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But I know my only defence is to answer, ‘I think it because it is true,’ thereby eliminating my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ because it is understood that being a man is not a particularity; a man is in his right by virtue of being man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Here Beauvoir offers a material account of women's unfreedom, explained in terms of their unequal position in society and their subordination to and dependence on men.3 This idea finds its philosophical articulation in the notion of woman as “Other.”4 Not only are women unfree in a material sense, having fewer resources and fewer opportunities than men, but at a more universal level women ...
- Charlotte Knowles
- 2019
told that “femininity is in jeopardy”; we are urged, “Be women, stay women, become women.” So not every female human being is necessarily a woman… (23) So there seems to be a sort of contradiction in our ordinary understanding of women: not every female is a woman, otherwise they would not be exhorted to be women.
(b) Oppression is to women’s material advantage; (c) It is assisted by women’s complicity and bad faith, providing an easy moral justification of one’s existence; to become object-like avoids the ‘anguish’ of freedom. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal–this would be for women to renounce all the advantages
towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed - he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.2 Throughout the history of Western thought from Aristotle to such contemporaries as Levinas and Mauriac, woman, says de Beauvoir,
- Joseph Mahon, Jo Campling
- 1997
What, Beauvoir asks, does it mean to be a woman? There two standard answers: Essentialists say that there is a female nature (the ‘eternal feminine’), while anti-essentialists (nominalists) say that there is no such thing, that women are just human beings, as men are, their ‘femininity’ merely an accidental characteristic no different from having red hair or being over six feet tall.
for a weekly paper: "Women write skilfully. In psychology they are un-excelled. But they lose themselves in detail, they fail to rise above the immediate occasion. With the sole exception of Simone de Beauvoir, women simply do not have the necessary stamina." 3 This weakness constitutes the strength of her essays, as in the "political"
