Word: woman
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...four score and forty years,” the Titanic spawned an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster, and Steinbeck became the bane of freshman reading lists, Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” posed the seminal question, “What is a woman...
Beauvoir, for her part, took on the question by denying its validity. Rejecting essentialist explanations for the female condition, Beauvoir famously declared, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The “eternal feminine”—those behaviors and character traits that set women apart from men—were humanly created, Beauvoir argued, not natural. Rather than evidencing a perverted female essence or mistaken choice, feminine traits reflected woman’s situation. For Beauvoir, women’s biological nature could never be experienced apart from...
...Woman, like man, is her body,” Beauvoir wrote, “but her body is something other than herself.” Although masculinity coincided with the for-itself—that freedom which makes one uniquely human—femininity coincided with the in-itself—the inhuman or object-like. Man encountered the body as pure instrument, able to be dominated and controlled; woman, by contrast, experienced her body as an inscrutable burden. Biological givens may have had no meaning outside that which society conferred on them, but they still had an objective reality...
...notion of equality in difference, which, in her mind, spelled inferiority. Yet, as per her claims, since the essence traditionally assigned to women was unacceptable and no new essence loomed on the horizon, women’s only chance at liberation lay in emulating men. Beauvoir’s woman, it seemed, was really just a man in drag—or, worse yet, a eunuch...
Critics latched onto this ambiguity and lambasted “The Second Sex” for ascribing to a masculinist paradigm. By trivializing women’s reproductive labor, the argument went, Beauvoir reinscribed the gendered binaries which she purported to deny, conflating culture with man and nature with woman. In this view, Beauvoir figured liberation as a masculine concept—as the ability to transcend the limitations of the traditionally feminine. The model of liberation that she offered woman, therein, seemed no different from the existing paradigm proffered...