Existentialist Feminism

Existentialist feminism references the work of Simone de Beauvoir and her book The Second Sex. Most agree that this book launched modern feminism. Beauvoir grounded her arguments in science, history, sociology, and law, overlaid with her existentialist belief that women could define themselves and in so doing could free themselves from patriarchal domination. Her analysis uses existential categories such as immanence-transcendence, subject-object, self-other to explain the oppression of women. De Beauvoir maintains that women have become the “other” or object of men’s subjectivity. Primarily due to one’s biology, women’s oppression consists of being denied transcendence and subjectivity. (Boles, Janet., Historical Dictionary of Feminism, Scarecrow Press, Md., 1996)

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was born in Paris. Her parents sent her to study at Catholic schools, the prestigious Cours Désir, and the Institut Sainte-Marie in Neuilly. She graduated from these institutions just at the time when educational reforms in France gave women equal access to the baccalauréat examination, enabling them to attend universities. Simone de Beauvoir attended the École Normale Supérieure and in 1929 became a candidate for the agrégation de philosophie, a competitive postgraduate examination for lycée and university teaching positions. She studied and succeeded at the agrégation at the same time as Jean Paul Sartre, with whom she began a lifelong love and partnership. Through dialogue and mutual influence, de Beauvoir and Sartre developed existentialism, a philosophy that concerned the exercise of human freedom in a world where existence has no transcendent purpose or essence to give it meaning.

As existentialists, both de Beauvoir and Sartre defined a human as that being whose being is not to be. They clarified this paradoxical definition by means of the important distinction between "Being-for-itself," which is conscious, and "Being-in-itself," which is unconscious and superfluous; they showed how consciousness implies a Being other than itself that enables the For-itself to be at once a revelation, negation, desire, and choice of Being only because it is not Being. Although de Beauvoir and Sartre agreed in defining human beings in terms of what they lacked, Sartre was more pessimistic in describing the "useless passion" of human beings and the anguish, despair, and nausea they experience.

In her trail-blazing study on the existential situation of woman, The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argued that prevailing concepts of "the feminine" are not natural to women but have instead imprisoned women and held them in a status secondary to men. Following G. W. F. Hegel, who in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) analyzed a master-slave relationship as one in which a consciousness sets itself up as essential in hostile opposition to an "Other," de Beauvoir showed in her Introduction to The Second Sex how man defines woman as relative and subordinate to him and not in herself. She also examined women's complicity in accepting the status of objectified "Other" and argued that social, legal, and economic inequalities worked against women's ability to claim their position as autonomous subjects.

Yet, de Beauvoir's well-known claim that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," while indicative of the existentialist's refusal to accept ready-made essences, has seemed extreme to some. French literary theorists of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, have argued instead that it is in women's difference, understood in poststructuralist terms, that women may find the source of liberation from a phallocentric discourse.

(See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/)

Resources:

Information about de Beauvoir from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
From Cenage Learning: Summary of Second Sex
Summary of Tong: Existential Feminism by Jan Mills
Summary of Tong: Existential Feminism, Part II by Serene Dussell