What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? An Interview with Dr. Abigail Favale on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Contributing editor Serena Sigillito joins Dr. Abigail Favale, author of The Genesis of Gender, to discuss mainstream contemporary feminism through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s enormously influential work. 

Serena Sigillito: I just finished reading Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic, The Second Sex (all 766 pages of it!). In the opening lines of her introduction, de Beauvoir says that she “hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman,” because “enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism” and “the volumes of idiocies churned out over this past century do not seem to have clarified the problem.” This sounds like something that could have been written yesterday, but de Beauvoir published this in 1949.

Can you provide some historical and intellectual context to The Second Sex? In the history of feminism in the United States, there’s a sort of quiet period between gaining the right to vote in 1920 and the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which helped kick off the women’s liberation movement. 

In the 1940s, when de Beauvoir was writing, was the conversation in France already starting to expand to what we think of now as more “second-wave” feminist concerns? What “idiocies” do you think de Beauvoir had in mind?

Abigail Favale: French feminism is usually characterized as having three waves. These roughly map onto the waves of American feminism, but the first wave is much longer in French feminism. It starts in the Revolutionary period with the Enlightenment, and then women don’t actually get the vote until 1944 in France—a full twenty-four years later than in the U.S. So there was definitely more of a lull between the first wave and the second wave in America. De Beauvoir is writing The Second Sex less than five years after women won the right to vote.

Things really heat up in the second wave in France in the 1960s, especially in May of 1968, which was a big revolutionary moment. We see similar things in French and American feminism, in terms of the second waves’ being much more interested in the question of abortion and contraception. In 1971, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a famous document called The Manifesto of the 343 that had a lot of celebrity signatories—including de Beauvoir—who publicly declared that they had had abortions and called for the legalization of abortion and access to contraception.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Simone de Beauvoir was the most influential feminist in the twentieth century. Last semester, I was teaching a course on Catholicism and Feminism, and I realized that every single feminist theorist that I assigned—from Mary Daly to Shulamith Firestone to Judith Butler to Luce Irigaray—explicitly connected their work to Simone de Beauvoir.

She really is the fundamental feminist foremother in terms of second wave feminism and beyond. Her work in The Second Sex shapes how feminist thought unfolds in both America and France from that point on.

As far as the “idiocy” comment, she names several of the views she’s criticizing: the concept of “the eternal feminine,” nominalism, and biological determinist views. Some people have this kind of eternal cosmic, mythic view of women, as this incarnation of a divine principle. Other people define woman by anatomy. Others are nominalists, who take the Enlightenment view that “women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman.’” De Beauvoir rejects all of these positions as insufficient. She doesn’t think any of them give a full account of what it actually means to be a woman, which is what she sets out to do.

In this book, she wants to look at all these different factors: the historical dimension, the biological, the psychological, the religious, the political—analyzing all of these different dimensions in order to then present her own alternative perspective.

SS: That strikes me as fundamentally true—the idea that we need to have a nuanced understanding of what it means to be a woman that doesn’t fall into oversimplification or caricature.

Before we get into the problems with de Beauvoir’s work, can you describe some of the important and true insights that de Beauvoir had? What are some of the positive aspects of her legacy?

AF: The idea that has had the biggest impact is that “woman” is a primarily constructed reality. The distinction between “sex” and “gender” arises from The Second Sex, and that becomes a central analytical category in feminist thought thereafter.

This concept just doesn’t really exist before de Beauvoir. She does present the idea of “woman” as connected to femaleness in a certain way—and I think she’s a little bit ambivalent on that point—but it is primarily a construct or a process that arises from social, historical, and biological factors.

There’s something true about that, right? There is definitely a way in which the cultural or social view of what a woman is shapes our lives in a profound way. There are certain things that have been asserted about women and presented as natural or innate that are in fact not natural or innate or inevitable in any way.

Even though I’ve criticized and still have my qualms about the sex–gender dichotomy, I do think it’s helpful to be able to recognize the constructed nature of some of our understandings of femininity. That’s something really important that she contributes, even though I think she leans too much in that direction.

One of my favorite parts of The Second Sex, where I find myself agreeing heartily with de Beauvoir, is her chapter on “The Independent Woman,” where she critiques the idea of the emancipated modern woman. She basically says that this supposedly liberated woman isn’t actually free from constraining stereotypes. Rather, she has to successfully perform both masculinity and femininity. This role carries a double burden, essentially. I think that’s really insightful and relevant to our current debates about women “having it all.”

In The Second Sex, of course, she’s going to land at a very Marxist place in terms of a solution, so she’s critical of the way in which “liberated women” under capitalism are not really liberated.

SS: I want to ask you more about that. Looking at the structure of the book, I was expecting “The Independent Woman” chapter to give a sense of de Beauvoir’s positive vision, after the seven hundred pages of critique, because that’s the last chapter before the conclusion. But it’s not a positive vision—it’s just more critique.

And even though de Beauvoir is coming from a Marxist perspective, her exaltation of autonomy and the realization of personhood through work and the domination of the will—all of those things seem very capitalism-friendly to me—a sort of precursor of “girl-boss feminism.”

Did she have a positive vision that she articulates elsewhere?

AF: Well, it’s very brief, but it is in the conclusion.

SS: Well, yes, you’re right: after 760 pages she does have a paragraph saying that she wants the world that the Soviet Revolution promised. She says:

A world where men and women would be equal is easy to imagine because it is exactly like the one the Soviet revolution promised: women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries; erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, but the sexual act would no longer be considered a remunerable “service”; women would be obliged to provide another livelihood for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them.

Do you think she actually thinks this world is possible? Does she offer an idea of how we could get there?

AF: What she’s saying is that the entire system has to be remade. You can’t just give women power within the current system. The entire society needs to be overhauled—the forest must be replanted all at once.

In this book, she still is aligning with the Marxist ideal. She recognizes that what the Soviet revolution promised hasn’t been realized, but she still seems to have faith that it could be. Later on, certainly by the 1970s, she does become disillusioned with Marxism and the ability for this to be realized.

There is a Marxist strain of feminism that has been influenced by her, but I think what we really see more is that her ideals—which she wanted to take in a Marxist direction—have been primarily taken in a more liberal direction. These values that she prizes—like autonomy and freedom and exercising your will—those are very much embraced by feminism, but not necessarily in a Marxist way.

SS: I knew that de Beauvoir was romantically entwined with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, but I hadn’t realized how deeply existentialism shaped her own thinking. Her main argument is that women have been systematically prevented from assuming their rightful role as “existents” in their own lives. For de Beauvoir, the whole goal of life seems to be to transcend the meaninglessness of your given, immanent nature and exert your will on the world around you.

There’s been a lot of great writing over the last few years (at Fairer Disputations and elsewhere) critiquing contemporary feminism’s myopic focus on autonomy and fighting for a renewed respect for interdependence. It’s easy to see how a highly autonomous, implicitly masculine model of the ideal worker (à la girl-boss feminism) fits in well to a capitalist economy. But I don’t often hear critics of mainstream feminism attributing its ills to an implicit embrace of existentialism.

Should we be? Are we all existentialists now?

AF: You can’t understand The Second Sex without understanding de Beauvoir’s existentialist framework. That framework posits a stark contrast between transcendence and immanence. For her, we don’t really have a nature. We aren’t human beings by default. We have to become human. We have to rise out of our initial state. We have to transcend our animal nature—our immanence, our facticity—by exercising our freedom in the world through creative action.

For her, that’s what it means to transcend. She’s not making an allusion here to any kind of God. It’s just about transcending our immanence and our status as an object in order to become a self-realized subject in the world.

In her framework, she associates transcendence with what we think of as maleness. She associates women with immanence, because she doesn’t see biological processes as capable of accomplishing transcendence.

That’s why she’s so dismissive of motherhood. For her, motherhood is simply repeating human existence. It does not count as transcendence, because human existence isn’t intrinsically meaningful. It has to be made meaningful. So having a baby doesn’t really matter, because that’s not how you realize your own transcendence. And that baby isn’t really human yet either. He or she has to take the initiative later in life to become human. For her, reproduction is this repetitive, almost vegetative process.

SS: She even refers to pregnancy and motherhood as the individual being in slavery to the species.

AF: Exactly. The values of her existentialist framework just map onto male physiology much better than female physiology. So that means she makes the female body a problem. The female body itself—not just how it’s been received in society, but the female body itself—is an agent of women’s oppression. And so, in order to overcome that oppression, women have to have access to things like contraception and abortion.

That way of thinking about what it means to be free has very much taken hold in feminist thought. I think the existentialist framework behind it remains a little bit implicit. But that association—that understanding of freedom as being freedom from femaleness—is very much part of her legacy.

But where I see a big difference from modern feminism, especially pop versions of feminism, is that Simone de Beauvoir is not a moral relativist.

She’s not saying that you decide what you want, and whatever you want is fine. It’s not “you have your truth, and I have my truth.” Because she explicitly says that, for example, a woman who would choose to simply be a stay-at-home mother is morally failing. She is choosing immanence. She is choosing not to fulfill her full humanity.

She explicitly says that she doesn’t want women to have that choice, because then more women would choose it, and that would be bad. So her vision isn’t just this kind of modern “choice feminism.” She has a very specific moral system that she’s working with.

SS: I wonder what de Beauvoir would think of third-wave feminism, intersectionality, and the increasing focus on oppressive social structures. That’s all based on social constructionism, which she pioneered, but it ends up de-emphasizing the individual will and autonomy in a way that I don’t think she’d like.

AF: One of the tensions in de Beauvoir’s work is whether she’s a strong or weak social constructionist. There are certain parts of the text where she seems to almost prefigure someone like Judith Butler—someone who sees reality as a linguistic and social construct.

Then there are other times when she seems to take material reality much more seriously. I think that that’s one of the reasons why her descendants have struck off in so many different directions. Because I think you’re right—certain types of intersectionality and even Judith Butler’s early work have a very impoverished understanding of human agency, discounting the capacity of the individual to meaningfully act in the world in the face of oppressive structures.

I think de Beauvoir is more positive about human agency. Although—and this is where she’s more of a constructionist—for someone like the independent woman, she’s trying to become a subject, but she simultaneously has to fulfill this role as a feminine “other.” So she’s trapped in a system that is basically creating a situation of self-sabotage for her.

That’s why de Beauvoir concludes that the whole system has to be reworked in order for this kind of agency for women to emerge. So there you can make the argument that she is more of a structural constructionist, even though her underlying framework does have this strong sense of human agency and freedom.

SS: In the contemporary debates about gender, I think de Beauvoir would be sympathetic to the critiques you or I might make about the caricatures of stereotypical “femininity” that some trans-identifying men equate with womanhood. On the other hand, I can see the precursors of the transhumanist impulse in her work—what Mary Harrington has called “meat-lego Gnosticism,” which says that you should be able to exert your will in order to remake your body however you want. That also sounds like something she would like.

AF: Yeah, but it’s not however you want, right? That’s the thing. I think she would say that you can self-objectify. You can objectify yourself by undergoing surgeries to become this hyper-sexualized vision of femininity. I don’t think she would see that as good.

I think she has an ethical framework that isn’t completely relativistic and would see this as women conceding their own oppression.

SS: That’s really interesting. I was going to say that it seems like she is replacing happiness or human flourishing as being the goal of human life. Rather than living well in accordance with your given nature, it seems like a sort of free-floating freedom is the goal for her. But maybe that’s not quite right. Because it’s not just any freedom, as you say.

AF: She uses the phrase “autonomous freedom”—to possess oneself as an autonomous freedom and to exercise one’s freedom in the world through creative action, to become a kind of fully self-possessed subject in the world. That’s her vision. She wouldn’t call it flourishing, but it’s kind of analogous.

Even though she would deny that there is a human nature per se, she really does have an implicit view of human nature, which is to be the kind of animal in the world that is not purely animal, but has the capability of self-awareness and transcendence. To shirk that—to hide from that potential and not to actualize it—that means you don’t fully become human. So she does still have an idea of “doing human well,” right? It’s kind of analogous to Aristotle’s idea of human flourishing as the fulfillment of your nature. It’s just that, for her, that means realizing oneself as an autonomous freedom and acting in the world.

SS: One other striking attribute of her vision of what it means to be human seems to be the fundamental aloneness of human existence.

The concept of alienation plays a major role in existentialism, but I find it somewhat confusing. It seems like a self-evidently negative state—a sense of being disconnected from oneself, others, and the world around you, and of being unable to make meaning and live authentically. But then de Beauvoir writes things like “the existent can only succeed in grasping himself by alienating himself; he searches for himself through the world, in the guise of a foreign figure he makes his own.” So is alienation sometimes good? Is it some kind of negative state you have to pass through in order to achieve transcendence?

Toward the end of the book, de Beauvoir references the idea of a romantic (or at least sexual) relationship between two autonomous equals. I do see her point that women needed to be able to stand on their own two feet and not be forced into marriages out of economic necessity or lack of opportunity to follow their own vocations, but it just seems like she went too far in the other direction. Am I right in thinking that, for de Beauvoir, our existence as human beings is ultimately solitary? What would a romantic relationship or a marriage look like in this framework?

AF: I think if I were to try to read her as charitably as possible, I do think she has a vision of relationality and certainly solidarity. But it’s dependent upon each person being a subject, so that it’s a subject-to-subject relation. You have to have a certain amount of autonomy and independence before you can enter into an authentic relationship with another. Her ideal is a relationship in which the woman isn’t giving up her subjectivity and becoming the “other,” right? So she does seem to want to get there.

But one thing I think it’s fair to say about this book—and I’m not the first one who’s said it—is that it’s full of contradictions. So if you feel like, “Wait a second, she seems to be saying one thing here, but that seems to contradict what she’s saying here,” you’re not crazy. That is happening.

To give just one concrete example, in the introduction, in the middle of page eight, she says, “In truth, nature is no more an immutable given than is historical reality.” So she seems to be here denying that we have a kind of immutable nature. But then at the top of page nine, she says, “The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.”

So there are times when she seems to lean into a kind of sex-realism, and I certainly think the way she interprets the female body as being inherently oppressive seems to lean that way. But then there are other times where she seems to deny that sexual difference is a natural given and argue that it is something that could in fact be overcome. I think what’s probably going on there is that she’s envisioning a society where women are able to conquer their own nature through technology, so then sexual difference becomes no longer inevitable. That’s one way to try to square what she’s saying here.

Interestingly, she critiques Mary Wollstonecraft for offering a vision for women that just adapts them to a masculine model, and that’s what she’s saying in “The Independent Woman” chapter as well. Which I think is true. I think she’s making a good argument there: that a lot of visions of female liberation just look like women becoming like men. But, ironically, I think that’s exactly what she does, too.

I think that’s another tricky part of reading her. She can be read in different ways. There are tensions in her work that aren’t fully resolved.

One of those tensions is that she does seem to want a vision of reciprocity and relationality and communal solidarity, but it is dependent upon autonomy, and her vision of autonomy is often framed as a repudiation of bonds and relationships. So that introduces a kind of paradox or tension in her work that I think you’re recognizing. In fact, I think that’s one reason why her work has been so widely influential. Different strands of feminist thought have taken different pieces of her work and run with it in different directions.

Feminism is a very fractious world. There’s a lot of different visions of what’s wrong and how we fix it. But all of the modern strands can trace their roots back to The Second Sex.

Image by Moshe Milner and accessed via Wikimedia Commons.