I read The Second Sex as a teenager and it was one of the books that shaped my thinking as an adult woman. Many times since then, I have wanted to return to it but hesitated fearing that a second reading so much later in life may rob it of the brilliance and magic it holds for me, it will somehow come to mean less to me - that felt like too big a loss to risk. Earlier this year, I decided to do it anyway and am so very relieved to find it is there for me - maybe in a different way in the confused adolescent years, but solidly, meaningfully there.
Early on, Beauvoir talks about how women have never been able to bargain collectively, agitate for and win rights in the manner of many other groups of marginalized people:
The proletarians made the revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are fighting in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women.
I could not help transposing this wisdom to a woman's experience in the modern workplace. There are symbolic things that they might do for each other even make tangible gestures of solidarity but when it comes to actually getting ahead at work, a woman is much better off with a male manager. The worst enemies of women can be women - not much has changed. As such, collectively we are still in the state of "symbolic agitation" and accepting what men are "willing to concede". As a young person, I remember feeling glee at Beauvoir's factual basis for equating a man's intelligence to that of a woman - something that was far from a foregone conclusion in my place and time. Reading it again brought back that feeling of vindication from long ago
..to compare two individuals correctly while not taking into account the body, one must divide the weight of the brain by the power of 0.56 of the body weight if they belong to the same species.. Equality is the result. But what removes much of the interest of these careful debates is that no relation has been established between brain weight and the development of intelligence
I am so excited to take the journey all over again- this time with lived experience of a woman, not the haphazard confusion of youth trying to make sense of what womanhood even meant.
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