Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
It is a commonplace to say that in modern households, and especially in the United States, the wife has reduced the husband to slavery. The fact is not new. Since the Greeks, males have complained of Xanthippe’s tyranny; what is true is that the wife intervenes in areas that previously were forbidden to her; I know, for example, of students’ wives who contribute to the success of their man with frenetic determination; they organize their schedules, their diet, they watch over their work; they cut out all distractions, and almost keep them under lock and key. It is also true that man is more defenseless than previously against this despotism; he recognizes his wife’s abstract rights, and he understands that she can concretize them only through him: it is at his own expense that he will compensate for the powerlessness and the sterility the wife is condemned to; to realize an apparent equality in their association, he has to give her more because he possesses more. But precisely because she receives, takes, and demands, she is the poorer. The dialectic of the master and slave has its most concrete application here: in oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Males are in chains by their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that the wife demands checks, because men alone practice a profession that the wife demands that they succeed, because they alone embody transcendence that the wife wants to steal it from them by taking over their projects and successes. And inversely, the tyranny wielded by the woman only manifests her dependence: she knows the success of the couple, its future, its happiness, and its justification, resides in the hands of the other; if she bitterly seeks to subjugate him to her will, it is because she is alienated in him. She makes a weapon of her weakness; but the fact is she is weak. Conjugal slavery is ordinary and irritating for the husband; but it is deeper for the wife; the wife who keeps her husband near her for hours out of boredom irritates him and weighs on him; but in the end, he can do without her more easily than she him; if he leaves her, it is she whose life will be ruined. The big difference is that for the wife, dependence is interiorized; she
is
a slave even when she conducts herself with apparent freedom, while the husband is essentially autonomous and enchained from the outside. If he has the impression he is the victim, it is because the burdens he bears are more obvious: the wife feeds on him like a parasite; but a parasite is not a triumphant master. In reality, just as biologically males and females are never victims of each other but all together of the species, the spouses together submit to the oppression of an institution they have not created. If it is said
men
oppress
women
, the husband reacts indignantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.
The situation has to be changed in their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a “career” for the woman. Men who declare themselves antifeminist with the excuse that “women are already annoying enough as it is” are not very logical: it is precisely because marriage makes them “praying mantises,” “bloodsuckers,” and “poison” that marriage has to be changed and, as a consequence, the feminine condition in general. Woman weighs so heavily on man because she is forbidden to rely on herself; he will free himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something
to do
in this world.
There are young women who are already trying to win this positive freedom; but seldom do they persevere in their studies or their jobs for long: they know the interests of their work will most often be sacrificed to their husband’s career; their salary will only “help out” at home; they hesitate to commit themselves to undertakings that do not pull them away from conjugal enslavement. Those who do have a serious profession will not draw the same social advantages as men: lawyers’ wives, for example, are entitled to a pension on their husbands’ death; women lawyers are prohibited from paying a corresponding pension to their husbands in case of death. This shows that the woman who works cannot keep the couple at the same level as the man. There are women who find real independence in their profession; but many discover that work “outside” only represents another source of fatigue within the framework of marriage. Moreover and most often, the birth of a child forces them to confine themselves to their role of matron; it is still very difficult to reconcile work and motherhood.
According to tradition, it is the child who should ensure the wife a concrete autonomy that dispenses her from devoting herself to any other aim. If she is not a complete individual as a wife, she becomes it as a mother: the child is her joy and justification. She reaches sexual and social self-realization through him; it is thus through him that the institution of marriage has meaning and reaches its aim. Let us examine this ultimate step in woman’s development.
3.
This evolution took place in a discontinuous manner. It was repeated in Egypt, in Rome, and in modern civilization: see
Volume I
.
4.
Hence the special character of the young widow in erotic literature.
5.
Cf. Volume I. This thesis is found in Saint Paul, the Church Fathers, Rousseau, Proudhon, Auguste Comte, D. H. Lawrence, and others.
*
In
The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia
.—T
RANS
.
6.
Claudine’s House
.
7.
Claire Leplae,
Les fiancailles
(The Engagement).
*
Our translation of
“Club des lisières vertes,”
source unknown.—T
RANS
.
8.
Ibid.
*
Complete Essays of Montaigne
, translated by Donald M. Frame. All Montaigne quotations are from this book.—T
RANS
.
9.
Of course, the adage “A hole is always a hole” is vulgarly humorous; man does seek something other than brute pleasure; nonetheless, the success of certain “slaughterhouses” is enough to prove a man can find some satisfaction with the first available woman.
10.
There are some, for example, who support the idea that painful childbirth is necessary to awaken the maternal instinct: those who deliver under anesthesia have been known to abandon their fawns. Such alleged facts are at best vague; and a woman is in no way a doe. The truth is that some males are shocked that the burdens of womanhood might be lightened.
11.
Still, in our times, woman’s claim to pleasure incites male anger; a striking document on this subject is Dr. Grémillon’s treatise
La vérité sur l’orgasme vénérien de la femme
(The Truth About the Genital Orgasm of the Woman). The preface informs us that the author, a World War I hero who saved the lives of fifty-five German prisoners, is a man of the highest moral standing. Taking serious issue with Stekel in
Frigidity in Woman
, he declares, “
The normal and fertile woman does not have a genital orgasm
. Many are the mothers (and the best of them) who have never experienced these wondrous spasms … the most latent erogenous zones are not natural but artificial. They are delighted to have them, but they are stigmas of decadence … Tell all that to a man seeking pleasure and he does not care. He wants his depraved partner to have a genital orgasm, and she will have it. If it does not exist, it will be made to exist. Modern woman wants a man to make her vibrate. To her we answer: Madam, we don’t have the time, and hygiene forbids it!… The creator of erogenous zones works against himself: he creates insatiable women. The female ghoul can tirelessly exhaust innumerable husbands … the ‘zoned’ one becomes a new woman with a new spirit, sometimes a terrible woman capable of crime … there would be no neuroses, no psychoses if we understood that the ‘two-backed beast’ is an act as indifferent as eating, urinating, defecating, or sleeping.”
*
“Increase and multiply.”—T
RANS
.
12.
In Vino Veritas
.
13.
“Some Reflections on Marriage” [in
Stages on Life’s Way
.
—TRANS.]
.
15.
“Today, in certain regions of the United States, first-generation immigrants still send the bloody sheet back to the family in Europe as proof of the consummation of the marriage,” says the Kinsey Report.
16.
Claudine’s House
.
17.
Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment
.
18.
In
La nuit remue (Night Moves
).
19.
See Stekel’s observations quoted in the previous chapter.
20.
Psychology of Women
.
21.
We summarize it following Stekel in
Frigidity in Woman
.
22.
“On Women.”
23.
La vagabonde (The Vagabond
).
*
Beauvoir’s title is mistaken. Lagache’s work on jealousy is called
La jalousie amoureuse
(Jealousy in Love).—T
RANS
.
*
Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, August 8, 1903.—T
RANS
.
24.
The Waves
.
*
La terre et les rêveries du repos
(Earth and Reveries of Repose), trans. Kenneth Haltman. —T
RANS
.
†
To the Lighthouse
.—T
RANS
.
25.
Earth and Reveries of Repose
.
*
In French “wash boiler,” or
lessiveuse
, is feminine, and where English uses the pronoun “it,” French uses
elle
, that is, “she.” Playing on this ambiguity throughout his text, Ponge gives the wash boiler a feminine identity and presence.—T
RANS
.
26.
“The Wash Boiler,” in
Liasse
(Sheaf). [This passage translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.
—TRANS.]
27.
James Agee,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
.
28.
On joue perdant
(Playing a Losing Game).
*
Sido
.—T
RANS
.
*
Jacques Chardonne,
L’épithalame (Epithalamium
).—T
RANS
.
29.
L’affamée
(The Starved Woman).
*
Passage translated by Nina de Voogd Fuller.—T
RANS
.
30.
Gaston Bachelard,
La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Earth and Reveries of Will
).
31.
Ibid.
32.
“Too Bad.”
*
The Gay Science
.—T
RANS
.
33.
Fin de siècle literature often has defloration take place in the sleeping car, which is a way of placing it “nowhere.”
*
Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy
.—T
RANS
.
*
Discrepancy between the French and the English translations. In the English text of Tolstoy’s diary the date is given as April 29.—T
RANS
.
34.
Claudine’s House
.
35.
Obsessions and Psychasthenia
.
36.
Ibid.
*
Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy
, December 19, 1863.—T
RANS
.
37.
Mauriac,
Thérèse Desqueyroux
.
*
Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy
. Discrepancy between the French and the English translations. In the English text the date is given as January 17.—T
RANS
.
†
Ibid. Discrepancy between the French and the English translations. In the English text the date is given as September 17.—T
RANS
.
38.
Eva
.
39.
“When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it … I mean that I was simply transferred from papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as yours—or else I pretended to, I am really not quite sure which—I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other … You and papa have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.”
40.
Helmer says to Nora: “But do you suppose you are any the less dear to me, because you don’t understand how to act on your own responsibility? No, no; only lean on me; I will advise you and direct you. I should not be a man if this womanly helplessness did not just give you a double attractiveness in my eyes … Be at rest, and feel secure; I have broad wings to shelter you under … There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying, to a man, in the knowledge that he has forgiven his wife … she has in a way become both wife and child to him. So you shall be for me after this, my little scared, helpless darling. Have no anxiety about anything, Nora; only be frank and open with me, and I will serve as will and conscience both to you.”
41.
Cf. Lawrence,
Fantasia of the Unconscious:
“You’ll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours … ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back to her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is to come home to her!… How rich you feel, tired, with all the burden of the day in your veins, turning home!… And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose.”
*
Daniel Halévy,
Jules Michelet
.—T
RANS
.
*
Luhan,
Lorenzo in Taos
.—T
RANS
.
42.
Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage
and
Nouvelles chroniques maritales
(New Marriage Chronicles).
43.
There can be love within marriage; but then one does not speak of “conjugal love”; when these words are uttered, it means that love is missing; likewise, when one says of a man that he is
“very
communist,” one means that he is not a communist; “a great gentleman” is a man who does not belong to the simple category of gentlemen, and so on.
44.
Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage
.
45.
There is sometimes a
real
collaboration between a man and a woman, in which the two are equally autonomous: in the Joliot-Curie couple, for example. But then the wife who is as skilled as the husband goes out of her wifely role; their relation is no longer of a conjugal order. There are also wives who use the man to achieve personal aims; they escape the condition of the married woman.
46.
See
Chapter 7
of this volume.
47.
Geoffrey Scott,
The Portrait of Zélide
.
48.
Ibid.
*
Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy
. Discrepancy between the French and the English translations. In the English text the date is given as November 13, 1863.—T
RANS
.
†
Ibid. Discrepancy between the French and the English translations. In the English text the date is given as October 12, 1863.—T
RANS
.
49.
Les causes du suicide (The Causes of Suicide
). The comment applies to France and Switzerland but not to Hungary or Oldenburg.
50.
Ibsen,
A Doll’s House
.