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The concept of feminism in Simone de Beauvoir

Posted on 2020-03-08 | JPL editions

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The concept of feminism in Simone de Beauvoir is a concept that carries a complex, plurivocal, multidimensional theoretical content whose meaning must be specified rigorously if we do not want to maintain confusion in the intellectual debate in which it is. used.

The first point that should be underlined is that when Simone de Beauvoir wrote and published Le Deuxieme Sexe , it was not a question of writing a manifesto militant for a collective commitment in the sense that Marx wrote in 1847 The Communist manifesto as a programmatic writing of a real, nascent political movement, in order to endow it with a theoretical, strategic and orienting tactical weapon. Today this position is called individual feminism which consists, in the absence of a collective structure of struggle for protest, of an individual cry of an intellectual woman who questions the sexual order of the world by claiming equal rights and duties for men and women. It is the intellectual feminism professed by women philosophers like the Greek Théano, wife of Pythagoras, the Italian Christine de Pisan, the German Lou Andréas Salomé. She is a defender of women's rights, this feminism, organized at a time when the battle is waged by female individualities when there is not yet a collective movement of women with agendas to claim rights like this. will be the case at a later stage in the struggle of members of the status of women in countries such as England, France, Spain and the USA. Simone de Beauvoir herself says that the idea of writing a book on the condition of women was suggested to her by Sartre. She gives the details in The Force of Things :

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I have said how this book was conceived: almost by accident; wanting to talk about myself, I realized that I had to describe the female condition; I first considered the myths that men have forged about it through cosmologies, religions, superstitions, ideologies, and literature. I tried to put some order in the painting, at first glance incoherent, which presented itself to me: in any case the man posed as the Subject and considered the woman as an object, like the Other. This claim was obviously explained by historical circumstances; and Sartre told me that I also had to indicate the physiological bases. It was in Ramatuelle; we talked about it for a long time and I hesitated: I had not considered writing such a vast work. But indeed, my study on myths was left in the air if we did not know what reality they covered. So I plunged into physiology and history books. I didn't just compile; the scientists themselves, and of both sexes, are imbued with virile prejudices and I tried to find, behind their interpretations, the exact facts. In history, I identified a few ideas that I had never encountered anywhere: I linked the history of women to that of inheritance, that is to say that it appeared to me as a backlash of evolution. economy of the male world.

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I had started to look at women with new eyes and I went from surprise to surprise. It's strange and stimulating to suddenly discover, at the age of forty, an aspect of the world that is obvious and that you did not see. One of the misunderstandings that my book gave rise to is that people believed that I denied any difference between men and women: on the contrary, I measured by writing what separates them; what I have argued is that these dissimilarities are cultural and not natural. I set out to tell systematically, from childhood to old age, how they are created; I examined the possibilities that this world offers to women, those it denies them, their limits, their bad luck and their chances, their escapes, their accomplishments. This is how I composed the second volume: The Lived Experience.1

Let us stop for a moment on this important passage from Simone de Beauvoir's work. Critical reflection on the condition of women begins at home but it is not yet linked either to a practical collective struggle or to a strategic vision. The feminism of Simone de Beauvoir is here above all a theoretical position. She says it herself in Tout taken, she admits it:

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The Second Sex can be useful for activists: but it is not an activist book. I thought the status of women would evolve along with society. I wrote:

“Basically we won the game. Many problems seem to us more essential than those which concern us singularly. "And in The Force of Things I said, speaking of the female condition:" It depends on the future of work in the world, it will only seriously change at the cost of an upheaval in production. That's why I avoided locking myself into feminism . »(Underlined by me, MA) A little later, in an interview with Janson * (Francis Jeanson, Simone de Beauvoir or the company of living), I said that it was by drawing my thoughts most radically towards feminism (underlined by me, MA) that it was most aptly interpreted. But I remained on a theoretical level (underlined by me, MA): I radically denied the existence of a feminine nature ”2.

But we can also, if we have to consider a last argument, wonder about the meaning of the end of the Second Sex where Simone de Beauvoir characterizes what seems to her to be the political perspective which must bring together men and women. : " We can not say it better. It is within the given world that it is up to man to make the reign of freedom triumph; to achieve this supreme victory, it is among other things necessary that, beyond their natural differentiations, men and women unequivocally affirm their fraternity 3 ”. It is a beautiful philosophical conclusion which only engages high minds but which does not correspond to the collective expectation of individuals who day after day pursue a struggle to change their condition of life. We must take into account the elements that we evoked in the first chapters of our analysis. The concept of feminism is a historical concept at first glance. Marxism, a theoretical and political current, which has organized since 1847 the struggle of working class women for the emancipation of their class and the prospect of the creation of a new world after the overthrow of capitalist society initially considered the concept of feminism as a negative or at least insufficient concept. The first theorists of Marxism like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontaï consider the struggle of women for their emancipation as a class objective, as part of the class struggle and cannot conceive of the woman. news apart from the reorganization of society on new economic, social and political bases. For them and for them there are no radical changes in the condition of women without a socialist revolution. What they call feminism and which they approve is the conquest of important rights such as political rights (right to vote, right to be elected, cultural rights, such as the right to education, the right to school Socialist organizations, socialist women's organizations stand in solidarity with other women when they claim these rights, but it does not seem to them that capitalist society, like other class societies before it, can constitute the economic, political and social framework. in which it will be possible to achieve the true liberation of women. They mobilize themselves so that all women can conquer the right to education, the right to work, but they themselves separate themselves from these unaccompanied women. socialists when they notice that their political vision does not go beyond greater integration into the capitalist system.

When on March 8, 1910, the socialist women in Copenhagen decided that henceforth on that date, this day would be the mobilization of all women throughout the world and in particular of working class women for their fundamental rights, this slogan is conceived above all as a revolutionary political slogan. The Russian revolution of 1917 and the creation within the Third International of the international women's secretariat with women like Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Kate Duncker will signal this line of demarcation between the feminist conception of the liberation of women and the Marxist conception of the emancipation of proletarian women from the perspective of the revolutionary struggle of women for the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of another form of society.

This was at the start the distinction between the Marxist, revolutionary conception of the liberation of women going hand in hand with the conception of a new socialist society and the conquest of certain rights by women within a vision and of a reformist process where women aim for greater integration into the capitalist system without asking the question of their overthrow.

Where the woman aimed for a radical break with the capitalist society which continued the class societies of the past, she could at the same time define a role other than that fixed for her by sex education and thus the alternative for her was to take its place in the class struggle of the proletariat, the only class which, along with socialism and communism, aspired to be "the gravedigger" of societies based on class domination.

Feminism, on the contrary, aimed at the conquest of new rights for her but within the framework of the current society of which she did not perceive the close connection between the exploitation of class and the exploitation of sex.

But this line of demarcation between the struggle of the working women and that of the women of other classes of the capitalist system such as the women of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie will be blown up. Women will want to be both fighters for sex rights and at the same time to choose another social formation that breaks with the foundations of class society. What at the time of Lenin and Clara Zetkin was of the order of the impossible will convert the form of opposition, of absolute contradiction into enriching conciliation. When the demands of sex and class will merge into a catalog of unique and complementary rights, or will be in the presence of feminist socialism or socialist feminism. We can see it through two theorists Anja Meulenbelt4 and Herbert Marcuse5 who consider themselves socialists and feminists without complex and without contradiction.

The position of these two authors, which today is representative of several other ideological currents, can be expressed as follows: one can be a socialist and a feminist, one can be a feminist and a socialist. There is a close and indissoluble link between socialist demands and feminist demands. When Simone de Beauvoir became a Marxist, she realized that she would have to change things by making changes to certain formulations of the Second Sex. This seems important to her since she takes up in Tout taken almost word for word what she had already underlined in The Force of Things, even when it must be remembered that she was never able to accomplish what seemed necessary to her: “Theoretically , I have already said that if I wrote The Second Sex today, I would give materialist and non-idealistic bases to the opposition of the Same and the Other. I would base the rejection and oppression of the other not on the antagonism of consciousness, but on the economic basis of scarcity.6

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1 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses I, pp. 258-259. Memoirs I, PP.1127-1128.

2 Simone de Beauvoir, All in all, p. 623. Memoirs II, pp. 963-964.

3 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex volume II, p.663. Renewed in 1976. p.652

4 See Anja Meulenbelt, Feminism and Socialism, Konkret Literature Publishing House 1975, Amsterdam.

5 See Herbert Marcuse, Marxism and Feminism, Three Lectures and an Interview, Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main Publishing House 1975 .

6 Simone de Beauvoir, All in all, p.614. Mémoires II, Gallimard 2018, p.956. Here too, we would have to think in detail to see if she does not underestimate the difficulty when she adds: "I also said that the development of the book would not be changed: all male ideologies aim to justify the problem. oppression of women; it is conditioned by society in such a way as to consent to it. Gallimard 1963, p.614. Mémoires II, Gallimard, 2018.p.956.

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Bibliography

Anja Meulenbelt, Feminism and Socialism, Konkret Literature Publishing House 1975, Amsterdam.

-Herbert Marcuse, Marxism and Feminism, Three Lectures and an Interview, Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main Publishing House 1975.

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-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex volume II, 1949. Renewed in 1976.

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- Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses I, Gallimard, Paris, 1963. Les Mémoires I, Gallimard, 2018.

-Simone de Beauvoir, All in all, Gallimars, Paris, 1972. Memoirs II, Gallimard, 2018.

Mimose ANDRÉ, PhD student in philosophy.

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