De Beauvoir’s Hegelian terminology highlights the fact that man’s relegation of woman to the status of “other” violates the principle of mutual recognition, thereby threatening the very status that man has for so long jealously accorded to himself, to his own subjectivity. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” ( SS, xvi). she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.
Summarizing these long traditions of thought, de Beauvoir states: “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Thomas as stating that the female nature is “afflicted with a natural defectiveness” ( SS, xvi). De Beauvoir quotes Aristotle as saying that the “female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” and St. Woman has ovaries, a uterus these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature” ( SS, xv). A man “thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison.
A man does not typically preface his opinions with the statement “I am a man,” whereas a woman’s views are often held to be grounded in her femininity rather than in any objective perception of things. In her renowned introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir points out the fundamental asymmetry of the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” Masculinity is considered to be the “absolute human type,” the norm or standard of humanity. This idea resounds in de Beauvoir’s famous statement: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” Influenced by Sartrean existentialism, Marxism, Psychoanaysis and Hegel, she argued that the objectification of woman permeates human history and informs the whole of Western philosophical thought. In highlighting this subordination, the book explains ,1 in characteristic existentialist fashion how the “essence” of woman was in fact created - at economic, social, political, religious levels by historical developments representing the interests of men.
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. Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated to the position of the “other”, that which is adjectival to the substantial subjectivity and the existential activity of man.
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