The Second Sex (29 page)

Antifeminists draw two contradictory arguments from examining history: (1) women have never created anything grand; (2) woman’s situation has never prevented great women personalities from blossoming. There is bad faith in both of these assertions; the successes of some few privileged women neither compensate for nor excuse the systematic degrading of the collective level; and the very fact that these successes are so rare and limited is proof of their unfavorable circumstances. As Christine de Pizan, Poulain de la Barre, Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, and Stendhal stated, women have never been given their chances in any area. This explains why many of them today demand a new status; and once again, their demand is not to be exalted in their femininity: they want transcendence to prevail over immanence in themselves as in all of humanity; they want abstract rights and concrete possibilities to be granted to them, without which freedom is merely mystification.
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This will is being fulfilled. But this is a period of transition; this world that has always belonged to men is still in their hands; patriarchal civilization’s institutions and values are still, to a great extent, alive. Abstract rights are far from being wholly granted to women: in Switzerland, women still cannot vote; in France, the 1942 law upholds the husband’s prerogatives in a weaker form. And abstract rights, as has just been said, have never been sufficient to guarantee woman a concrete hold on the world: there is not yet real equality today between the two sexes.

First, the burdens of marriage are still much heavier for woman than for man. We have seen that the constraints of pregnancy have been limited by the overt or clandestine use of birth control, but the practice is neither
universally disseminated nor rigorously applied; as abortion is officially forbidden, many women either jeopardize their health by resorting to unregulated abortion methods or are overwhelmed by the number of their pregnancies. Child care, like housekeeping, is still almost exclusively the woman’s burden. In France in particular, the antifeminist tradition is so tenacious that a man would think it demeaning to participate in chores previously reserved for women. The result is that woman has a harder time reconciling her family and work life. In cases where society demands this effort from her, her existence is much more difficult than her spouse’s.

Take, for example, the lot of peasant women. In France they make up the majority of the women involved in productive labor, and they are generally married. The single woman most often remains a servant in the father’s, brother’s, or sister’s household; she only becomes mistress of a home by accepting a husband’s domination; depending on the region, customs and traditions impose various roles on her: the Norman peasant woman presides over the meal, while the Corsican woman does not sit at the same table as the men; but in any case, as she plays one of the most important roles in the domestic economy, she shares the man’s responsibilities, his interests, and his property; she is respected, and it is often she who really governs: her situation is reminiscent of the place she held in ancient agricultural communities. She often has as much moral prestige as her husband, and sometimes even more; but her concrete condition is much harsher. The care of the garden, barnyard, sheepfold, and pigpen falls on her alone; she takes part in the heavy work: cleaning the cowshed, spreading the manure, sowing, plowing, hoeing, and hay making; she digs, weeds, harvests, picks grapes, and sometimes helps load and unload wagons of straw, hay, wood and sticks, litter, and so on. In addition, she prepares the meals and manages the household: washing, mending, and such. She assumes the heavy burdens of pregnancies and child care. She rises at dawn, feeds the barnyard and small animals, serves the first meal to the men, takes care of the children, and goes out to the fields or the woods or the kitchen garden; she draws water from the well, serves the second meal, washes the dishes, works in the fields again until dinner, and after the last meal occupies her evening by mending, cleaning, husking the corn, and so forth. As she has no time to take care of her health, even during her pregnancies, she loses her shape quickly and is prematurely withered and worn out, sapped by illnesses. She is denied the few occasional compensations man finds in his social life: he goes to the city on Sundays and fair days, meets other men, goes to the café, drinks, plays cards, hunts, and fishes. She stays on the farm and has no leisure. Only the rich peasant women helped
by servants or dispensed from field work lead a pleasantly balanced life: they are socially honored and enjoy greater authority in the home without being crushed by labor. But most of the time rural work reduces woman to the condition of a beast of burden.

The woman shopkeeper, the small-business owner, have always been privileged; they are the only ones since the Middle Ages whose civil capacities have been recognized by the code; women grocers, hoteliers, or tobacconists and dairy women have positions equal to man’s; single or widowed, they have a legal identity of their own; married, they possess the same autonomy as their husbands. They are fortunate in working and living in the same place, and the work is not generally too consuming.

The situation of the woman worker, employee, secretary, or saleswoman working outside the home is totally different. It is much more difficult to reconcile her job with managing the household (errands, preparation of meals, cleaning, and upkeep of her wardrobe take at least three and a half hours of work a day and six on Sunday; this adds a lot of time to factory or office hours). As for the learned professions, even if women lawyers, doctors, and teachers manage to have some help in their households, the home and children still entail responsibilities and cares that are a serious handicap for them. In America, ingenious technology has simplified housework; but the appearance and elegance demanded of the working woman impose another constraint on her; and she maintains responsibility for the house and children. In addition, the woman who seeks her independence through work has far fewer possibilities than her masculine competitors. Her salary is inferior to man’s in many fields; her job is less specialized and hence doesn’t pay as well as that of a skilled worker; and for the same job, the woman is paid less. Because she is new to the world of males, she has fewer chances of success than they. Men and women alike are loath to work under a woman’s orders; they always give more confidence to a man; if being a woman is not a defect, it is at least a pecularity. If she wants to “get ahead,” it is useful for a woman to make sure she has a man’s support. Men are the ones who take the best places, who hold the most important jobs. It must be emphasized that in economic terms men and women constitute two castes.
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What determines women’s present situation is the stubborn survival of the most ancient traditions in the new emerging civilization. Hasty observers are wrong to think woman is not up to the possibilities offered her today or even to see only dangerous temptations in these possibilities. The truth is that her situation is tenuous, which makes it very difficult for her to adapt. Factories, offices, and universities are open to women, but marriage is still considered a more honorable career, exempting her from any other participation in collective life. As in primitive civilizations, the amorous act is a service she has the right to be paid for more or less directly. Everywhere but in the U.S.S.R.,
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the modern woman is allowed to use her body as capital. Prostitution is tolerated,
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seduction encouraged. And the married woman can legally make her husband support her; in addition, she is cloaked in much greater social dignity than the unmarried woman. Social customs are far from granting her sexual possibilities on a par with those of the single male, in particular, the unwed mother is an object of scandal, as motherhood is more or less forbidden to her. How could the Cinderella myth not retain its validity? Everything still encourages the girl to expect fortune and happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of attempting the difficult and uncertain conquest alone. For example, she can hope to attain a higher caste through him, a miracle her whole life’s work will not bring her. But such a hope is harmful because it divides her strength and interests;
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this split is perhaps the most serious handicap for woman. Parents still raise their daughters for marriage rather than promoting their personal development; and the daughter sees so many advantages that she desires it herself; the result is that she is often less specialized, less solidly trained than her brothers, she is less totally committed to her profession; as such, she is doomed to remain inferior in it; and the vicious circle is knotted: this inferiority reinforces her desire to find a husband. Every benefit always has a burden; but if the burden is too heavy, the benefit is no more
than a servitude; for most workers today, work is a thankless task: for woman, the chore is not offset by a concrete conquest of her social dignity, freedom of behavior, and economic autonomy; it is understandable that many women workers and employees see no more than an obligation in the right to work from which marriage would deliver them. However, because she has become conscious of self and can emancipate herself from marriage through work, a woman no longer accepts her subjection docilely. What she would hope for is to reconcile family life and profession, something that does not require exhausting acrobatics. Even then, as long as the temptations of facility remain—from the economic inequality that favors certain individuals and the woman’s right to sell herself to one of these privileged people—she needs to expend a greater moral effort than the male to choose the path of independence. It has not been well enough understood that temptation is also an obstacle, and even one of the most dangerous. It is amplified here by a mystification since there will be one winner out of the thousands in the lucky marriage lottery. Today’s period invites, even obliges women to work; but it lures them with an idyllic and delightful paradise: it raises up the happy few far above those still riveted to this earthly world.

Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.