of a young American black man are and what struggle he has to endure merely to raise himself to the level where whites begin to have problems” (2010: 736), Beauvoir characterizes these struggles as “similar to those encountered by women” (2010: 737). She laments that as for Blacks, the “moral and intellectual repercussions [of social discrimination] are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature” (2010: 14).

The boundaries of this analysis become particularly troublesome when Beauvoir fails to consider the experience of black women, for example, as challenging the conclusions she draws from delimiting her categories in this way. Considering Elizabeth Spelman’s important and early criticisms of The Second Sex on this score, Penelope Deutscher argues that working within rather than exploding these bounded categories is a missed opportunity in the context of Beauvoir’s work on ambiguity wherein she might have explored coinciding privilege and subordination, or the experience of simultaneously marginalizing others while being marginalized.²² Following Deutscher’s generous indication of the potential of Beauvoir’s writings to resist the conceptual separation of race and sex if considered in light of her work on ambiguity, we might think about how Beauvoir’s theorization of women’s situation is able to capture the dynamics of group oppression without running roughshod over the pluralities, varieties, and contingencies of women’s experiences. The fact that Beauvoir chooses not to designate black women, Hispanic women, French Algerian women, for instance, as exhibiting predictable responses to their unique situations actually serves to preserve individual agency and unpredictability in response to systematic kinds of inequality and oppression. She frequently offers examples from the lives of women with various identities, but these examples are given as individual, rather than group, evidence.

Additionally, thinking about the situated freedom of women as shaping experience, rather than women’s experience as something essential available for discovery, is an important insight of Beauvoir’s that can help us challenge not just the suppression of women’s lives and experiences, but also to understand (and potentially undermine) the repressive logics and their explicit denial of ambiguity that produce such categories and identities. Such a conceptualization offers enormous potential for thinking about the formation of group identity, the effects of group identity on individual consciousness, as well as strategies for political resistance that might be encouraged in the face of oppression and habituated and lived inequality.

To present just a brief sample of the promise of Beauvoir’s work on situated freedom I will linger for a moment in Chapter Six, “The Mother.” I choose this chapter both because it is so rich and because it has been so controversial. Beauvoir begins the chapter, typically, in the voice of male authority: “It is through motherhood that woman fully achieves her physiological destiny; that is her “natural” vocation, since her whole organism is directed toward the perpetuation of the species” (2010: 524). As we might well guess, her examples throughout the chapter will undermine this claim. Within that same first paragraph she shifts immediately into a discussion of multiple experiences of abortion. This discussion, which comprises about one quarter of the chapter, is littered with women’s experiences—often horrible, physically and psychologically, sometimes ending in death—from multiple class locations, almost all French. It frames her entire chapter on “the mother” through the clear implication, spelled out explicitly later on, that any path towards becoming a mother that isn’t freely chosen should be rendered suspect. Yet, at the same time that she insists that women should control their pregnancies freely, she takes very seriously the contradictions, and sometimes the loss, that some women feel when they have an abortion. Beauvoir confirms that it is not a simple contraceptive practice: “an event has taken place that is an absolute commencement and whose development is being halted” (2010: 531); “even consenting to and wanting an abortion, woman feels her femininity sacrificed” (2010: 532).

It is impossible to do justice to the range of the many examples Beauvoir cites about women’s multiple, and often contradictory, experiences of and reactions to motherhood or its rejection.²³ Far from denigrating the experience wholesale (which has sometimes been claimed) she instead situates it: “Pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in very different ways depending on whether they take place in revolt, resignation, satisfaction, or enthusiasm” (2010: 533). Moreover, she acknowledges the “complex truths” that come to the fore in each woman’s experience: an unwed woman might be “overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her” but then “find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams” (2010: 533).

What reveals women’s situation as unique in its reflection of systematic inequality is how women, across various locations and multiple identities, struggle with the meanings accorded to femininity. This becomes manifest very powerfully in various experiences of motherhood since being a mother is considered the most laudatory role a woman can play. Throughout the chapter, Beauvoir talks about mothers who see their existence justified in their pregnant bodies, those who feel themselves more erotic during pregnancy, some who feel invaded by the species, and others who make it an excuse to take a “vacation” from responsibility and just exist. Likewise, she describes many contradictory responses to the birth of the baby. Some feel nursing is their destiny while others can’t nurse at all; some immediately bond with their child while others must establish concrete bonds over time. Some women regard their children as tyrants, others as extensions of themselves; there is hostility between mother and the growing child as well as deep and abiding love and reciprocity.

None of these responses are explained as, or reduced to, an outcome of any particular situation, and thus nothing can be predicted other than the fact that all women must struggle with the strong association between femininity and various representations of motherhood.²⁴ Poor women who can’t financially care for their children might be overjoyed by the birth of a child while a wealthier woman feels burdened; the woman who loves her husband might be repulsed by her pregnant body and the single mother take joy in it. While Beauvoir is very sensitive to the distinct particularities of situation for each woman, she does not deduce individual responses as predictably arising from these situations. Rather, she seeks to theorize women’s situation as constituting the struggle with the pervasive idea that motherhood constitutes women’s personal and psychological fulfillment. Each woman struggles with and responds to this situation differently, but none are free from the expectations and psychological and physical burdens it imposes.

In describing how this might be different, Beauvoir argues: “To have a child is to take on a commitment; if the mother shrinks from it, she commits an offense against human existence, against a freedom; but no one can impose it on her. The relation of parents to children, like that of spouses, must be freely chosen” (2010: 566). But for this to occur, women must become women not through struggles with the myths of femininity which constitute their currently constituted situation, but rather women must become women in conditions of enhanced freedom. But how to accomplish this when women are continually deceived by the temptations of bad faith? While freedom is difficult for any human being to embrace, it is especially arduous for subjects who are habituated in the ways of submission. The temptation is always to avert action and to take the “easy path” so that “the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence” can be avoided (2010: 10). Throughout The Second Sex there is ample evidence that because women’s happiness is equated with certain kinds of repetitive tasks—cleaning, childcare, cooking—and certain kinds of roles—mother, wife, daughter—women are systematically encouraged to abdicate their potential freedom in order to align their desires with what is socially productive and non-disruptive to the status quo.²⁵ These acts of bad faith are, as Beauvoir characterizes them, “a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil” (2010: 16).

Can an individual woman achieve freedom on her own, or must there be a collective transformation?²⁶ Although Beauvoir always grounds her theoretical claims by measuring them against the possibilities encountered in individually lived situations, she argues that political transformation only is accomplished by collective action, and individuals can be free only within the context of the freedom of all. Measuring the collectivity of women’s lives against her own, Beauvoir does not see her own accomplishments as justified by her individual will or talent. She ends the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,²⁷ by remembering her best friend Zaza’s premature death in 1929, which Beauvoir attributes to her struggle with her family over her desire to marry Merleau-Ponty rather than submit to an arranged marriage.

The doctors called it meningitis, encephalitis; no one was quite sure. Had it been a contagious disease, or an accident? Or had Zaza succumbed to exhaustion and anxiety? She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahead of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death

(1959: 360).

In its attention to the details and circumstances of women’s lived existence and situated freedom, Beauvoir’s work in The Second Sex extends her early philosophical insight that no individual can accomplish freedom in isolation, nor are one’s actions ever sovereign or their effects predictable.²⁸ The best course for progressive political action given this tragic context is Beauvoir’s lifelong primary concern.

Conclusion: Beauvoir’s Challenge to Political Thinking

To prove that there is a full blown political theory within The Second Sex has not been my goal in this essay. More importantly, it was never Beauvoir’s desire to formulate a systematic philosophy. Though she was very strongly influenced by both Hegel and Marx, for example, she rejects Hegel’s grand theory of History as well as Marx’s insistence that class determines consciousness. Likewise, she rejects the idea that consciousness trumps materiality or that the radical freedom of the individual can exist anywhere other than in our heads. While she is influenced by, and works with and within several canonical traditions, Beauvoir transforms and converts them in her own unique way.

In short, Beauvoir’s thinking politics in situation is a direct challenge to political theory’s usual methods and assumptions. By avowing and investigating her embodiment, theorizing ambiguity as it manifests in the political meaning accorded to biology, and situating women’s freedom in the context of lived experience, Beauvoir offers us a new way to think about the status of the universal and the evaluation of evidence, the reality of ambiguity and the ways we deny it, the many and persistent obstacles to freedom for the oppressed, and the ways we might best theorize and enact political freedom. As political thinkers, we ignore this text at our peril. The new and restored translation of The Second Sex offers a unique opportunity to reread, or read anew, this profound exploration into the meaning and political possibilities for women’s, and indeed all our lives.