上海交通大学：《女性文学与性别文化》教学资源_课程资料_Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan.pdf_大学文库

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND BETTY FRIEDAN: THE POLITICS OF OMISSION SANDRA DIJKSTRA The thirtieth anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has recently been commemorated at a conference in New York,but the effort to understand the book's contribution to feminist thought and to assess its effect on this generation of American feminists has only begun.'At this juncture,it seems crucial to ask:Why did Betty Friedan,and not Simone de Beau- voir,become the prophet of women's emancipation in America? On many levels,Friedan's book,The Feminine Mystique,appears to be a deradicalized and pragmatic rather than a theoretic reading of a similar problematic,women's situation.2 By examining the process by which Friedan (consciously or unconsciously)"trans- lated"the 1949 text,we can more clearly perceive the radical message of The Second Sex,which still remains the only thorough attempt to fathom the situation of modern women from a histor- ical,economic,psychological,sociological,and literary perspective. Social,economic,and political conditions as well as intellectual and ideological predilections prepared American women and the American media to better receive The Feminine Mystique.In 1953 when The Second Sex first appeared in translation in Amer- ica,it had to contend with a number of obstacles.The country was entering the silent,fearful fortress of the McCarthy years, and de Beauvoir was suspected of Marxist sympathies,despite her stance as an existentialist and her critique of Engels's "eco- nomic monism."3 Readers of The Nation,a generally liberal mag- azine,were warned to be wary of"certain political leanings"of the author.4 It seems that de Beauvoir's study of"the peculiar nature"of woman's oppression was too radical for America in the fifties (SS,p.64).Her conclusion,that change in woman's eco- nomic condition,though insu fficient by itself,"remains the basic factor,"was unacceptable (SS,p.807).Although de Beauvoir her- self would later criticize the unmaterialist.abstract nature of her Feminist Studies 6,no.2 (Summer 1980).1980 by Feminist Studies,Inc. This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sandra Dijkstra 291 early feminist statement,in 1953 it seemed too concrete for Amer- ican taste. In addition to this ideological barrier,The Second Sex encount- ered still another ideological obstacle.By the end of the New Deal, its vision of public salvation was being replaced by a more individu- alistic ethic.The middle-class American exodus to the suburbs and the retreat into the domain of private happiness were underway. With the return of the soldiers,women's participation in the work force was discouraged.One of the strongest sections of Friedan's book is her documentation of the effort to reintroduce the cult of true womanhood.She amply describes the way in which full-time motherhood was lauded as woman's true profession,and career is viewed as deviant or evil (FM,p.40). Yet,the postwar retreat of women into domesticity was not as universal as Friedan would have us believe.Although the fifties bore witness to a revitalization of family life and to a baby boom, it was also marked by a doubling of women's employment outside the home.The most striking feature of the period was the degree to which women continued to enter the job market.s In spite of the media's designation of woman as"housewife-mother,"many women were rejecting this role in daily life (FM,p.38).Or,if not, they were subject to a new phenomenon,diagnosed by sociologists of the period as"role conflict."7 Perhaps more than other factors, this disparity between the dominant cultural model of womanhood and the actual economic role of women would lead to the rebirth of feminism. Did The Second Sex have any impact at all in the fifties?Al- though de Beauvoir recommended economic autonomy for wom- en and praised the independent woman,it is doubtful that her message provided the stimulus for women's entry into the job market.Economic factors were responsible for that. In addition,de Beauvoir's book was not really designed to reach the masses.Had she published an easy-to-read manual with prac- tical advice,its impact would have been more immediate and more perceptible.But trained in philosophy,de Beauvoir had more ab- stract premises and loftier intentions.She wanted to explore the condition of womanhood and began by asking,on page xv,the fundamental question:"What is a woman?"Her purpose was nothing less than to analyze woman's historic submission to the male sex and to find out how it all began.Her goal was to dis- cover:"How can a human being in woman's situation attain ful- fillment?"(SS,p.xxvii).Reaching back to ancient sources for evidence,this philosophical treatise based on psychoanalytic and materialist methodologies testified to the seriousness and compe- This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

292 Sandra Dijkstra tency of its author,but it may have overwhelmed the American reader.The particularly French intellectual density of her approach diminished the book's accessibility,but those who did read The Second Sex in the mid-fifties were offered,perhaps for the first time,an opportunity to perceive the shape of women's history, and they were called upon to begin forging a collective,self conscious appraisal of women's historic subordination. Tracing the book's reception is a difficult task because curiously enough even women who were well-disposed to feminism seemed inclined to dismiss its impact on them.By 1959,the book's fem- inist legacy seemed difficult to discern,according to Eleanor Flex- ner:"At that time there was almost no interest in the past history of women or their current situation...as an issue the status of women was nonexistent."8 Yet Flexner herself had been moved to write her Century of Struggle;The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States in 1959.In her own case,had not The Second Sex been"an effective catalyst"of sorts?9 She pronounced nega- tively on the question. How do the ideas of a weighty,almost pedantic,and yet poetic tome filter down into mass consciousness?How do books of any kind influence thought and action?By the mid-sixties,de Beauvoir denied ever having tried to accomplish this:"..I never cherished any illusion of changing woman's condition:it depends on the future of labor in the world;it will change significantly only at the price of a revolution in production...."1 However,even before such a profound economic transformation took place,The Second Sex gave women insight into the social (and universal)nature of their predicament.Roberta Salper,a scholar of Spanish literature who helped to establish the first women's studies program in the country at San Diego State University in 1970,described the book's effect this way:"I began to perceive that my condition as a woman was a social problem,not just a silly neurosis."If the book made women aware of the commonality of their problem, it also clarified the necessity for collective action.Here was its radical potential,and perhaps the main reason why the book would exercise only a subterranean influence for so many years. De Beauvoir declared that woman could only exercise her liberty in revolt,"which is the only road open,...the road of the future ..there is no other way out for woman than to work for her liberation.This liberation must be collective,and it requires first of all that the economic evolution of woman's condition be accom- plished"(SS,p.698).These were pretty strong words for 1953. Yet,on the whole,de Beauvoir's radical message lies buried still. How did this happen? This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sandra Dijkstra 293 A partial answer can be found by examining Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.Once economic conditions were ripe for a mass movement,The Second Sex needed a"translator'' who could boil down its ideas,and its theory,into less radical, more readable journalese,so that its message could be transmitted to the masses,at least partially.For the "lady with a lance,"as de Beauvoir had been called by the Time magazine reviewer,with her"alarmed male mind"(in the words of the Newsweek writer), had raised important questions.12 Exactly ten years separates the English translation of The Second Sex from its first illegitimate offspring,The Feminine Mystique. And it took Friedan another twelve years to own up to the rela- tionship.In the Pre face and Acknowledgments to the first edition of 1963,Friedan acknowledged her debts to scores of individuals, but de Beauvoir's name was notably absent.The entire project, Friedan pointed out in her opening words,was born out of a "personal question mark"which led her in 1957 to survey her Smith College classmates (FM,p.7).Later,on page 345 of the book,she admitted that she was "asked to do an alumnae ques- tionnaire...(my emphasis).Friedan claimed to have undergone an individual awakening,a realization for which"a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir,"as she described her predecessor, need get no credit(FM,p.14).Friedan would later call de Beau- voir"an intellectual heroine of our history."13 But in 1963,she presented her only through the words of a male American critic who charged that de Beauvoir"didn't know what life was all about,”and“besides she was talking about French women”(FM, p.14).Instead of acknowledging de Beauvoir's influence,Friedan left this critical presentation standing as evidence of the general problem that existed by the end of the fifties:"Words like 'eman- cipation'and 'career'sounded strange and embarrassing;no one had used them for years"(FM,p.14).14 Thus,her own discovery seemed all the more portentous and original,and American read- ers were left with a much less weighty and less subversive book, and a new mystique,"the problem that has no name"(FM,p.11). Finally,in a 1975 interview with de Beauvoir,Friedan felt com- pelled to pay her intellectual debt,at least partially.She admitted that she,Betty Friedan,"who had helped start women on the new road"had been herself"started on that road"by de Beau- voir.15 When it came to specifying the nature of the influence, Friedan demurred,reluctantly avowing that she had"learned my own existentialism from her....[This]led me to whatever original analysis of women's existence I have been able to contribute...." The Second Sex had instructed her in existentialism,not in femin- This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

294 Sandra Dijkstra ism,she seemed to imply,perhaps mocking de Beauvoir's original disavowal of a purely feminist project (SS,p.xxxiii).(Yet it is clear that whether or not de Beauvoir proclaimed herself a feminist, her book so proclaimed her:moreover,existentialism was a philos- ophy with enormous influence in 1949,when she wrote,and be- cause it was based upon the concepts of freedom and responsibility, it could implicitly lead to a theory of feminism.as it did in the case of The Second Sex.It is perhaps unimportant that Friedan may have tried to obscure her intellectual debt;what is important is that she was affected,like those millions of women in the early fifties who were,as she put it,"still writing 'housewife'on the census blanks,who were still in the "unanalyzed embrace of the feminine mystique,"were affected if they did,as she did,read The Second Sex.17 Friedan's belated and grudging admission of de Beauvoir's influence is curious:The Feminine Mystique achieved success on its own grounds and became the best-seller that The Second Sex never was,regardless of its intellectual origins.But Friedan's reticence,her conscious or unconscious attempt to obscure the pattern of influence,seems to come from an ideological source: the French book was simply too radical even for 1963.and cer- tainly for Friedan,who adapted many of its basic premises to make them "safe"for America,reducing them from radical to reformist solutions.from philosophical to popular jargon,and from European to American references. Indeed,Friedan"Americanized"The Second Sex on many levels.She chose her materials from an American rather than a European context,and from popular rather than philosophical or literary sources:she catered to the American fascination for figures and provided statistics for college enrollment,for birthrate,for sexual satisfaction.In this sense,she anchored her book more concretely in time and place than had de Beauvoir,who was more concerned with presenting a sweeping panorama of the situation of women.In effect,Friedan's survey of the contemporary sources of American women's limited options was the strong point of her book.But in her analysis of the problem,Friedan rarely moved beyond sociological description. In observing the process by which Friedan selected and trans- formed de Beauvoir's central insights,we witness a shrinking of conceptualization.At the very center of The Feminine Mystique lies one of de Beauvoir's crucial discoveries:"One is not born but rather one becomes woman"(SS,p.301).Instead of analyzing the phenomenon that de Beauvoir had described ("It is civilization as a whole which produces this creature ..."SS.p.301)and This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sandra Dijkstra 295 instead of examining the specific institutions that oppress women (such as housework,motherhood,marriage),Friedan limited her attack to the more superficial enemies,such as the media,the social sciences,and consumerism,themselves not the cause but rather the means,the agents by which the subordinate condition of women is ideologically maintained and reinforced.Thus her solution was much more simplistic:women must reject a certain image of themselves,they must"say 'no'to the feminine mystique ...(FM,p.338).It is not necessary to destroy or even remake the institutions which incarcerate women;they can simply "say 'no'to the housewife image"(FM,p.330).Housewifery itself remains intact.Indeed,Friedan did not analyze the effect of domestic service on women in any concrete way.Her recommen- dation to women trapped therein is a shift in perception:"See housework for what it is-not a career,but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible"(FM,p:330). Thus,her solutions were based on the endorsement of the very consumerism she had criticized.How else could the housewife achieve efficiency except through the purchase of time-saving devices offered her by the capitalist marketplace? De Beauvoir's examination of the problem of housework was much more devastating:"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework,with its endless repetition:the clean becomes soiled,the soiled is made clean,over and over....The housewife wears herself out marking time:she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present (SS,p.504)."The worst of it all is that this labor does not even tend toward the creation of any- thing durable"(SS,p.508).The result of this process is the de- formation of women's personality,and de Beauvoir assesses the psychological toll incisively.Labor-saving devices cannot remedy the structural marginalization of women that occurs by restricting them to the private sphere.Although de Beauvoir did not take her analysis to its logical conclusion here,it is clear that she under- stood the meaning of women's exclusion from productive,creative work,that she recognized that women's role in marriage is a"sur- viving relic of dead ways of life,and the situation of the wife is more ungrateful than formerly,because she still has the same duties but they no longer confer the same rights,privileges,and honors"(SS,p.509).The shadows of Juliet Mitchell's analysis of the"ideology of the family"are visible here.18 Friedan treated marriage in the same superficial manner that she had treated housewifery.Women must rid themselves of the media image of marriage and "see it as it really is"(FM,p.330). Again,she preferred a facile solution,one which placed the respon- This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

296 Sandra Dijkstra sibility squarely on the shoulders of the individual woman who must only see the truth to be freed.Of course,this is a first step But Friedan never went beyond that.To find an indictment of the institution itself,we must look back to de Beauvoir who declared that,"individuals are not to be blamed for the failure of marriage...it is the institution itself,perverted as it has been from the start"(SS,p.536).If we seek a critical analysis of mar- riage as an oppressive and unrewarding destiny for women in both sexual and professional terms,we must turn to The Second Sex where the purpose of the institution is seen clearly:"To serve the interest of society,not to assure their personal happiness" (SS.p.485).In perceiving that there was a difference between "his"and "her"marriage,that "marriage has always been a very different thing for man and for woman"(SS,p.476),de Beauvoir laid the basis for future sociological investigations,such as Jessie Bernard's.19 Moreover,de Beauvoir's concern extended beyond the practical to the erotic when she wrote that"marriage kills feminine eroticism"(SS,p.496).Yet,she could also see the relationship of women's situation in marriage to the context of international politics,and she found the metaphors of colonialism appropriate to describe women's dependent status under the "capricious imperialism"of the master,in this case,the husband (SS,p.519).The problem is that"marriage is woman's only means of support and the sole justification for her existence" (SS,p.477),and a change in perception,such as that recom- mended by Friedan,would hardly suffice to remedy it. On the whole,Friedan managed to oversimplify the issue of motherhood as well.Again,a mind-switch performs magic: "Even a very young woman today must think of herself as a human being first,not as a mother with time on her hands,and make a life plan in terms of her own abilities,a commitment of her own to society,with which her commitments as wife and mother can be integrated(FM,p.332;my emphasis).Structural socioeconomic change is unnecessary:individual decision making suffices.Historically.Friedan played an important role in encour- aging such consciousness raising,but it was focused entirely upon the individual operating within a realm of free choice.Friedan's class bias prevented her from seeing that not all women have the luxury of free choice,and her belief in the underlying ideology of the capitalist system obscured her perception of reality.To suggest that both roles can be "integrated''reproduces the very ideology of"functionalism and adjustment"which she finds so repulsive in the social sciences and against which she has written her book(FM,p.330;194).Friedan's solution to "the problem This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sandra Dijkstra 297 that has no name"'is based on the American dream.In fact,she endorses its principles of action:ambition and competition are the mainstays of her solution.Friedan tells the American woman that "she must learn to compete." De Beauvoir treated motherhood more profoundly,viewing it as the origin of woman's restricted existence:"..woman's infer- iority originated in her being at first limited to repeating life..." (SS,p.585).To remedy this situation,it is necessary to dispel the myth of the maternal instinct,for maternity is not sufficient to "crown a woman's life"(SS,p.582).In fact,reproduction is often disappointing to women;at the very moment when she be- lieves she will find justification for her existence,she finds herself "a passive instrument"at the service of the species:"For she does not really make the baby,it makes itself within her..."(SS, pp.553-54).Thus,motherhood cannot serve as the source of her life's worth.20 Myth breaking was only one step.Contraception and abortion must be made available to all women."Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants,whom their parents will be unable to support...our society,so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo,shows no interest in the children once they are bom" (SS,p.542).De Beauvoir attacked the hypocrisy of bourgeois society which considers abortion"a revolting crime,"and she advocated strikingly modern solutions:"Contraception and legal abortion would permit woman to undertake her maternities in freedom..."(SS,pp.541-50).The lack of legal abortion was actually a"class crime"'whose devastating effects were felt most by poor women (SS,p.544).Freedom for mothers cannot be achieved without communal responsibility for child care: In a properly organized society where children would be largely taken in charge by the community and the mother cared for and helped,maternity would not be wholly incompatible with careers for women....The woman who enjoys the richest individual life will have the most to give her children ..feminine employment is still too often a kind of slavery...no effort has been made to provide for the care,protection and education ofchildren outside the home.[SS,p.586] Society's negligence of these needs results in "a double and bane- ful oppression of women"(SS,p.586),for which individual solu- tions are no remedy. Indeed,when we look back to The Second Sex,we leave behind the linguistic and perceptual limits of the middle-class American "happy housewife syndrome"to discover the process by which women came to be defined as Other.Friedan's definition of the This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

298 Sandra Dijkstra problem was vague and superficial,and so were her solutions:A "re-immersion in the humanities"'and "a national education pro- gram for women"(FM,pp.356-57)are insufficient remedies when viewed in the context of de Beauvoir's definition of the problem of how "to abolish the slavery of half of humanity"(SS,p.814). Friedan's book eliminated the radical core of de Beauvoir's analysis,the dynamic by which men established their supremacy over women,later named"sexual politics"by Kate Millett.21 In her exploration of this domain,de Beauvoir was privileged by her knowledge of philosophy,and in particular,existentialist philos- ophy.Extracting its insights and methodology,de Beauvoir applied them in a most original way,to study the battle of the sexes and the establishment of male privilege:"Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself,but as relative to him:she is not regarded as an autonomous being....He is the Subject;he is the Absolute:she is the Other"(SS,pp.xviii,xix).In this psy- chological struggle between two beings,de Beauvoir discovered the origin of women's servitude,the fact that "the two sexes have never shared the world in equality"(SS,p.xxiv).(Later,in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance [1963],de Beauvoir criticized this description as"an idealistic and a priori struggle of consciences,"saying that it needed to be anchored in"the facts of supply and demand,"in economics.)22 Already in The Second Sex,her analysis of the way in which woman's otherness served to reinforce male privilege provided an important and original tool for understanding woman's situation. Women's complicity in their own subjugation was more easily explained:"The bond that unites her to her oppressor is not comparable to any other bond.The division of the sexes is a biological fact,not an event in human history"(SS,p.xxiii). The biological roots of the problem could not be overlooked, they resulted in woman's estrangement from her own body: "From puberty to menopause,woman is the theatre of a play that unfolds within her and in which she is not personally con- cerned"(S.S.p.31).But woman's complicity derived not only from her passivity on the physiological level.Materially,she was dependent on her oppressor:"To decline to be the Other,to refuse to be a party to the deal-this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance to the superior caste"(SS,p.xxiv).Such a step is rendered even more unlikely because women "have no past,no history,no reli- gion of their own....They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence,housework,economic condition. and social standing to certain men-fathers or husbands-more This content downloaded from 218.193.184.25 on Sat,16 Jan 2016 12:24:11 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions