4/25 Thoughts

I think what jumped out at me the most after reading Beauvoir’s introduction was her thoughts about the nature of women’s relation to their oppressor:

Women live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.

Beauvoir makes a great point about the major disadvantage that women face in gaining equal representation in the world in comparison to other oppressed groups.  It is really a situation unlike any other since the very existence of the human race makes the sexes dependent on each other.  Certainly the implications of that bond will mean unconventionality and creativity in the routes women choose to take to address the problem of patriarchy in the world.