Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. “Men make gods and women worship them,” said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law.
Perhaps, however, if productive work had remained at the level of her strength, woman would have achieved the conquest of nature with man; the human species armed itself against the gods through male and female individuals; but she could not obtain the benefits of tools for herself. Engels only incompletely explained her decline: it is insufficient to say that the invention of bronze and iron profoundly modified the balance of productive forces and brought about women’s inferiority; this inferiority is not in itself sufficient to account for the oppression she has suffered. What was harmful for her was that, not becoming a labor partner for the worker, she was excluded from the human Mitsein: that woman is weak and has a lower productive capacity does not explain this exclusion; rather, it is because she did not participate in his way of working and thinking and because she remained enslaved to the mysteries of life that the male did not recognize in her an equal; by not accepting her, once she kept in his eyes the dimension of other, man could only become her oppressor. The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine incapacity into a curse. Man wanted to exhaust the new possibilities opened up by new technology: he called upon a servile workforce, and he reduced his fellow man to slavery. Slave labor being far more efficient than work that woman could supply, she lost the economic role she played within the tribe.---Simone de Beauvoir (1949) The Second Sex translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2009), pp. 88-89.
A few years ago, while reflecting on work by Liam Kofi Bright and Lionel McPherson (recall), it dawned on me that the very steep prestige, economic, and racial hierarchies (recall) within the academy (and sciences) mirrors those of our oligarchic society. And that if I wanted to understand my own life-world, I needed to study systems of thought that take hierarchy and subordination seriously as objects of enquiry. So, I have been studying golden age Islamic political philosophy and the long history of feminism(s) as much for teaching prep as for self-understanding. Because I recently read Manon Garcia's We Are Not Born Submissive and Nancy Bauer's How to Do Things with Pornography (recall), I was moved to pick up The Second Sex (in translation).
In addition to the functioning of systems of hierarchy, there is also the question of their origins and overcoming. And one might reasonably assume that insight into the origin of a system of hierarchy -- which is not without interest if it is as widespread as patriarchy -- might help in devising strategies for its overcoming. And, in fact, because patriarchy is so prevalent geographically and temporally, and compatible with so many different political systems, it is by no means obvious when to locate its establishment or multiple re-establishments and its persistence.
De Beauvoir's analysis is primarily focused on patrilineal civilizations of paternal right that "have evolved technically and ideologically," (note on p. 87). As she puts it, "By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes," (91; emphasis added) These civilized societies/stages are contrasted with matrilineal and patrilineal societies that have remained in the "primitive stage". Thus, her stadial analysis presupposes a distinction, familiar from European Enlightenment thought, between savage and civilized (recall this post on Hume).
And because of this conceptual contrast, she also assumes (the idea goes back to Locke) that anthropological insight into contemporary primitive societies provide a window into the very distant past stage of primitive life. This, too, is an Enlightenment idea that more recent anthropologists (since Geertz, I guess) have recognized is a highly dubious working assumption. The effect of these dual ideas of progress (discussed in this and previous paragraph) in De Beauvoir, is that really existing matrilineal or matriarchal societies are irrelevant to her project (because backward) and so can be left aside. (A more polemical author than I might discuss some of the racialized issues lurking here.) It also means that from the perspective of the origin of patriarchy, one does not really have to study history (understood as the history of civilization) because it is (almost by definition) everywhere patriarchal.
As an aside, while De Beauvoir herself is super learned in the long history of feminist thought (Poulain de la Barre offers her one of her epigraphs), one can see how these ideas conjoined with scattered remarks about really existing historical patriarchies, might make a reader of De Beauvoir think that there are few feminist resources in the past and so this has, I suspect, contributed to the idea that feminism is a recent phenomenon.
Okay, let's turn to her explanation of the origin of patriarchy. This follows her very compelling refutations of Freud's and Engel's accounts of the origin of patriarchy (in chapters 2-3 of Part 1 of Volume 1). The first sentence of the quoted passage notwithstanding, I don't think De Beauvoir denies that the institution of patriarchy was violent and maintained by (explicit or the threat of) violence--rather, she denies the claim that there was a single violent revolution.
But, more important, it's not merely violence that sustains patriarchy. There is an underlying idea or view that gets it going and these views are rooted in biological facts and essentialist. And to avoid confusion, De Beauvoir famously herself does not endorse the essentialism or the naturalization of these facts, but she kind of implies that the humans who were on the threshold of patriarchal civilization do (or were capable of using violence to enforce assent to them). And because of that, she sometimes sounds here in offering the explanation of the origin of patriarchy like she herself is rather reductive.
The underlying idea, "the key to the whole mystery," (76) is, in fact, stated most clearly a few pages before:
On a biological level, a species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition. With an animal, the gratuitousness and variety of male activities are useless because no project is involved; what it does is worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future. Positing himself as sovereign, he encounters the complicity of woman herself: because she herself is also an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her and her project is not repetition but surpassing herself toward another future; she finds the confirmation of masculine claims in the core of her being. She participates with men in festivals that celebrate the success and victories of males. Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined to repeat Life, while in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reason for being, and these reasons are more important than life itself. (76)
A few days ago I jokingly tweeted a picture of this passage out with the caption that she backward projects existentialism onto primitive man and so implies that Sartre peddles a patriarchal and dated philosophy. The ideology that she is describing here is better known as Homo faber--man the maker--"an inventor since the beginning of time" (75); as she puts it shortly before the passage I quoted at the top of this post: "Homo faber is the reign of time that can be conquered like, space, the reign of necessity, project, action and reason." (87) To be sure my view is that in these passages she is merely describing the ideology not endorsing it, but others have read her as accepting these claims.*
The ideology was undoubtedly familiar to her and her readers from Bergson's Creative Evolution, where he writes, "If we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should say not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber. In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture." (139) [I was pleased to find the work by Margaret A. Simons.] De Beauvoir connects these ideas surrounding Homo faber to Heidegger's emphasis on companionship (mit-sein), or a world dense with human values and social practices.
Crucially, the ideology that originates and sustains patriarchy is one in which man the maker is also a maker (there are shades of Nietzsche here) of values, and so daringly embraces novelty that always goes beyond the empirically given. This embrace of excess, and of novelty is sexed male in opposition to the repetition of empirical and biological reality (sexed female).
A key point in De Beauvoir's explanatory schema, is that ur-woman admires (aesthetically?) the prestige of this Nietzschean Homo faber, who also throws irresponsibly large but splendid festivities to promote his own (military and hunting) achievements, in contrast to her own boring (ahh) rootedness. So crucially -- and this a major theme of Garcia's book I mentioned above -- women become partially complicit in their own subordination from the start and help sustain it in various ways.
Since this is a rather long post, I just want to note that on its own terms this does not fully succeed as an explanation. For the idea that Homo faber is admirable and worth submitting to, and that biology is destiny, is precisely what needs explaining. As MacKinnon notes, the whole explanation presupposes that "patriarchy is already institutionalized." (Toward a Feminist Theory of State, p. 55)
However, whatever one thinks of this as an explanation, it is, in fact, action guiding. Shulamith Firestone and her more recent Xenofeminist followers see in technologies that decouple reproduction (and motherhood) from biology a possible way to overcome patriarchy. That is, and more culturally, one can unsex Homo faber. Or, one can reject the very ideology of Homo faber (which is, I think, De Beauvoir's own position).
I close with two observations about this explanation of the origin of patriarchy. First, there is a curious and somewhat subtle rejection of Hobbesian ideas at the root of this explanatory schema. (Yes, Hobbes is never mentioned; but notice patriarchy is a system of sovereignty.) For, in Hobbes submission to authority is found in treating death as the summum malum, and the preservation of life as the minimal baseline (which is bequeathed to liberalism as can be gleaned off 'life, liberty, etc.'). But from the vantage point of the ideology that gives rise to patriarchy, Hobbes' schema turns out to be sexed. For, (to repeat) "in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reason for being." And, even more important, "these reasons are more important than life itself."
As is well known, in Hobbes the rejection of a summum malum is thought a mark of unreason or dangerous ambition. That is to say, from the perspective of Hobbes -- which I make here stand in for canonical rationality -- women's self-understanding of her submission to initial patriarchy makes no sense. (This is why above I emphasized aesthetic issues.) Patriarchy as a system of sovereignty is in some ways unintelligible from the perspective of Hobbesian socials science not just because it is founded on the rejection of the summum malum, but also because its appeal to those that do not initially benefit from it is, in fact, a rejection of social reproduction of the same as a fundamental value itself.+ In addition, the patriarchal men are also odd from a Hobbesian perspective because they value property (and its survival over the generations) more "than life itself" (93).
Second, on De Beauvoir's explanation, patriarchy and the existence of slaves or (very) exploited labor are co-extensive. Not because women are the slave population in patriarchy. (De Beauvoir silently glides over those women who are among the slaves.) But because for his ambitions, which by definition exceed the given (and its constraints), Homo faber always requires a population who can generate a surplus for his projects. Strikingly enough, in this schema, women are not treated as sources of such surplus. That is, by definition, the system of patriarchy always sustains multiple forms of subordination (that can intersect). She doesn't say this, but the explanatory schema also leaves women the role as (unproductive) ornament within patriarchy.
*In a very early and fascinating reception study (1949), the Dutch philosopher, F. J. J. Buytendijk treats De Beauvoir as endorsing homo faber in some sense. This is also the point of view of a more recent (2010) article in Hypatia by Andrea Veltman, which also discusses some literature critical of De Beauvoir for it.
+Admittedly, this idea can be read into Hobbes.
It's only slightly related to the post, but have you read Nancy Bauer's rather negative review of the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation of The Second Sex? See: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-second-sex/ Given that she also notes very serious problems (almost certainly worse) this is probably still the best option for those of us who can't read French, but it's unfortunate that there's not a better option available, given Bauer's criticisms.
Posted by: Matt | 10/28/2021 at 01:15 AM
Hi Matt,
I had forgotten that! (Makes me regret not looking at the French while writing the post.) I don't find it as unreadable as she suggests, but then again most of my academic life I have been reading Ciceronian length sentences in different languages.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 10/28/2021 at 08:06 AM