Simone De Beauvoir’s Feminist Theory: What Is Woman?
In the mid-20th century, the Western world experienced an unprecedented political, social, and ideological upheaval.
After women gained the right to vote in many countries, a part of society wondered what was happening to those aspects of life in which men continued to dominate the female sex. This malaise, which later gave rise to the second wave of feminism, had one of its fruits in the work of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in which this thinker tried to understand what the nature of femininity was.
Next we will see what are the main characteristics of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory and the way in which it has influenced psychology and philosophy.
Sartre’s existentialist influences can be seen in The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s best-known work, although the application of this perspective to gender studies was totally original, as we will see. On the other hand, in addition to developing an important theoretical body for feminism, this philosopher was also a novelist.
Simone de Beauvoir’s theory: its essential principles
These are the main characteristics of the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir:
1. Recognize the masculine as the reference point
Beauvoir’s starting point was to realize that all cultural productions of humanity, from art to the use of language, have man as the central point, the main reference.
For example, When expressing the idea of ​​”human being” the figure of man is used by default, or that of the man and the woman, but never that of the woman. Another example would be that, many times, developing the feminine version of something consists of adding unequivocally feminine attributes to “neutral” models. For example, there are products with a “women’s” version that are distinguished from the standard model by being pink, thus signaling that the standard model is actually the male one. The same would happen in politics: it is normal and expected that politicians are men.
2. The concept of “the Other”
From the previous idea, Simone de Beauvoir develops the idea of ​​”the Other”, or rather, “the other”. This category serves to express in a visual way the fact that the feminine gender moves through the periphery of the human is an attribute that is not integrated into the first, but rather an extension of it, while the masculine is inseparable from the idea of ​​the human as if they were synonyms.
3. A male dominance saga
Linked to the previous elements appears the corroboration that history, for all purposes, has been written by men, both literally and symbolically Simone de Beauvoir sees this as a symptom of a phenomenon of domination and subjugation of women, and in turn the reason why women have been alienated from all aspects of life and symbolic production.
4. You are not born a woman, you become one
Recapitulating, we will see that for Simone de Beauvoir the reference point of the human is the man and that the feminine is, in any case, a specific attribute not comparable to the concept of the masculine, since it is defined according to its proximity or distance from this reference point
The conclusion he draws from this is that the feminine is, in itself, something that has been designed and defined by men and imposed on women. This is summed up in his famous phrase “you are not born a woman, you become one.” Ultimately, women They are not in a way foreign to history and politics but rather because of the dominance of the male gaze over “the Other.”
5. For a non-alienated femininity
The theory that Simone de Beauvoir outlines in The Second Sex It is not simply a description of what she considered reality to be; attached to this was a moral indication, of what should be done and it is good Specifically, this philosopher pointed out the need for women to define their own identity outside the male gaze, without being coerced by the impositions of that moral and intellectual reference fed by centuries and centuries of domination.
