34 Feminism in the Second Wave: Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer

Ms. Apala Vatsa

Introduction

The present module looks at Second Wave Feminism, specifically through the works of Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch). It begins by trying to provide a definition of feminism and then seeks to delineate different stages in the feminist movement. It briefly outlines the major contours of these movements and mentions some relevant figures and key campaigns in all these different stages. Further, it delves into the second wave feminist movement, discussing Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at length. It concludes with a brief mention of ‘Anti Feminism’ and some criticisms of feminism.

Feminism(s) 

Is there just one kind of feminism or many? Should we use the word in a singular sense or plural? At the outset, it must be established that there is no one history of feminism. In fact, the way feminism has developed, it emphasizes upon how different women have very different experiences as well as contexts in which they encounter these experiences. One single narrative is by no means capable of encompassing these varied women’s divergent realities.

That said, we still need a broad definition of feminism to relate to the reader what it is about. It can broadly be defined as a set of challenges to women’s oppression and marginalization. It must be established here that these challenges may be thrown at various levels. While for some women it must be difficult to gain access to schools, for others it can be impossible to read the same subject in schools as the male students. While some women fight sexism at home, others fight it in the workplace. What it tells us that while experiences of subjugation may be very different, it is the one common thread of oppression that brings women from varied backgrounds together. That however, must not lead us to assume that all these women who come together, one common version of oppression they are fighting, or that they are all equally affected by it or that they come together to shore up a single kind of feminism.

It is differences such as these that have led to the compartmentalization of  the feminist movement into three different waves, as they are popularly called. Very briefly, First-wave feminism refers to the period of activity during the 19th century and early twentieth century. In the US and UK, it concentrated on the  establishment of equal contract, parenting, marriage along with property rights for women. The Second-wave feminists perceived women’s cultural and political inequities as entangled in a common matrix. Women under this wave were persuaded to see that their personal lives remained deeply politicized and also reflective of the sexist power structures. Carol Hanisch’s slogan “The Personal is Political”, is often considered emblematic of the second wave. Third-wave feminism surfaced in the early 1990s, in the USA, as a reaction to the perceived fiascoes of the second wave and also to the repercussions of the initiatives and campaigns installed by the second wave. Third- wave feminism differentiated itself from the second wave over questions of sexuality, challenges to female heterosexuality and the celebration of sexuality as a means to attain female empowerment.

As already outlined, feminism borrows from the kind of challenges that specific women have thrown towards their specific kinds of oppression. So what exactly makes a challenge feminist? What exactly is feminism? What are the concepts it relies on? As a term, Feminism became popular long after women began interrogating their inferior status and demanding substantial changes in the same. Does this mean that all actions emerging as challenges must be seen as feminist? Or is feminism to be seen as a collection of thoughts and activities wherein each component has its own distinguishing history and practice.

From Mira Bai questioning social structures to women reporting their dowry demanding would-be husbands to the police, we have had innumerable instances of women rising up against what they feel to be an oppressive or marginalizing act. Let us say then that feminism is a spirit, a specific consciousness that encourages women to identify and thereby challenge those structures and ideologies that seek to oppress them. It is the feeling that women are treated unequally in all the spheres of life and the sentiment that something needs to be done about it very actively.

So how did Feminism begin? 

14th century Europe witnessed broad far-reaching changes. A novel way of being and thinking was inaugurated. Feudalism diminished gradually and new ways of economic organizations emerged. Trade became pivotal and society, economy and polity were getting organized around it. The state was required to become more concrete and centralized (to organize and generate revenue); develop a well-organized army to fulfill the mercantile capitalists’ need for law and order on trade routes. With earlier feudal ties weakening, new ways of organizing social, familial and religious life began emerging. The individual, state and society came to be conceptualized in new ways. Not surprisingly then, women were also getting influenced by these changes. Feminism then may be defined as a response to the challenges and opportunities ushered in by modernity, and like most things it remained unequal for women.

England witnessed a sharp distinction between the public and the private during the second half of the 17th century. With agriculture changing its nature and wage labourers increasing in numbers, a division between the public world of employment and the private world of the home also got put in place. Women were increasingly out of work as economic activities shifted from home to new destinations outside the home. For the first time in recorded history, the public and private were divided sharply and women’s role in this new division became a matter of debate. Capitalist modernity therefore, served to limit women to the private sphere with adverse impacts.

Questioning this obvious/natural limitation or rejecting this public private divide is owed to feminist ideologues. This is what makes feminism modern. Voices like Mary Astell’s, used the classic liberal discourse to assess the impact of these changes on women. She asked that if every human being has rationality, and deserves freedom of choice and autonomy; what explains the systematic exclusion of women from this system? Unfortunately, Astell was excluded from public memory of the 18th century English history. Other women too articulated similar concerns; signifying that women had begun to consider themselves to be a group, with a similar mission of acquiring answers to similar questions. These voices however, did not defy the existing social and economic arrangements that marginalized women, for instance, there was no whole scale questioning of gendered division of labour division.

Did Feminism just have one inspiration?

With the American and the French Revolutions creating a context for questioning all accepted norms by the second half of the 18th century, women too began interrogating the basis of their extensive inequality. Philosophers of revolution spoke about freedom and human rights of men, but they failed to extend it to women. Mary Wollstonecraft demanded that women too should be recognised as possessing the universal faculty of reason. She rejected the public-private divide deployed by the liberals, but as Carole Pateman has suggested, like most other liberal feminists, Wollstonecraft couldn’t resolve the dilemma of demanding women’s citizenship on gender-neutral grounds and simultaneously recognizing that certain qualities and roles possessed by women must necessarily be seen differently.

During the second part of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery struggles acquired momentum in the USA. It gave women a chance to absorb ideas of freedom and dignity, with the result that issues of gender and race came to be spoken of in the same breath. To announce formally that principles of liberal republicanism had to be extended to women, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, emerged as the first ever women’s rights convention. This convention fell prey to the age-old dilemma: recognition of women as a distinctive group and a parallel denial of any special consequence of this distinctness.

Socialist groups began to expose the limitations of capitalism and its inherently unequal nature in both England and America. Meanwhile, women who had long been part of these groups became disenchanted with their fellow men for not bashing patriarchy publicly and privately. Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the first to question the male control of socialist politics. She linked the expansion of working class rights to the emancipation of women. She objected to entering into marriage and left the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to form the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS).

In the colonized world too, oppression was beginning to be questioned by women. Colonialism remained a formative influence in this context. Mid-19th century campaign against sati and widow remarriage, in India are significant cases in point. Women like Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde emerged as important figures writing on women’s rights by the end of the 19th century. Both critiqued upper caste patriarchy and challenged the Hindu religious scriptures thereby serving to create a bridge for relating with lower caste women under a common theme of female oppression.

Meanwhile Britain’s Victorian Feminism remained embroiled in the classic dilemma: whether to demand women’s rights on the basis of similarity or difference. JS Mill for instance, too seemed caught up in this conundrum. While he rejected the false basis for male female inequality and suggested a overhauling of the social and political system, he also did not shy away from suggesting that given a free choice, women would still pick marriage and household in the new overhauled system.

By the end of the nineteenth century, some important feminist demands were fulfilled. Education had opened up to women (but its nature remained sex specific); some land reforms were introduced that endowed specific ownership rights to women. While books and newspapers began portraying women as freethinking and financially independent, these portrayals were often imbued with ridicule, as they were ‘challenging existing norms’. Cycles unchained women from the chains of falsely compulsory male supervising; typewriters were crucial in women’s quest for writing and education; and eventually the demand was extended to the right to vote. During this period, within Marxist fold like Nadezhda Krupskaya and Alexandra Kollontai adopted a radical critique of socialist practices that marginalized women. While there were several inter and intra group differences in women’s demand for voting rights,  as a consequence of sustained campaigning they were able to gain the same. However, their participation in voting failed to bring about the much- anticipated qualitative changes.

After voting struggles, feminist movement got divided between broadly the ‘equal rights’ vs. welfare feminism, where the former focused on the issue of the woman as an individual and the latter worked at emphasizing the sex-group identity of women. By the end of the Second World War, increasing number of women worked outside the house. This brought in new kinds of issues: the phenomenon of ‘double burden of work’, ‘Guilt’ of leaving kids behind, and so on. The fact remained that women had only received formal equality, they still couldn’t’ get highly paid jobs; they would still be primarily responsible for home and childcare, etc. There seemed to be a relative calm in the post war years and many have wrongly taken it to mean that since woman’s issues were largely taken care of, feminism had become redundant.

Simone De Beauvoir and The Second Sex

The post war quiet meant that women growing up in the immediate post war years did not hear of any ongoing feminist movements or campaigns. It was in this background that Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949. She radically observed that a woman is not born but rather becomes one. This served to stir women’s imagination all over the world. She argued that so-called non-political areas of one’s life such as family and relationships were influenced by the larger power structures of a society. Her book aimed at demonstrating the constructed nature of womanhood and thereby rejecting the same. She suggested that a woman would have to overcome her biology in her quest for freedom. Incidentally, this sharply contrasts with radical feminist positions that seek to celebrate women’s body.

The main argument of The Second Sex remains that women have been caught up in a relationship of long-standing oppression to men through their relegation to being men’s “Other.” Beauvoir contends that the self needs some otherness to ably define itself as a subject; hence, the category of the otherness, is mandatory in the creation of the self, as a self. However, as discovered by Beauvoir, men, who take on the role of the Self, consistently categorize women as the Other. It is never the other way round. As Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman “is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the Other.” Beauvoir writes that human existence can be seen as an ambiguous interaction between transcendence and immanence. Despite this however, men have “been privileged with expressing transcendence through projects, whereas women have been forced into the repetitive and uncreative life of immanence.” Beauvoir’s aim was to investigate the initial emergence of this radically unequal relationship and to understand what structures, presuppositions and attitudes continue to provide life-sap to this social power.

She concludes her work by outlining various changes necessary for woman’s emancipation as well as the recovery of her selfhood. Firstly, she argues that woman must be allowed to transcend via her own free projects along with all the risk, uncertainty and danger that this might entail. To ensure woman’s equality, Beauvoir calls for changes in social structures around universal childcare, contraception, education and legal abortion and most importantly, around women’s financial independence from men. To gain this kind of independence, Beauvoir supposes that women will profit from “non-alienating, non-exploitative productive labor” in some measure. Simply put, women would benefit greatly from independent work. As far as the question of marriage is concerned, Beauvoir writes that while the nuclear family is damaging to both partners, it especially harms the woman. Marriage, like all truly authentic choices, must be an act of active and free choice. Beauvoir suggested that one must not pay undue attention to predetermined structures or constraints as an individual alone has the power to determine the kind of life he or she may want to lead. This went against the psychoanalytical approach and also the basic variety of Marxism. Taking from Beauvoir, existentialist feminism argued that an individual must take full responsibility for her life. They even went so far so as to suggest that the individual had full freedom to do so.

While de Beauvoir began by emphasizing upon individual transformation as well as individual struggles, by the late 1960s she clearly identified herself as a feminist. She was also in the forefront of many feminist campaigns in France, particularly the movement to legalize abortion. These activities in France and elsewhere fall right after the deceptive calm mentioned earlier and has often been discussed as the second wave feminism.

It began basically in America. It was very simply a liberal protest against the state and society’ s inability to actualize the rights promised to women in the earlier decades. By the 1960s, owing to the overall spirit of de-Stalinization, some re-thinking took place within the Soviet Union as well. For other places in the world too, the 1960s became a period of political resurgence. The new left movement, European and American civil rights campaigns, student protests in France led to a questioning of socialism from within. The National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 was one of the largest coalitions that emerged from the second wave. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had been unsuccessful in rooting out workplace sexism, focusing only on racial discrimination. When the EEOC rejected the ban of gender-specific job posters, Betty Friedan formed NOW with other leading feminists of the time. NOW looked primarily to the law to institute gender reforms.

Germaine Greer and The Female Eunuch

Germaine Greer, another significant figure in the second feminist wave, wrote the book The Female Eunuch. Germaine Greer’s most significant contribution rests in recognizing the inability of high-sounding ideals to penetrate and thereby alter the routine, everyday situations of women, moving in different contexts. Greer has argued that conventional political methods as well as the Marxist wait for a revolution both serve to cause despair in a woman looking at the immediate solution to her intense oppression. In order to recreate the hope for a solution in her, Greer suggests, the woman needs to begin not by altering the world, but rather by re-assessing herself.

The Female Eunuch begins with the Body. It is not possible to make a case for female liberation if there is no surety about the magnitude of “inferiority or natural dependence, which is unalterably female.” The point is that we may know who we are but not what we could have been or might have been. Science has been too dogmatic in presenting the status quo as the unavoidable result of law; women must interrogate the fundamental presumptions about feminine normality, to be able to reopen the prospects for development, that have which have been successively buried by conditioning. Hence we need to begin at the very beginning, viz. the sex of cells.

Chromosomal differences do not mean much unless they are demonstrated in development. Development does not take place in a vacuum. From the very beginning, what is female is colored consciously and unconsciously by assumptions whose origins wed o not know and whose attributes we cannot easily shed. Greer’s new hypothesis behind this conversation of the body is that all that we see or observe, could be otherwise. With this supposition she aims to show how female sexuality has been disguised and distorted by observers.

The female as we know (or want to know) and approve of is a product of a particular type of conditioning. The Female Eunuch delves into the beginnings of such conditioning. What actually transpires is that the female gets defined a sexual object, whose utility and appreciation is directly dependent on the needs of other sexual beings, men. In the process, her own sexuality is both misrepresented and denied, by being equated to passivity. Her biological organs are obliterated from the images of femininity in the exact manner that the symbols of independence and are suppressed in the rest of her body. A set of praiseworthy characteristics is evolved and Greer has written that these are characteristics of the castrate, “timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity.”

The set of induced characteristics regarding soul and body bases the falsehood of the Eternal Feminine, known today as the Stereotype. It holds the dominant image of femininity that rules cultures and to which women can be seen aspiring to. Greer embarks upon an examination of how this cultural artifact is produced and sustained. The principal element in this process is similar to the castration that we earlier saw practiced upon the body, the destruction and distortion of Energy. Here the book looks at the concept of Baby, showing how less is made of the greater. Not only are genuine female attributes ridiculed in the process of inducing desirable characteristics, contribution made by females towards economy and society is also devalued. The book involves the concept of The Raw Material and Work to impress this point.

Employing a masculine-feminine polarity brings about the castration of women. Here, men commandeer all the energy, streamlining it into an antagonistic conquistatorial power, thereby reducing all heterosexual interaction to a sadomasochistic arrangement. This results into a distortion of the concept of Love. It begins with a celebration of an Ideal and proceeds to involve some of its chief caricatures, Altruism, Egotism, and Obsession. These distortions roam freely under different façades, all serving to establish the ‘ideal’ norms of being a wife, lover, sister and so on and all coalescing to design what an ideal home and marriage should look like.

The perversions of love become so popular that anytime woman complaints against anything objectionable for instance, abuse, rape, sexual assault, it is immediately characterised as a Rebellion against men, wherein women either want to compete with them or attack them. Unfortunately, it only perpetuates the separation of the sexes. It also mars the possibility of both the sexes coming together to fight oppression.

Anti-feminism and Criticism of Feminism 

In the 19th century, anti-feminism focused primarily on opposing women’s suffrage.Subsequently, those who opposed women’s entry into institutes of higher learning argued that education would be too much of a physical burden for women. Yet other anti-feminists expressed displeasure at women joining the labor force, or the unions, or sitting on juries, or using contraception, or controlling their sexuality, or more recently, entering temples, or roaming about at ‘odd hours’ and so on.

Some groups characterize feminism as marring traditional values and causing harm to religious beliefs. Forcing/encouraging women to commit Sati, telling women to continue in toxic marriages as divorce makes a woman less worthy of respect, suggesting that raped women are walking zombies (comment by a woman MP of a ruling party), are just a few pointers of this ideology. Very simply, every time a woman seeks to break out of archaic norms and oppressive structures, there emerge a large group of people with their usually uninformed opinions about how a woman should conduct herself, what she should wear, who she should be friends with, what should be her preferred times of travel, what should she think (Gurmehar Kaur’s unjustified trolling is a recent case in point), so on and so forth.

Conclusion

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Greer’s The Female Eunuch, through their different strategies seek to bring forward this point: how women are relegated not just to second class citizenry but also (and perhaps more disturbingly) to second class human beings with no freedom and autonomy at their disposal. Beginning with the first cells that constitute female forms, societal standards of what is approvable and acceptable and what is reprehensible and also punishable seek to supervise every single moment of a woman’s existence. Feminism lies both in recognizing it and in gearing oneself to challenge it. What also needs to be understood is that feminism is not a battle between the two sexes. Feminism, most fundamentally is about equality and equal respect. In this background then, no picture that is exclusive or oppressive of any gender, can be painted on the canvas of feminism. Anybody who claims or does otherwise is simply selling fake copies of the real feminist paintings.

Summary

• Feminism is modern in the sense that its first public challenge emerged with the establishment of the public-private divide, upheld by Modernity.
• Women realized that like most things, Modernity too remained unequally accessible by them.
• While different women experience different kinds of subjugation, it is the common thread of oppression that binds them together. One must not assume however that it binds them all in one kind of feminism.
• From First-wave feminism’s focus on equal contract, parenting, marriage along with property rights for women, women under the second wave were persuaded to see that their personal lives remained deeply politicized and also reflective of the sexist power structures. Carol Hanisch’s slogan “The Personal is Political”, is often considered emblematic of the second wave.
• Third-wave feminism surfaced as a reaction to the perceived fiascoes of the second wave and also to the repercussions of the initiatives and campaigns installed by the second wave. It differentiated itself from the second wave over questions of sexuality, challenges to female heterosexuality and the celebration of sexuality as a means to attain female empowerment.
• Over different moments in history, feminism took ideological inspiration from American and French Revolutions, Anti-Slavery struggles and so on. Over different periods, feminist groups have fought for women’s voting rights, abortion rights, rights over their bodies, and so on.
• Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex served to highlight the innumerable ways in which women are made to exist as both second-class citizens as well as second-class human beings.
• Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch suggests that women are robbed of their ‘authentic qualities’ and are told to appear in tandem with the ‘norms created as well as popularized by male dominated society’. The extent of impositions is so deep that even body cells are dipped into ‘faulty gender constructs.’

Reference

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