Throughout history, most societies that created myths and legends about women regarded them as a distinctly weaker and inferior caste of beings, whose main role was that of wife and mother. Women who passively accepted their inferior status and did not aspire to economic and educational equality with men were glorified, particularly in myths about the Mother and the Virgin. Those who failed to limit themselves to the confines of these myths and stereotypes were demonized, or even literally condemned as witches. Nazi Germany and the other fascist states were the most extreme cases of all, with their totalitarian myths that gloried aggression, conquest and genocide, while relegating women to the status breeders of new warriors. All of this was a very recent memory when The Second Sex was published in 1949, and de Beauvoir had lived through it during the Occupation of France. De Beauvoir compared this Other-ing of women to the oppression of workers, slaves and racial and religious minority groups by ruling class males. As a Marxist, she believed that such mythology prevailed among the upper classes, which had the wealth and leisure to spawn all types of mythology about the Other. She thought that Marxism offered a truly democratic alternative to this unjust system, but that it could only be obtained through revolutionary struggle. De Beauvoir thought that these myths of power and domination had culminated in fascism, and that probably the only redemption for the Western world would be in a Communist or socialist revolution that would abolish these myths of the inferior Other forever.
All myths about women served to keep them in a state of passivity and dependence, particularly for economic reasons. From the earliest myths, such as those recorded in Genesis, God created women as an afterthought and a companion and helper to men, and the Bible also blamed them for original sin and the fall of man from grace (de Beauvoir 160). Many other myths depicted women as Mother, including St. Francis of Assisi who praised “the earth, our mother, who preserves and cares for us”, while others described man as the prisoner of the Mother and Nature, always struggling to escape the “chaotic insecurity of the mother’s womb” (de Beauvoir 164). Men regarded themselves as being naturally closer to the gods, and even gods-on-earth who maintained order and domination over women, slaves and other inferiors. Like the gods in heaven, they were “sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes unpredictable”, just like the slave masters of history or the rulers of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (de Beauvoir 233).
This book was first published in 1949, so Nazism was still very much a recent memory for de Beauvoir, who had lived through the German occupation of France and supported the Resistance. Many of the democratic and socialistic ideas in The Second Sex are really reactions against the aggressively masculine ideology of the Nazis and fascists, and their glorification of heroes and warriors. She found similar myths throughout history, such as in the highly authoritarian society of Sparta, where aristocratic females had a “higher station than that of other Greek women” as breeders of new warriors (de Beauvoir 161). So it was in Nazi Germany, where ‘Aryan’ or ‘Nordic’ women who produced exceptionally large families of blond-haired and blue-eyed children received medals and cash bonuses from the state. Friedrich Nietzsche may not have been a Nazi in this sense, but he admired all the aristocratic warrior societies of history like the Vikings, and regarded democracy, equality and feminism as signs of cultural degeneration. Femininity was “exalted only during periods of weakness” while masculine societies under the control of warrior elites always mastered and dominated slaves, women, subject peoples and even nature and the Great Mother (de Beauvoir 214). In the Third Reich, the SS of Heinrich Himmler regarded itself as such a knightly or warrior cult, with a sacred duty to destroy gays, Jews, feminists, pacifists and the mentally ill, and like all fascists would “kill everything they want or like to kill in the name of these lofty ideas” (de Beauvoir 228).
De Beauvoir’s feminism was always one aspect of an overall Marxist context, and the hope for a new kind of society in which the Other would no longer exist. She stated repeatedly that in the “authentically democratic society heralded by Marx, there is no place for the Other”, no matter whether they were women, blacks, Jews or other minorities. To be sure, Stalin’s Soviet Union was hardly such a society in reality, no matter that it claimed to be based on Marxism, nor were its satellites in Eastern Europe. Having just lived through World War II when she wrote this book, though, and witnessing how fascism took over Western nations like Germany, Italy and Spain, de Beauvoir was placing her hopes for the future on Communism and the East. She was also aware of the long history of slavery and racial oppression in the U.S., and noted that “rich America and the male are on the side of the Master, and Mystery belongs to the slave” (de Beauvoir 271). Almost by definition, societies that had slavery and racial caste systems were also extremely patriarchal and had strong fascist tendencies. These were the cultures most likely to produce mythology about the inferior status of women, which she regarded as a luxury product of classes that had the wealth and leisure to create various myths about the feminine. This was not the case with the peasants, slaves and workers of history, who depended on the labor of women for sheer physical survival, nor was it an accident that conservative and fascist ideologues despised these classes and also treated them as inferior Others (de Beauvoir 272).
D.H. Lawrence also proposed a new type of modern mythology in his novels, in which gender and sexuality would not simply be based on traditional concepts of power and domination. He elevated sexual expression as the basis for all human life and asserted that “thought and action must derive their source from this or else it would be an empty conceit and a sterile mechanism” (de Beauvoir 229). Although his book Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in the U.S. and other countries for many years because of its explicit sexuality, his main point was not simply pornographic but to demonstrate how “Lady Chatterley and Mellors attain the same cosmic joys: blending into each other, they blend into the trees, the light and the rain” (de Beauvoir 230). This was in contrast to the cold, sadistic and authoritarian Gerald, who regarded women as slaves and the “passive substance of his will” (de Beauvoir 231). At the same time, there were also women who enjoyed the power of wives and mothers over sick and weak husbands and children, so that they could control them and impose their will on the world.
De Beauvoir hoped that all the traditional mythology about mothers, virgins and weak and passive women would be dissolved in a more modern and democratic society. Contrary to her expectations, these changes occurred in the Western states, particularly during the feminist and countercultural rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the newer ideas about sexuality and gender relations anticipated by modernist writers like Lawrence came to fruition. In the end, the Soviet Union and other Communist societies did not turn out to be the vanguard in these matters, although writing in 1949 de Beauvoir was still part of the afterglow in which the Left had led the Resistance against fascism. She still had very recent memories of many ‘modern’ Western nations rejecting democracy, reason and egalitarian ideals in favor of brutal and genocidal police states that were very oppressive to women, racial and religious minorities and all ‘Others’. She had witnessed many French intellectuals and members of the middle and upper classes collaborating with the Nazis as well. From this viewpoint, the U.S. seemed to have many similarities in this history, which made de Beauvoir very skeptical about the Western world in this era, especially whether it really represented the forces or freedom, progress and democracy. All of the earlier myths of power and domination over women and the Other, including the subject people in the colonies, caused de Beauvoir to be very wary of fascist tendencies in the Western world and skeptical about whether it was redeemable at all, short of a revolution.
WORKS CITED
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011.
