According to modern culture, being a “stay-at-home” mom seems like an unattainable privilege. Instead, the “girlboss” lifestyle is the status quo. Many women fear that focusing on something other than their career will slip them into a pre-emancipation slave mentality that their feminist foremothers fought against.
This is a product of Simone De Beauvoir’s vision for women coming to fruition. A user on LinkedIn provides just one example of a woman who took De Beauvoir’s propositions to heart; when women fail to work, the user declares, they “perpetuate stereotypical gender roles,” “abandon women,” and “perpetuate the myth that motherhood is enough to fulfill.”De Beauvoir would nod her coiffed head in agreement. And she’s not the only one.
Grasping at Liberation
In The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, Marx’s co-author and friend Friedrich Engels critiques monogamy and family life, arguing that the power struggle between men and women has persisted throughout time. He writes that “the first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding … the first class antagonism … [is] between man and woman in monogamian marriage.” Likewise, Simone De Beauvoir contends that men and women have historically prevailed in a master-slave relationship. She argues that liberation for a woman is only viable through complete emancipation from men and the social limitations imposed upon her due to her existence as a female, wife, and mother.
Notably, De Beauvoir never married nor had children. Though the reasons are numerous and widely speculated, one wonders whether her radical position would be different if she had experienced these things.
De Beauvoir professes that women should not derive their identity from their female nature, but rather, from their productive contributions to society. By entering the workforce, women can prove their productive value. This chisels away at gender differences between the sexes until, eventually, gender differences disappear altogether.
Without these gender differences, women become an equal part of the workforce instead of remaining unseen laborers within the home. De Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, “When the socialist society is established throughout the world, there will no longer be men and women, but only workers on a footing of equality.”
Much like Marx’s proletariat, De Beauvoir’s woman is oppressed, unequal, and subservient to an oppressor – man. If a woman is a man’s “private property,” then only the propertyless wonderland of socialism can save her. Until this shift occurs, De Beauvoir bluntly declares that a woman is essentially “a womb, an ovary; she is a female,” emphasizing that the sole difference between the sexes lies in their reproductive function. Therein lies the inequality.
Bodies Without Souls
Once again, De Beauvoir takes a myopic view of her sex, downplaying or ignoring altogether women’s essence and focusing her attention solely on biology and sex. For De Beauvoir, the woman’s body is a factory in which she is enslaved; a woman’s value derives solely from how her body is used and manipulated by others, regarded as property. The line is again traced back to De Beauvoir’s intellectual father, Marx, whose factory was the cruel agency of the proletariat’s servitude.
A woman’s physical body, for her, does not reveal natural feminine qualities (receptivity, generosity, and motherliness) as they were traditionally understood. Instead, she’s just a body subservient to men.. Even natural processes such as pregnancy are framed as having mere “social utility,” which only alienates a woman from her full potential. The separation of the body and soul presents an irredeemable conundrum to De Beauvoir and many women today.
De Beauvoir also asserts that a woman attains partial freedom only upon reaching menopause, liberated from the biological functions that mark her distinct from men and discharging her from her role of bearer and nurturer of children. Motherhood and the liberation that comes from work, De Beauvoir laments, are simply not compatible. Moreover, De Beauvoir is certain that marriage is a social construct that exclusively perpetuates inequality. Thus, women win their freedom by becoming like men, assimilating into male-dominated spheres, and overthrowing current gender roles.
According to these Marxists true freedom for the woman comes from defining her very existence. Regardless, according to De Beauvoir, society is structured in such a way that this is nearly impossible.
A Woman’s Value
So, if one cannot evaluate a woman by her essence, she must be evaluated by her material contribution to society. Here, De Beauvoir demonstrates yet again that she is a willing pupil of Marx.
“[Man’s] existence,” she writes in The Second Sex, “is justified by the work he provides.” De Beauvoir is explicit that “work alone can guarantee [woman’s] concrete freedom.” Yet gender distinctions, oppression by men, and social institutions such as marriage and family all limit a woman’s ability to define herself, shackling her with the preordained responsibilities of wife and mother.
Ultimately, De Beauvoir suggests that a woman can define her existence but must do so by matching the economic performance of her male counterpart. She arrives at the same conclusion as Marx: the industrial revolution is key in liberating the oppressed. Previously, menial labor (performed with heavy tools or weapons of war) provided an obstacle to women achieving parity with men. Now, with modern machinery and the release from domestic responsibilities, women are increasingly able to match male productivity.
Reviving the Supernatural
Despite approaching De Beauvoir’s vision of liberation, women remain dissatisfied, often disconnected from their bodies, and even more so from their souls. Some now are even choosing to abandon their “gender identity’ altogether and exist in a sexless limbo. The crown jewels of the modern women’s ‘liberation’ movement — unrestricted access to birth control and abortion — all function to divorce women from their true nature by pitting them against their own bodies and men. It’s clearly manifested through examples like celebrities crediting their success to abortion and the viral “4B” movement.” The threat menacing us today is precisely the metaphysical revolt of feminists who totally lost sight of their vocation because they’ve become blind to the supernatural,” writes the Belgian philosopher Alice von Hildebrand. Indeed, De Beauvoir’s world is void of the supernatural, and therein lies the cause of divorce between body and soul.
Is it possible for the modern woman to find a way back to herself, or is she doomed to wallow in De Beauvoir’s self-pitying ennui? While the poisonous seeds of De Beauvoir’s philosophy have already borne bitter fruit, there is indeed hope for women, beginning with healing the rupture between body and soul.
Contrary to De Beauvoir’s mandate, women do not need to define their own existence — they need only to enter into renewed understanding of the unique nature that has been theirs since Eden.
