Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory: what is woman?

In the mid-20th century, the Western world experienced an unprecedented political, social, and ideological upheaval.

After women won the right to vote in many countries, a part of society became raised what happened to those aspects of life in which men continued to dominate sex feminine. This malaise, which later gave rise to the second wave of feminism, had one of its fruits the work of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which this thinker tried to understand what the nature of femininity was.

Next we will see what are the main characteristics of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and the way in which it has influenced psychology and philosophy.

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Who was Simone de Beauvoir? Short biography

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 in the French capital, Paris. During her youth she studied philosophy first at the Sorbonam, and then at the École Normale Supérieure. In this second institution she met Jean-Paul Sartre

, and at that moment she began an affectionate relationship that lasted her entire life. Finally, she died in Paris in 1986.

Sartre's existentialist influences are seen in The Second Sex, Beauvoir's best known work, although the application of this perspective to gender studies was totally original, as we will see. On the other hand, in addition to developing an important body of theory for feminism, this philosopher was also a novelist.

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Simone de Beauvoir's theory: its essential principles

These are the main characteristics of the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir:

1. She recognizes the masculine as the point of reference

Beauvoir's starting point was to realize that all the cultural productions of the humanity, from art to the use of language, have man as the central point, the main reference.

For example, when expressing the idea of ​​"human being" the figure of man is used by default, or that of the man and the woman, but never that of the woman. Another example would be that, many times, developing the feminine version of something consists of adding unequivocally feminine attributes to "neutral" models. For example, there are products with a version "for women" that are distinguished from the standard model by being pink, thus indicating that the standard model is actually the male one. The same would happen in politics: what is normal and expected is that politicians are men.

2. The concept of "the Other"

Starting from the previous idea, Simone de Beauvoir develops the idea of ​​"the Other", or rather, "the other". This category serves to visually express the fact that the feminine gender moves around the periphery of the humanIt is an attribute that is not integrated into the first, but rather an extension of it, while the masculine itself is inseparable from the idea of ​​the human as if they were synonyms.

3. A male saga of domination

Linked with the previous elements appears the corroboration that the story, for all intents and purposes, has been written by men, both literally and symbolically. Simone de Beauvoir sees in this a symptom of a phenomenon of domination and subjugation of women, and their perhaps the reason why women have been alienated from all aspects of life and production symbolic.

4. You are not born a woman, you become one

Recapitulating, we will see that for Simone de Beauvoir the reference point of the human is man and that the feminine is, in any case, a specific attribute not comparable to the concept of the masculine, since it is defined according to its proximity or distance from this landmark.

The conclusion he draws from this is that the feminine is itself something that has been designed and defined by men and imposed on women. This can be summed up in her famous phrase "you are not born a woman, you become one". In short, women they are not in a way alien to history and politics, but rather because of the dominance of the male gaze over "the Other."

5. For a femininity not alienated

The theory that Simone de Beauvoir traces in The Second Sex it is not simply a description of what she considered reality to be; attached to this was a moral indication, of what should be done and it is good. Specifically, this philosopher pointed out the need for women to define their own identity outside the male gaze, without be coerced by the impositions on the part of that moral and intellectual referent fed on the basis of centuries and centuries of domination.