The Second Sex (92 page)
Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
This moral aspect of the drama is more or less intensely felt depending on the circumstances. For very “liberated” women, thanks to their financial resources, their social situation, the free milieu they belong to, or for those who have learned through poverty and misery to disdain bourgeois morality,
the question hardly arises: there is a difficult moment to go through, but it must be gone through, and that is all. But many women are intimidated by a morality that maintains its prestige in their eyes, even though their behavior cannot conform to it; inwardly, they respect the law they are breaking, and they suffer from committing a crime; they suffer even more for having to find accomplices. In the first place, they undergo the humiliation of begging: they beg for an address, a doctor’s care, a midwife; they risk being haughtily snubbed; or they expose themselves to a degrading connivance. To deliberately invite another to commit a crime is a situation that most men never know and that the woman experiences with a mixture of fear and shame. This intervention she demands is one she often rejects in her own heart. She is divided inside herself. It might be that her spontaneous desire is to keep this child whose birth she is preventing; even if she does not positively want this motherhood, she feels ill at ease with the ambiguity of the act she is about to perform. For even if abortion is not murder, it cannot be assimilated to a simple contraceptive practice; an event has taken place that is an absolute commencement and whose development is being halted. Some women are haunted by the memory of this child who did not come to be. Helene Deutsch cites the case of a psychologically normal married woman who, having twice lost third-month fetuses due to her physical condition, made them little tombs that she treated with great piety even after the birth of many other children.
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If the miscarriage was induced, this is all the more reason to feel she has committed a sin. The childhood remorse that follows the jealous desire for the death of a newborn little brother is revived, and the woman blames herself for really killing a child. This feeling of guilt can be expressed in pathological melancholies. In addition to women who think they tried to kill a living thing, there are many who feel they have mutilated a part of themselves; from here stems a resentment against the man who accepted or solicited this mutilation. Deutsch, once again, cites the case of a young girl who, deeply infatuated with her lover, herself insisted on eliminating a child who would have been an obstacle to their happiness; leaving the hospital, she refused to see the man she loved from then on. Even if such a definitive rupture is rare, it is, on the contrary, common for a woman to become frigid, either with all men or with the one who made her pregnant.
Men tend to take abortion lightly; they consider it one of those numerous accidents to which the malignity of nature has destined women: they
do not grasp the values involved in it. The woman repudiates feminine values, her values, at the moment the male ethic is contested in the most radical way. Her whole moral future is shaken by it. Indeed, from childhood woman is repeatedly told she is made to bear children, and the praises of motherhood are sung; the disadvantages of her condition—periods, illness, and such—the boredom of household tasks, all this is justified by this marvelous privilege she holds, that of bringing children into the world. And in an instant, the man, to keep his freedom and not to handicap his future, in the interest of his job, asks the woman to renounce her female triumph. The child is no longer a priceless treasure: giving birth is no longer a sacred function: this proliferation becomes contingent and inopportune, and it is again one of femininity’s defects. The monthly labor of menstruation becomes a blessing by comparison: now the return of the red flow that once plunged the girl into horror is anxiously awaited; it was in promising her the joys of childbearing that she had been consoled. Even consenting to and wanting an abortion, woman feels her femininity sacrificed: she will from now on definitively see in her sex a malediction, a kind of infirmity, a danger. Taking this denial to its extreme, some women become homosexual after the trauma of abortion. Yet when man asks woman to sacrifice her bodily possibilities for the success of his male destiny, he is denouncing the hypocrisy of the male moral code at the same time. Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution; they can contradict themselves with dizzying cynicism; but woman feels the contradictions in her wounded flesh; she is generally too shy to deliberately revolt against masculine bad faith; while seeing herself as a victim of an injustice that decrees her to be a criminal in spite of herself, she still feels dirtied and humiliated; it is she who embodies man’s fault in a concrete and immediate form, in herself; he commits the fault, but unloads it onto her; he just says words in a pleading, threatening, reasonable, or furious tone: he forgets them quickly; it is she who translates these phrases into pain and blood. Sometimes he says nothing, he just walks away; but his silence and avoidance are a far more obvious indictment of the whole moral code instituted by men. What is called immorality in women, a favorite theme with misogynists, should surprise no one; how could women not feel inwardly defiant against the arrogant principles men publicly advocate and secretly denounce? Women learn to believe men no longer when they exalt women or when they exalt men; the one sure thing is the manipulated and bleeding womb, those shreds of red life, that absence of a child. With her first abortion, the woman begins to “understand.” For many women, the world will never be the same. And yet, for lack of access to contraceptives, abortion is the only way out today in
France for women who do not want to bring into the world children condemned to death and misery. Stekel said it correctly: “Prohibition of abortion is an immoral law, since it must be forcibly broken every day, every hour.”
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Birth control and legal abortion would allow women to control their pregnancies freely. In fact, what decides woman’s fecundity is in part a considered desire and in part chance. As long as artificial insemination is not widely practiced, a woman might desire to become pregnant but be unable to—because either she does not have relations with men, or her husband is sterile, or she is unable to conceive. And, on the other hand, she is often forced to give birth against her will. Pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in very different ways depending on whether they take place in revolt, resignation, satisfaction, or enthusiasm. One must keep in mind that the decisions and feelings the young mother expresses do not always correspond to her deep desires. An unwed mother can be overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her, be openly distressed by it, and yet find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams; inversely, a young married woman who joyfully and proudly welcomes her pregnancy can fear it in silence, hate it with obsessions, fantasies, and infantile memories that she herself refuses to recognize. This is one of the reasons why women are so secretive on this subject. Their silence comes in part from liking to surround an experience that is theirs alone in mystery; but they are also disconcerted by the contradictions and conflicts of which they themselves are the center. “The preoccupations of pregnancy are a dream that is forgotten as entirely as the dream of birth pains,” one woman said.
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These are complex truths that come to the fore in women and that they endeavor to bury in oblivion.
We have seen that in childhood and adolescence woman goes through several phases in connection with motherhood. When she is a little girl, it is a miracle and a game: she sees in the doll and she feels in the future child an object to possess and dominate. As an adolescent girl, on the contrary, she sees in it a threat to the integrity of her precious person. Either she rejects it violently, like Colette Audry’s heroine who confides to us:
Each little child playing in the sand, I loathed him for coming out of a woman … I loathed the adults too for lording it over the children, purging them, spanking them, dressing them, shaming them in all
ways: women with their soft bodies always ready to bud out with new little ones, men who looked at all this pulp of their women and children belonging to them with a satisfied and independent air. My body was mine alone, I only liked it brown, encrusted with sea salt, scratched by the rushes. It had to stay hard and sealed.
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Or else she fears it at the same time as she wishes it, which leads to pregnancy fantasies and all kinds of anxieties. Some girls enjoy exercising maternal authority but are not at all disposed to assume the responsibilities fully. Such is the case of Lydia cited by Helene Deutsch who, at sixteen, placed as a maid with foreigners, took the most extraordinarily devoted care of the children entrusted to her: it was a prolongation of her childish dreams in which she formed a couple with her mother to raise a child; suddenly she began to neglect her service, to be indifferent to the children, to go out, flirt; the time of games was finished, and she was beginning to pay attention to her real life, where desire for motherhood did not hold a great place. Some women have the desire to dominate children their whole lives, but they are horrified by the biological labor of parturition: they become midwives, nurses, grammar school teachers; they are devoted aunts, but they refuse to have children. Others too, without being disgusted by maternity, are too absorbed by their love lives or careers to make a place for it in their existence. Or they are afraid of the burden a child would mean for them or their husbands.
Often a woman deliberately ensures her sterility either by refusing all sexual relations or by birth-control practices; but there are also cases where she does not admit her fear of the infant and where conception is prevented by a psychic defense mechanism; functional problems of nervous origin occur that can be detected in a medical examination. Dr. Arthus cites a striking example, among others:
Mme H.… had been poorly prepared for her life as a woman by her mother; who had always warned her of the worst catastrophes if she became pregnant … When Mme H.… was married she thought she was pregnant the following month; she realized her error; then once more after three months; new mistake. A year later she went to a gynecologist, who did not see any cause of infertility in her or her husband. Three years later, she saw another one who told her: “You
will get pregnant when you talk less.” After five years of marriage, Mme H.… and her husband had accepted that they would not have a child. A baby was born after six years of marriage.
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The acceptance or refusal of conception is influenced by the same factors as pregnancy in general. The subject’s infantile dreams and her adolescent anxieties are revived during pregnancy; it is experienced in different ways depending on the woman’s relations with her mother, her husband, and herself.
Becoming a mother in turn, woman somehow takes the place of the one who gave birth to her: this means total emancipation for her. If she sincerely desires her pregnancy, it will be of utmost importance for her to carry it out without assistance; still dominated and consenting to it, she will put herself, on the contrary, in her mother’s hands: the newborn will seem like a brother or sister to her rather than her own offspring; if at the same time she wants and does not dare to liberate herself, she fears that the child, instead of saving her, will make her fall back under the yoke: this anguish can cause miscarriages; Deutsch cites the case of a young woman who, having to accompany her husband on a trip and leaving the child with her mother, gave birth to a stillborn child; she wondered why she had not mourned it more because she had ardently desired it; but she would have hated giving it over to her mother, who would have dominated her through this child. Guilt feelings toward one’s mother are common, as was seen, in the adolescent girl; if they are still strong, the wife imagines that a curse weighs on her offspring or on herself: the child, she thinks, will kill her upon coming into the world, or he will die in birth. This anguish that they will not carry their pregnancy to term—so frequent in young women—is often provoked by remorse. This example reported in H. Deutsch shows how the relationship to the mother can have a negative importance:
Mrs. Smith was the youngest in a family with many other children, one boy and several girls. After this boy had disappointed the ambitious hopes of the parents, they wanted to have another son, but instead my patient was born. Her mother never concealed her disappointment over this fact … the patient was saved from traumatic reactions to this attitude by two compensations—her father’s deep and tender love for her, and the maternal affection of one of
her sisters … As a little girl she had reacted to her mother’s rejections with conscious hatred … Up to her pregnancy she had been able to disregard her mother problem; but this method no longer worked when she herself was about to become a mother … she gave birth one month before term to a stillborn child. Soon she was again pregnant; and her joy was now even more mixed with fear of loss than during her first pregnancy. By this time she had come into close relation with a former friend of hers who was also pregnant … The friend had a mother who was the opposite of her own … full to the brim with maternal warmth. She spread her motherly wings both over her own loving daughter and Mrs. Smith. [But] her friend had conceived a whole month before her; thus during the last month she would be left to her own fate … to the surprise of everyone concerned, her friend did not have her child at the expected time … and gave birth to a boy overdue by a whole month on the very day that Mrs. Smith expected her own delivery.
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The two friends now consciously adjusted themselves to each other in regard to their next pregnancies and conceived in the same month. This second time, Mrs. Smith had no fears or doubts. But during the third month of her pregnancy her friend told her that her husband had been offered a position in another town and that the family would probably move there. That very day Mrs. Smith started on a miscarriage. This woman could not manage to have a second child … After her friend had failed her she could no longer chase away the shadow of the mother she had rejected.
