SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S CONTRIBUTION TO FEMINISM WITH REFERENCE TO THE SECOND SEX
Journal Title: International Journal of Physical and Social Sciences (IJPSS) - Year 2012, Vol 2, Issue 1
Abstract
Simone De Beauvoir was born in Jan. 9, 1908 and died in April 14, 1986 in Paris, France. While studying at the Sorbonne, she met Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau- Ponty, beginning a lifelong association with them. With these two philosophers, she founded a literary and political journal. She belonged to a feminist collective and was politically active in feminist causes. She wrote several novels and a number of philosophical works, the most notable of which was The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; translated as The Second Sex, 1952).In the present paper an attempt has been made to draw attention towards Beauvoir‟s observation on „how women have been deliberately given secondary place‟. De Beauvoir‟s text (The Second Sex, 1952) laid the foundations for much of the feminist theory and political activism that emerged during the 1960s in Western Europe and America. Since then, its impact, if anything, has broadened and deepened: its basic thesis and premises continue to underlie the broad spectrum of feminist concerns. The book‟s central argument is that, throughout history, woman has always occupied a secondary role in relation to man, being downgraded to the position of the “other”. Whereas man has been enabled to transcend and control his environment, always furthering the domain of his physical and intellectual conquests, woman has remained imprisoned within “immanence”, remaining a slave within the circle of duties imposed by her maternal and reproductive functions. In highlighting this subordination, the book explains in characteristic existentialist fashion how the so-called “essence” of woman was in fact created – at many levels, economic, political, religious– by historical developments representing the interests of men. Beauvoir‟s existentialism, while influenced by Sartre, was also influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Hegel. Her view of freedom is distinguished from Sartre‟s view by its Hegelian emphasis on mutual recognition. Another moment in Hegel‟s philosophy that underlies de Beauvoir‟s analyses of male–female relations through history and ideology is the master– slave relationship. According to Hegel, human consciousness tries hard for recognition and mastery, placing itself initially in a position of opposition toward every other consciousness; a crucial phase in this endeavor for mastery is the willingness of one consciousness to risk everything in a life and death struggle. The consciousness that takes this risk becomes the “master”, reducing its opponent to the status of a slave.
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SACHIN VAMAN LONDHE
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