Existentialist Feminism

Introduction
Feminism Point of Views
Liberal Changes in society, particularly in laws, could eliminate or at least reduce
gender inequity by ensuring women are provided with the same educational
and occupational opportunities men are provided.
Radical Feminist We need to examine men’s and women’s sexual and reproductive rights and
responsibilities in order to understand fully the persistence of the systems
that foster male domination and female subordination.
Marxist and socialist feminist Unless capitalist economic structures are destroyed people will continue to be
divided into two oppositional classes – the have and the have-nots-and
because the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy reinforce each other,
more women than men will find themselves within the ranks of the have
nots.
Psychoanalysis and Gender Feminism The fundamental explanation for women’s way of acting is rooted deep in
women’s psyche, especially in women’s way of thinking.
Existentialist Feminism Existential feminism utilizes this theory in critiquing socially imposed gender
roles and constructs that inhibit one’s freedom and desire for authentic living.
And using the subject and object-other dynamic, existential feminism is able
to emphatically detail the gendered role thrust upon women.
Existential Feminism
• This chapter encapsulates Jean Paul Sartre’s work Being and
Nothingness and Simon de Beauvior’s The Second Sex to examine
feminism through an existentialist point of view.
• An understanding of Sarte’s philosophy is a prerequisite for fully
appreciating Beauvior’s because she applies his terminology to
expand on her own.
 The philosophy of Being and Nothingness:

• Divides the self into two parts: being-for-itself versus being-in-itself.

• Being-in-itself refers to the material existence as shared with animals, vegetables and
minerals.
• Being-for-itself refers to the consciousness inherent to human existence that is shared by all
(humans).
• The distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself is useful in an analysis of the
human person to the degree we associate being-in-itself with the body. The body has
constant and objective being. As it can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted, the
body is the perceived. In contrast, the perceiver—the entity that does the seeing, touching,
hearing, smelling, and tasting—is not itself a perceptible object but, according to Sartre, still
has a certain kind of being: being-for-itself.
• This consciousness presents the problem of freedom, the curse of constant choice, also
called the human condition. 
• Sartre suggests taking full responsibility for one’s actions and never denying the reality of
freedom of choice.
The philosophy of Being and Nothingness:

• To the first two kinds of being, Sartre added a third, being-for-others. Sartre sometimes described this
mode of being positively as Mitsein, a communal “being-with.” More frequently, however, he
described it negatively, as involving “a personal conflict as each For-itself seeks to recover its own
Being by directly or indirectly making an object out of the other.
• Freedom, the distinguishing characteristic of a self, is, according to Sartre, more of a burden than a
blessing. It is a burden because so long as a person is conscious, there is no relief from the freedom to
choose and affirm. There are no answers in life, just questions.
• Existence, said Sartre, precedes essence. In other words, we exist only as amorphous, living
organisms until we create separate and essential identities for ourselves through conscious action—
through making choices, coming to decisions, reaffirming old purposes and projects, or affirming new
ones.
Ethics of existencialism
• Beauvoir is an existencialist
• Main creed of existencialism: Human is freedom, human always has a
choice
• Human has to decide about his/her life, take responsibility for it
Simone de Beauvoir
• de Beauvoir viewed Freud’s explanation for woman’s otherness as incomplete. She
faulted Freudians for teaching that women’s low social status relative to men is due
simply to women’s lack of the penis.
• Anticipating by decades a central tenet of the US woman’s movement, de Beauvoir
refused to concede it is women’s anatomy that consigns women to second-class
personhood and citizenship.
• Women “envy” those who possess a penis, said de Beauvoir, not because they want a
penis per se but because they desire the material and psychological privileges society
accords to penis possessors.
• The social status of men is not to be traced to certain features of the male anatomy;
rather, the “prestige of the penis” is to be explained “by the sovereignty of the father.”
Women are the other not because they lack penises but because they lack power.
 First and second sex
• Being the second sex implies that
woman is seen as “the sex”
• Therefore emphasis on women’s
body, sexuality
• The male is seen as the one, as
“man” and related to his
cognitive capaties
• The female is the other, the lesser
• All that is differenct, negative
 De Beauvior
• De Beauvior examined women’s status in society and subordination to men.
• According to de Beauvoir the basic explanation for men’s relegation of women to the spere of
otherness: as soon as men asserted himself “as subject and free being, the idea of the other
(arose) – specifically, the idea of woman as the other. Woman became for man everything man
was not, an alien power that man had best control lest woman become the self and man become
the other.
• As civilization develop, men discovered they could control women by creating myths about
women: her irrationality, complexity, and opaqueness. Throughout her analysis of men’s myth
about woman, de Beauvoir emphasized that each man is in search of the ideal woman – the
woman who can make him whole.
• In studying five male authors, she found that the ideal woman whom men dream about is one
who feels it is her duty to sacrifice herself for the man. In the institutions of motherhood and
marriage women are denied the freedom to accomplish something ‘great’ and gradually learn to
settle for less.
• Many women internalize that men’s law of the ideal woman is the accurate reflection of what it’s
mean to be a woman.
Women as the other
• De Beauvoir believes that men have created myths about women. In sum, the ideal woman, is a woman who
believes it is her duty to sacrifice herself for her man. She believes what makes the myth so horrible is that
many women come to internalize this thought as an accurate reflection of what it means to be a woman.

• De Beauvoir perceived social roles as the primary mechanism the self, or subject, uses to control the other,
or object. She labelled women’s tragic acceptance of her own otherness the feminine “mystery,” which
passes from generation to generation through the painful socialization of girls.
• She goes on to talk about how this sense of "otherness" is cemented in the institution of marriage and
motherhood. She believes marriage transforms freely given feelings into mandatory duties.
Woman's Lived Experience

• De Beauvoir spoke from her own experience—that of a bourgeois French girl

growing up between two world wars. She claimed girls recognize their bodily
differences from boys very early on. With puberty, with the swelling of their
breasts, and with the beginning of their menstrual flow, girls accept and
internalize asshameful and inferior their otherness.
• This otherness is cemented, said de Beauvoir, in the institutions of marriage and
motherhood.
The Second sex
• It matters of what sex one is born
• Men have better chances, have a better position of power
• Women have less power in politics, in society
• Women are poorer (still women only 3% - 5% of the wealth of the
world)
• Women are not as free as men, according to Beauvoir
• It is because women have been defined as being “other”, as being
different
De Beauvoir
• De Beauvoir mentions how she believes three kinds of women role-play
the woman to an extreme, the prostitute, narcissist, and the mystic. The
worst part about all of these roles played out by women, (mother, wife,
prostitute, narcissist and mystic), are constructed by man.
• According to Beauvoir, there are four ways that women can overcome this
oppression. Women should: go to work, become intellectuals, work
towards social reform, and refuse to internalize the "otherness" that has
been created.
• “Woman, like man, is a subject rather than an object; she is no more
being-in-itself than man is. She, like man, is being-for-itself, and it is high
time for man to recognize this fact”.