A Woman’s Problem
By Kirsten Anderson
Something we discussed in class Tuesday 2/18 was the idea touched on when in discussion about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that men have no gender– they are simply identified as men only because they are not women. Relating to de Beauvoir’s argument that women are a permanent “other,” this references the theory that something is not defined by what it is in itself, but rather it is defined by its opposite. For example, white people are similarly seen having no race, but they are defined as white solely because they are not black, meaning they are not a part of an oppressed group of people, so they must have a label to separate them from who they view as their subordinates. By this same logic, women are herein the oppressed group which defines all others by their absence of such oppression, essentially including only men, as nonbinary people are oppressed in different kinds of ways, one of which being they are not included in our automatic ideas of gender in the first place, but that is another discussion about the violence of the gender binary. In this necessary, forced adoption of internal misogyny, women are then able to achieve their womanhood– they are not seen as respectable or proper women if there is any dissent from such an oppressive framework. The next caveat is that in this system, womanhood does not equate to the threshold at which girls start to mentally feel like women, but it is the point at which they begin having the ability to reproduce, apparently “proving” one’s transition into womanhood. It is seen as shameful if a woman cannot or does not want to have children, as that is her god-given duty. The ability to conceive is seen as the point in a woman’s life where she is for the taking of men, and she can be used for sex under the guise of fulfilling her life’s destiny of being a mother. This is an idea I have seen in my own life and have witnessed it in others’ as well, so this is nothing rare. I have been a witness to many conversations within my own family enforcing these sexist doctrines because god forbid my female relatives do not want children and do not want to get married for the purpose of submitting to men. These notions are widespread and largely accepted, further allowing for the reproduction of these sexist stereotypes in regards to a woman’s worth, respectability, and duty.
I believe these notions are very significant in the reading of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas as well. Her overall argument is essentially that without the demolition of all social structures including education, professions, and marriage/society, we cannot escape war, which inarguably perpetuates misogyny. She makes the assertion that the study of war valorizes violence and conflict as well as creates class division, sending the poor into battle because they lack the education to do other work. Additionally Woolf says that men are bound to their jobs, as one must sell their soul to their work in order to survive, further reinforcing the economic structure and stratification of class and gender. While her text is not explicitly about gender, it is involved, and moreover, the same doctrines of the reproduction of problematic social structures are relevant with regards to de Beauvoir’s piece as well and her idea of womanhood and the othering of women. Woolf argues that marriage and society prevent women from being able to work because having your own job and making your own money give you some sort of freedom and social standing– this obviously conflicts with the everlasting effort to silence women and strip them of their right to have opinions and influence. All in all she correctly asserts that we are all implicated in the creation and continuation of war and violence through continuing to uphold these aforementioned social structures. The central claims made by de Beauvoir and Woolf are deeply related: these phenomena will simply continue to problematize the lives of women, femmes, and all other people if these institutionalized structures are not destroyed and reconstructed in a radically different way, or more significantly, abolished altogether, providing the only path to true liberation, which I argue is the end goal of feminism altogether. As stated by Audre Lorde, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, so we must burn these institutions to the ground to cleanse ourselves of these injustices we have created and continue to enforce just by our mere existence. Liberation will not come through manipulation of a social structure– it only arises through the abolition of social institutions, structures, and assigned identities, which I take as the driving point of these two pieces of literature.