Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne,… [606714]

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became
the youngest person ever to obtain the
agrégation
in philosophy at the
Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught in lycées in
Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to
1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the
existentialist movement, working with Sartre on
Les Temps
Modernes
. The author of many books, including the novel
The
Mandarins
(1957), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, Beauvoir
was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in
1986.
Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have lived in Paris
for more than forty years and are both graduates of Rutgers
University, New Jersey. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier were faculty
members at the Institut d’Études Politiques. They have been
translating books and articles on social science, art, and feminist
literature for many years and have jointly authored numerous books in
English and in French on subjects ranging from grammar to politics to
American cooking.
2

3

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2011
Le deuxième sexe
copyright © 1949 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Translation copyright © 2009 by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Judith Thurman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Originally published in France in two volumes as
Le deuxième sexe: Les faits
et les mythes
(Vol. 1) and
L’expérience vécue
(Vol. 11) by Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
Copyright © 1949 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris. This translation originally published
in hardcover in slightly different form in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, The Random
House Group Ltd., London, in 2009, and subsequently published in hardcover in the
United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in
2010.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908–1986.
[Deuxième sexe. English]
The second sex / Simone de Beauvoir ; translated by Constance Borde and
Sheila Malovany Chevallier.
p. cm.
1. Women. I. Borde, Constance. II. Malovany-Chevallier, Sheila. III. Title.
HQ1208.B352 2010
305.401—dc22
2009023164
eISBN: 978-0-307-81453-1
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
4

To Jacques Bost
There is a good principle that created
order, light, and man
and a bad principle that created
chaos, darkness, and woman
.

— PYTHAGORAS
Everything that has been written by men
about women should be viewed with suspicion
,
because they are both judge and party
.
—
POULAIN DE LA BARRE
5

Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Judith Thurman
Translators’ Note
VOLUME I

Facts and Myths
Introduction
PART ONE | DESTINY
Chapter 1
Biological Data
Chapter 2
The Psychoanalytical Point of View
Chapter 3
The Point of View of Historical Materialism
PART TWO | HISTORY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART THREE | MYTHS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

I. Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust

II. D. H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride
III. Claudel or the Handmaiden of the Lord
IV. Breton or Poetry

V. Stendhal or Romancing the Real
6

VI.
Chapter 3
VOLUME II

Lived Experience
Introduction
PART ONE | FORMATIVE YEARS
Chapter 1
Childhood
Chapter 2
The Girl
Chapter 3
Sexual Initiation
Chapter 4
The Lesbian
PART TWO | SITUATION
Chapter 5
The Married Woman
Chapter 6
The Mother
Chapter
7 Social Life
Chapter 8
Prostitutes and Hetaeras
Chapter 9
From Maturity to Old Age
Chapter 10
Woman’s Situation and Character
PART THREE | JUSTIFICATIONS
Chapter 11
The Narcissist
Chapter 12
The Woman in Love
Chapter 13
The Mystic
PART FOUR | TOWARD LIBERATION
Chapter 14
The Independent Woman
Conclusion
Selected Sources
7

Introduction
In 1946, Simone de Beauvoir began to outline what she thought
would be an autobiographical essay explaining why, when she had
tried to define herself, the first sentence that came to mind was “I am a
woman.” That October, my maiden aunt, Beauvoir’s contemporary,
came to visit me in the hospital nursery. I was a day old, and she
found a little tag on my bassinet that announced, “It’s a Girl!” In the
next bassinet was another newborn (“a lot punier,” she recalled),
whose little tag announced, “I’m a Boy!” There we lay, innocent of a
distinction—between a female object and a male subject—that would
shape our destinies. It would also shape Beauvoir’s great treatise on
the subject.
Beauvoir was then a thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual who
had been enfranchised for only a year. Legal birth control would be
denied to French women until 1967, and legal abortion, until 1975.
Not until the late 1960s was there an elected female head of state
anywhere in the world. Girls of my generation searching for examples
of exceptional women outside the ranks of queens and courtesans,
and of a few artists and saints, found precious few. (The queens, as
Beauvoir remarks, “were neither male nor female: they were
sovereigns.”) Opportunities for women have proliferated so broadly
in the past six decades, at least in the Western world, that the distance
between 2010 and 1949, when
The Second Sex
was published in
France, seems like an eternity (until, that is, one opens a newspaper—
the victims of misogyny and sexual abuse are still with us,
everywhere). While no one individual or her work is responsible for
that seismic shift in laws and attitudes, the millions of young women
who now confidently assume that their entitlement to work, pleasure,
and autonomy is equal to that of their brothers owe a measure of their
freedom to Beauvoir.
The Second Sex
was an act of Promethean
audacity—a theft of Olympian fire—from which there was no turning
back. It is not the last word on “the problem of woman,” which,
Beauvoir wrote, “has always
been a problem of men,” but it marks the
8

place in history where an enlightenment begins.
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in
1908 into a reactionary Catholic family with pretensions to nobility.
She had a Proustian childhood on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in
Paris. But after World War I, her father, Georges, lost most of his
fortune, and without dowries Simone and her sister, Hélène, had dim
prospects for a marriage within their class. Their mother, Françoise, a
banker’s daughter who had never lived without servants, did all the
housework and sewing for the family. Her pious martyrdom indelibly
impressed Simone, who would improve upon Virginia Woolf’s
famous advice and move to a room of her own—in a hotel, with maid
service. Like Woolf, and a striking number of other great women
writers,
1
Beauvoir was childless. And like Colette, who wasn’t (she
relegated her late-born, only daughter to the care of surrogates), she
regarded motherhood as a threat to her integrity. Colette is a
ubiquitous presence in
The Second Sex
, which gives a new
perspective to her boast, in a memoir of 1946, that “my strain of
virility saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevated
to a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocre
author … Beneath the still young woman that I was, an old boy of
forty saw to the well-being of a possibly precious part of myself.”
Mme de Beauvoir, intent on keeping up a facade of gentility,
however shabby, sent her daughters to an elite convent school where
Simone, for a while, ardently desired to become a nun, one of the few
respectable vocations open to an ambitious girl. When she lost her
faith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams that
proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting
classmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin and
childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a
taste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew. (Not
many bookish virgins with a particle in their surname got drunk with
the hookers and drug addicts at Le Styx.) Her mother hoped vainly
that the worthless Jacques would propose. Her father, a
ladies’ man,
knew better: he told his temperamental, ill-dressed, pimply genius of a
daughter that she would never marry. But by then Simone de
Beauvoir had seen what a woman of almost any quality—highborn or
9

low, pure or impure, contented with her lot or alienated—could expect
from a man’s world.
Beauvoir’s singular brilliance was apparent from a young age to
her teachers, and to herself. An insatiable curiosity and a prodigious
capacity for synthetic reading and analysis (a more inspired grind may
never have existed) nourished her drive. One of her boyfriends
dubbed her Castor (the Beaver), a nickname that stuck. She had a
sense of inferiority, it would appear, only in relation to Jean-Paul
Sartre. They met in 1929, as university students (she a star at the
Sorbonne, he at the Ecole Normale Supérieure), cramming, as a team,
for France’s most brutal and competitive postgraduate examination,
the
agrégation
in philosophy. (On their first study date, she explained
Leibniz to him.) Success would qualify her for a lifetime sinecure
teaching at a lycée, and liberate her from her family. When the results
were posted, Sartre was first and Beauvoir second (she was the ninth
woman who had ever passed), and that, forever, was the order of
precedence—Adam before Eve—in their creation myth as a couple.
Even though their ideal was of a love without domination, it was
part of the myth that Sartre was Beauvoir’s first man. After Georges
de Beauvoir confronted them (they had been living together more or
less openly), Sartre, the more bourgeois, proposed marriage, and
Beauvoir told him “not to be silly.” She had emerged from her age of
awkwardness as a severe beauty with high cheekbones and a regal
forehead who wore her dark hair plaited and rolled—an old-fashioned
duenna’s coif rather piquantly at odds with her appetites and behavior.
Both sexes attracted her, and Sartre was never the most compelling of
her lovers, but they recognized that each possessed something
uniquely necessary to the other. As he put it one afternoon, walking in
the Tuileries, “You and I together are as one” (on
ne fait qu’un
). He
categorized their union as an “essential” love that only death could
sunder, although in time, he said, they would naturally both have
“contingent” loves—freely enjoyed and fraternally confessed in a
spirit of “authenticity.” (She often recruited, and shared, his girls,
some of whom were her students, and her first novel,
She Came to
Stay
, in 1943, was based on one of their ménages à trois.) “At every
level,” Beauvoir reflected, years later, of the pain she had suffered and
inflicted, “we failed to face the weight of reality, priding ourselves on
what we called our ‘radical freedom.’ ” But they also failed to fault
10

themselves for the contingent casualties—the inessential others—who
were sacrificed to their experiment.
And the burden of free love,
Beauvoir would discover, was grossly unequal for a woman and for a
man.
If Beauvoir has proved to be an irresistible subject for biographers, it
is, in part, because she and Sartre, as a pharaonic couple of incestuous
deities, reigned over twentieth-century French intellectual life in the
decades of its greatest ferment. But the most fascinating subjects tend
to be those richest in contradictions, and
The Second Sex
, no less than
Beauvoir’s prolific and important fiction, memoirs, and
correspondence, seethes with them. Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir’s
biographer, touches upon a fundamental paradox in the introduction to
her admirable life. She and Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal
had been lecturing together at Harvard. At the conclusion of their talk,
she writes, “I could not help but comment to my distinguished
audience that every question asked about Sartre concerned his work,
while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.” Yet
Sartre’s work, and specifically the existentialist notion of an
opposition between a sovereign self—a subject—and an objectified
Other, gave Beauvoir the conceptual scaffold for
The Second Sex
,
2
while her life as a woman (indeed, as Sartre’s woman) impelled her to
write it. He had once told her that she had “a man’s intelligence,” and
there is no evidence that he changed his mind about a patronizing
slight that she, too, accepted as a compliment until she began to
consider what it implied. It implied, she would write, that “humanity
is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to
himself,” and by all the qualities (Colette’s strain of “virility”) she is
presumed to lack. Her “twinship” with Sartre was an illusion.
The Second Sex
has been called a “feminist bible,” an epithet bound
to discourage impious readers wary of a sacred text and a personality
cult. Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a
Catholic, and she dismisses religions—even when they worship a
goddess—as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion. The
analogy is fitting, though, and not only to the grandeur of a book that
was the first of its kind but also to its structure. Beauvoir begins her
narrative, like the author of
Genesis, with a fall into knowledge. The
11

two volumes that elaborate on the consequences of that fall are the
Old and New Testaments of an unchosen people with a history of
enslavement. (“Facts and Myths” is a chronicle of womankind from
prehistory to the 1940s; “Lived Experience” is a minutely detailed
case study of contemporary womanhood and its stations of the cross
from girlhood through puberty and sexual initiation to maturity and
old age, with detours from the well-trodden road to Calvary taken by
mystics and lesbians.) The epic concludes, like Revelation, with an
eloquent, if utopian, vision of redemption:
The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and
transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away
by time, stalked by death, they have the same essential need of
the other; and they can take the same glory from their freedom; if
they knew how to savor it, they would no longer be tempted to
contend for false privileges; and fraternity could then be born
between them.
The first English edition of
The Second Sex
was published in 1953.
Blanche Knopf, the wife of Alfred Knopf, Beauvoir’s American
publisher, had heard of the book on a scouting trip to Paris. Thinking
that this sensational literary property was a highbrow sex manual, she
had asked an academic who knew about the birds and the bees, H. M.
Parshley, a retired professor of zoology at Smith College, for a
reader’s report. His enthusiasm for the work (“intelligent, learned, and
well-balanced … not feminist in any doctrinaire sense”) won him the
commission to translate it. But Alfred Knopf asked Parshley to
condense the text, noting, without undue masculine gallantry, that
Beauvoir “certainly suffers from verbal diarrhea.” Parshley appealed
to the author for advice on the “minor cuts and abridgments” that
Knopf felt were essential for the American market. She was either too
busy or unwilling to reply, because he heard nothing until he received
an indignant letter protesting that “so much of what seems important
to me will have been omitted.” But she signed off graciously on the
edition.
While the translation was a labor of love from which Parshley
nearly expired, he lacked a background in philosophy, or in French
literature. He also lacked a credential more pertinent, perhaps, to the
12

audience for a foundational work of modern feminism, a second X
chromosome. This eagerly awaited new translation, by Constance
Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier—the first since Parshley’s—
is a magisterial exercise in fidelity. The cuts have been restored, and
the English is as lucid and elegant as
Beauvoir’s ambition to be
exhaustive permits it to be. She is a bold, sagacious, often dazzling
writer and a master aphorist,
3
but no one would accuse her of being a
lapidary stylist. It is hard to find a description for the prose that does
justice both to its incisive power and to its manic garrulity. Elizabeth
Hardwick came closest, perhaps, when she called
The Second Sex
“madly sensible and brilliantly confused.”
The stamina that it takes to read
The Second Sex
in its entirety pales
before the feat of writing it. (Sartre was happy when his beaver was
busy, Beauvoir told Bair, because “I was no bother to him.”) One is
humbled to learn that this eight-hundred-page encyclopedia of the
folklore, customs, laws, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology,
literature, economic systems, and received ideas that have, since time
began, objectified women was researched and composed in about
fourteen months,
4
between 1946 and 1949, while Beauvoir was also
engaged with other literary projects, traveling widely, editing and
contributing to
Les Temps Modernes
, Sartre’s leftist political review,
and juggling her commitments to him and “the Family” (their
entourage of friends, groupies, disciples, and lovers) with a wild,
transatlantic love affair. On a trip to America in 1947, she had met the
novelist Nelson Algren, the most significant of her male others, and it
was he who advised her to expand the essay on women into a book.
He had shown her the “underside” of his native Chicago, and that
year and the next they explored the United States and Mexico
together. Her encounter with a racism that she had never witnessed
firsthand, and her friendship with Richard Wright, the author of
Native Son
, helped to clarify her understanding of sexism, and its
relation to the anti-Semitism that she certainly
had
witnessed firsthand
before and during the war, but, with Sartre, had never openly
challenged. The black, the Jew, and the woman, she concluded, were
objectified as the Other in ways that were both overtly despotic and
insidious, but with the same result: their particularity as human beings
was reduced to a lazy, abstract cliché (“the eternal feminine”; “the
black soul”; “the Jewish character”) that served as a rationale for their
13

subjugation.
Not all of Beauvoir’s staggering erudition and mandarin authority in
The Second Sex
is reliable (she would repudiate a number of her more
contentious or blinkered generalities, though not all of them). Her
single most famous assertion—“One is not born, but rather becomes,
woman”—has been disputed by more recent feminist scholars, and a
substantial body of research in biology and the social sciences
supports their argument that some sexual differences (besides the
obvious ones) are innate rather than “situational.” Instead of rejecting
“otherness” as an imposed cultural construct, women, in their opinion,
should cultivate it as a source of self-knowledge and expression, and
use it as the basis to critique patriarchal institutions. Many readers
have also been alienated by Beauvoir’s visceral horror of fertility—the
“curse” of reproduction—and her desire, as they see it, to homogenize
the human race.
Yet a revolution cannot begin until the diffuse, private indignation
of individuals coalesces into a common cause. Beauvoir not only
marshaled a vast arsenal of fact and theory; she galvanized a critical
mass of consciousness—a collective identity—that was indispensable
to the women’s movement. Her insights have breached the solitude of
countless readers around the world who thought that the fears,
transgressions, fantasies, and desires that fed their ambivalence about
being female were aberrant or unique. No woman before her had
written publicly, with greater candor and less euphemism, about the
most intimate secrets of her sex.
One of those secrets—the hardest, perhaps, for Beauvoir to avow
—is that a free woman may refuse to be owned without wanting to
renounce, or being able to transcend, her yearning to be possessed.
5
“As long as the temptations of facility remain,” she wrote, by which
she meant the temptations of romantic love, financial security, and a
sense of purpose or status derived from a man, all of which Sartre
had, at one time or another, provided for her, a woman “needs to
expend a greater moral effort than the male to choose the path of
independence.” Colette, who would have smiled, and not kindly, at
the phrase, “moral effort,” states the problem less cerebrally: “How to
liberate my true hope? Everything is against me. The first obstacle to
14

my escape is this woman’s body barring my way, a voluptuous body
with closed eyes, voluntarily blind, stretched out full, ready to perish.”
To a reader of this new translation—a young feminist perhaps, for
whom the very title may seem as quaint as a pair of bloomers—I
would suggest that the best way to appreciate
The Second Sex
is to
read it in the spirit it was written: as a deep and urgent personal
meditation on a true hope that, as she will probably discover, is still
elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense, one’s own woman.
—Judith Thurman
1.
Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Louisa
May Alcott, Christina Rossetti, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gertrude Stein, Christina Stead,
Isak Dinesen, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Simone Weil, Willa Cather, Carson
McCullers, Anna de Noailles, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle,
Marguerite Yourcenar, Sigrid Undset, Else Lasker-Schüler, Eudora Welty, Lillian
Hellman, Monique Wittig, to name a few.
2.
It has been credited by Beauvoir and others for having given her the scaffold,
although a journal from her university years, which was discovered after her death by
her companion and adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, suggests that
Beauvoir had arrived at the notion of a fundamental conflict between self and Other
before she met Sartre, partly through her reading of Henri Bergson, but partly through
her own struggle—an explicit and implicit subtext of
The Second Sex
—with an
imperious need for love that she experienced as a temptation to self-abnegation.
3.
The cult of the Virgin is “the rehabilitation of woman by the achievement of her
defeat”; “The average Western male’s ideal is a woman who … intelligently resists but
yields in the end”; “The traditional woman … tries to conceal her dependence from
herself, which is a way of consenting to it.” Examples are numerous.
4.
In reference libraries and in lecture halls—Beauvoir audited classes by Lacan and
Lévi-Strauss, among others—and in interviews with women of all backgrounds on two
continents.
5.
It was a source of her bad faith in fictionalizing the affair with Algren in her finest
novel,
The Mandarins
.
15

Translators’ Note
We have spent the past three years researching
Le deuxième sexe
and
translating it into English—into
The Second Sex
. It has been a
daunting task and a splendid learning experience during which this
monumental work entered our personal lives and changed the way we
see the world. Questions naturally arose about the act of translating
itself, about ourselves and our roles, and about our responsibilities to
both Simone de Beauvoir and her readers.
Translation has always been fraught with such questions, and
different times have produced different conceptions of translating.
Perhaps this is why, while great works of art seldom age, translations
do. The job of the translator is not to simplify or readapt the text for a
modern or foreign audience but to find the true voice of the original
work, as it was written for its time and with its original intent.
Seeking signification in another’s words transports the translator into
the mind of the writer. When the text is an opus like
The Second Sex
,
whose impact on society was so decisive, the task of bringing into
English the closest version possible of Simone de Beauvoir’s voice,
expression, and mind is greater still.
This is not the first translation of
Le deuxième sexe
into English,
but it is the first complete one. H. M. Parshley translated it in 1953,
but he abridged and edited passages and simplified some of the
complex philosophical language. We have translated
Le deuxième sexe
as it was written, unabridged and unsimplified, maintaining
Beauvoir’s philosophical language. The long and dense paragraphs
that were changed in the 1953 translation to conform to more
traditional styles of punctuation—or even eliminated—have now been
translated as she wrote them, all within the confines of English. Long
paragraphs (sometimes going on for pages) are a stylistic aspect of
her writing that is essential, integral to the development of her
arguments. Cutting her sentences, cutting her paragraphs, and using a
more traditional and conventional punctuation do not render Simone
de
Beauvoir’s voice. Beauvoir’s style expresses her reasoning. Her
16

prose has its own consistent grammar, and that grammar follows a
logic.
We did not modernize the language Beauvoir used and had access
to in 1949. This decision precluded the use of the word “gender,” for
example, as applied today. We also stayed close to Beauvoir’s
complicated syntax and punctuation as well as to certain usages of
language that to us felt a bit awkward at first. One of the difficulties
was her extensive use of the semicolon, a punctuation mark that has
suffered setbacks over the past decades in English and French and has
somewhat fallen into disuse.
Nor did we modernize structures such as “If the subject attempts to
assert himself, the other is nonetheless necessary for him.” Today we
would say, “If the subject attempts to assert her or himself …” There
are examples where the word “individual” clearly refers to a woman,
but Beauvoir, because of French rules of grammar, uses the masculine
pronoun. We therefore do the same in English.
The reader will see some inconsistent punctuation and style, most
evident in quotations. Indeed, while we were tempted to standardize it,
we carried Beauvoir’s style and formatting into English as much as
possible. In addition, we used the same chapter headings and numbers
that she did in the original two-volume Gallimard edition. We also
made the decision to keep close to Beauvoir’s tense usage, most
noticeably regarding the French use of the present tense for the
historical past.
One particularly complex and compelling issue was how to
translate
la femme
. In
Le deuxième sexe
, the term has at least two
meanings: “the woman” and “woman.” At times it can also mean
“women,” depending on the context. “Woman” in English used alone
without an article captures woman as an institution, a concept,
femininity as determined and defined by society, culture, history.
Thus in a French sentence such as
Le problème de la femme a
toujours été un problème d’hommes
, we have used “woman” without
an article: “The problem of woman has always been a problem of
men.”
Beauvoir occasionally—but rarely—uses
femme
without an article
to signify woman as determined by society as just described. In such
cases, of course, we do the same. The famous sentence,
On ne naît
pas femme: on le devient
, reads, in our translation: “One is not born,
17

but rather becomes, woman.” The original translation by H. M.
Parshley read, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
Another notable change we made was in the translation of
la jeune
fille
. This is the title of an important chapter in Volume II dealing with
the period in a female’s life between childhood and adulthood. While
it is often translated as “the young girl” (by Parshley and other
translators of French works), we think it clearly means “girl.”
We have included all of Beauvoir’s footnotes, and we have added
notes of our own when we felt an explanation was necessary. Among
other things, they indicate errors in Beauvoir’s text and discrepancies
such as erroneous dates. We corrected misspellings of names without
noting them. Beauvoir sometimes puts into quotes passages that she is
partially or completely paraphrasing. We generally left them that way.
The reader will notice that titles of the French books she cites are
given in French, followed by their translation in English. The
translation is in italics if it is in a published English-language edition;
it is in roman if it is our translation. We supply the sources of the
English translations of the authors Beauvoir cites at the end of the
book.
We did not, however, facilitate the reading by explaining arcane
references or difficult philosophical language. As an example of the
former, in Part Three of Volume II, “Justifications,” there is a
reference to Cécile Sorel breaking the glass of a picture frame holding
a caricature of her by an artist named Bib. The reference might have
been as obscure in 1949 as it is today.
Our notes do not make for an annotated version of the translation,
yet we understand the value such a guide would have for both the
teacher and the individual reading it on their own. We hope one can be
written now that this more precise translation exists.
These are but a few of the issues we dealt with. We had instructive
discussions with generous experts about these points and listened to
many (sometimes contradictory) opinions; but in the end, the final
decisions as to how to treat the translation were ours.
It is generally agreed that one of the most serious absences in the
first translation was Simone de Beauvoir the philosopher. Much work
has been done on reclaiming, valorizing, and expanding upon her role
as philosopher since the 1953 publication, thanks to the scholarship of
Margaret Simons, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Michèle Le Doeuff,
18

Elizabeth Fallaize, Emily Grosholz, Sonia Kruks, and Ingrid Galster,
to mention only a few. We were keenly aware of the need to put the
philosopher back into her text. To transpose her philosophical style
and voice into English was the most crucial task we faced.
The first English-language translation did not always recognize the
philosophical terminology in
The Second Sex
. Take the crucial word
“authentic,” meaning “to be in good faith.” As Toril Moi points out,
Parshley changed it into “real, genuine, and true.” The distinctive
existentialist term
pour-soi
, usually translated as “for-itself” (
pour-soi
referring to human consciousness), became “her true nature in itself.”
Thus, Parshley’s “being-in-itself” (
en-soi
, lacking human
consciousness) is a reversal of
Simone de Beauvoir’s meaning.
Margaret Simons and Toril Moi have unearthed and brought to light
many other examples, such as the use of “alienation,” “alterity,”
“subject,” and the verb “to posit,” which are by now well
documented. One particularly striking example is the title of Volume
II;
“L’expérience vécue”
(“Lived Experience”) was translated as
“Woman’s Life Today,” weakening the philosophical tenor of the
French.
The Second Sex
is a philosophical treatise and one of the most
important books of the twentieth century, upon which much of the
modern feminist movement was built. Beauvoir the philosopher is
present right from the start of the book, building on the ideas of
Hegel, Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and others. She developed,
shared, and appropriated these concepts alongside her equally brilliant
contemporaries Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévi-Strauss, who were
redefining philosophy to fit the times. Before it was published,
Beauvoir read Lévi-Strauss’s
Elementary Structures of Kinship
and
learned from and used those ideas in
The Second Sex
. Although the
ideas and concepts are challenging, the book was immediately
accepted by a general readership. Our goal in this translation has been
to conform to the same ideal in English: to say what Simone de
Beauvoir said as close to the way she said it, in a text both readable
and challenging.
Throughout our work, we were given the most generous help from
the many experts we consulted. In every area Simone de Beauvoir
delved into, whether in psychoanalysis, biology, anthropology, or
philosophy, they helped us to produce the most authentic English
19

version of her work. We thank them profusely.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the indomitable Anne-Solange Noble
of Editions Gallimard, who for years believed in this retranslation
project. Anne-Solange begged, badgered, and persuaded (“I shall
never surrender!”) until she found the editor who was willing to take
on the monumental task. That exceptional person is Ellah Allfrey of
Jonathan Cape, a patient and superb editor who astutely worked with
us step-by-step for three years, strongly supported by LuAnn Walther
of Knopf. Anne-Solange introduced us to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir,
Simone de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter, and our relationship has
been a very special one ever since that first lunch on the rue du Bac,
where we four toasted the moment with
“Vive le point-virgule!
”
(“Long live the semicolon!”)
The feminist scholar Ann Shteir, our Douglass College friend and
classmate, and now professor of humanities and women’s studies at
York University, Toronto, Canada, was always available to provide
source material and to solve problematic issues, often many times a
week. She, like we, felt that no task was too great to repay the debt
women—and the world—owe
to Simone de Beauvoir. Michael
Mosher and Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz were extremely helpful with
philosophical language and concepts. Gabrielle Spiegel and her
generous colleagues took on the esoteric research required for the
“History” chapters, notably the passages on the French Middle Ages,
on which Gaby is a leading expert. James Lawler, the distinguished
professor, merits our heartfelt gratitude for retranslating, specially for
this edition, the Paul Claudel extracts with such elegance and grace.
Our thanks to Beverley Bie Brahic for her translations of Francis
Ponge, Michel Leiris, and Cécile Sauvage; Kenneth Haltman for
Gaston Bachelard; Raymond MacKenzie for François Mauriac and
others; Zack Rogow and Mary Ann Caws for Breton; Gillian Spraggs
for Renée Vivien. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky allowed
us the special privilege of using parts of their magnificent translation
of
War and Peace
before the edition appeared in 2008; their views on
translation were an inspiration to us. Donald Fanger helped us with
Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries.
Many writers, translators, researchers, friends, colleagues, and
strangers who became friends unfailingly contributed their expertise:
Eliane Lecarme-Tabone, Mireille Perche, Claire Brisset, Mathilde
20

Ferrer, David Tepfer, Marie-Victoire Louis, Virginia Larner, Nina de
Voogd Fuller, Stephanie Baumann, Jane Couchman, Catherine
Legault, Robert Lerner, Richard Sieburth, Sandra Bermann, Gérard
Bonal, Lia Poorvu, Leila May-Landy, Karen Offen, Sybil Pollet,
Janet Bodner, our copy editors, Beth Humphries and Ingrid Sterner,
and our indexer, Cohen Carruth, Inc.
Our husbands, Bill Chevallier and Dominique Borde, were among
our staunchest and most reliable partners, living out the difficult
passages with us, helping us overcome obstacles (and exhaustion),
and also sharing the joy and elation of the life-changing discoveries
the text held for us.
Very special thanks go to our expert readers. Our official reader,
Mary Beth Mader, authority par excellence in French and the
philosophical language of Simone de Beauvoir, enriched our text with
her insights and corrections; Margaret Simons, showing no end to her
boundless generosity, “tested” our texts on her students and came
back to us with meticulous perceptions and corrections; Marilyn
Yalom, Susan Suleiman, and Elizabeth Fallaize, with all of the
discernment for which they are renowned, explored chapters with a
fine-tooth comb and gave us a heightened understanding of
The
Second Sex
for which we will ever be grateful.
And now it is for English readers to discover, learn, and live
Simone de Beauvoir’s message of freedom and independence.
21

VOLUME I
Facts and Myths
22

Introduction
I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject
is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has
flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s
not talk about it anymore. Yet it is still being talked about. And the
volumes of idiocies churned out over this past century do not seem to
have clarified the problem. Besides, is there a problem? And what is
it? Are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine
still has its followers; they whisper, “Even in Russia,
women
are still
very much women”; but other well-informed people—and also at
times those same ones—lament, “Woman is losing herself, woman is
lost.” It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will
always exist, if there should be women at all, what place they hold in
this world, what place they should hold. “Where are the women?”
asked a short-lived magazine recently.
1
But first, what is a woman?
“
Tota mulier in utero:
she is a womb,” some say. Yet speaking of
certain women, the experts proclaim, “They are not women,” even
though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are
females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up
about half of humanity; and yet we are told that “femininity is in
jeopardy”; we are urged, “Be women, stay women, become women.”
So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must
take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as
femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a
Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?
Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has
never been patented. It is typically described in vague and shimmering
terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. In Saint Thomas’s
time it was an essence defined with as much certainty as the sedative
quality of a poppy. But conceptualism has lost ground: biological and
social sciences no longer believe there are immutably determined
entities that define given characteristics like those of the woman, the
Jew, or the black; science considers characteristics as secondary
23

reactions to a
situation
. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it
is because there never was. Does the word “woman,” then, have no
content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment philosophy,
rationalism, or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among
human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the
word “woman”; American women in particular are inclined to think
that woman as such no longer exists. If some backward individual
still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to undergo
psychoanalysis to get rid of this obsession. Referring to a book—a
very irritating one at that—
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, Dorothy
Parker wrote: “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as
women. My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we
are, should be considered as human beings.” But nominalism is a
doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for antifeminists to show
that women
are
not men. Certainly woman like man is a human being;
but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human
being is always uniquely situated. To reject the notions of the eternal
feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that
there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation
for those concerned but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can
claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. A few years
ago, a well-known woman writer refused to have her portrait appear
in a series of photographs devoted specifically to women writers. She
wanted to be included in the men’s category; but to get this privilege,
she used her husband’s influence. Women who assert they are men
still claim masculine consideration and respect. I also remember a
young Trotskyite standing on a platform during a stormy meeting,
about to come to blows in spite of her obvious fragility. She was
denying her feminine frailty; but it was for the love of a militant man
she wanted to be equal to. The defiant position that American women
occupy proves they are haunted by the feeling of their own femininity.
And the truth is that anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into
two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces,
bodies, smiles, movements, interests, and occupations; these
differences are perhaps superficial; perhaps they are destined to
disappear. What is certain is that for the moment they exist in a
strikingly obvious way.
If the female function is not enough to define woman, and if we
24

also reject the explanation of the “eternal feminine,” but if we accept,
even
temporarily, that there are women on the earth, we then have to
ask: What is a woman?
Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It
is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a
book on the singular situation of males in humanity.
2
If I want to
define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”; all other assertions
will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing
himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.
The categories masculine and feminine appear as symmetrical in a
formal way on town hall records or identification papers. The relation
of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents
both the positive and the neuter to such an extent that in French
hommes
designates human beings, the particular meaning of the word
vir
being assimilated into the general meaning of the word “homo.”
Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is
imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity. I used to get
annoyed in abstract discussions to hear men tell me: “You think such
and such a thing because you’re a woman.” But I know my only
defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating
my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, “And you think
the contrary because you are a man,” because it is understood that
being a man is not a particularity; a man is in his right by virtue of
being man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. In fact, just as for the
ancients there was an absolute vertical that defined the oblique, there
is an absolute human type that is masculine. Woman has ovaries and a
uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her
subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man
vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles.
He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he
believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers
woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that
particularizes it. “The female is female by virtue of a certain
lack
of
qualities,” Aristotle said. “We should regard women’s nature as
suffering from natural defectiveness.” And Saint Thomas in his turn
decreed that woman was an “incomplete man,” an “incidental” being.
This is what the Genesis story symbolizes, where Eve appears as if
drawn from Adam’s “supernumerary” bone, in Bossuet’s words.
25

Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in
relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.
“Woman, the relative being,” writes Michelet. Thus Monsieur Benda
declares in
Le

rapport d’Uriel
(Uriel’s Report): “A man’s body has
meaning by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the
woman’s body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the
male. Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think
herself without man.” And she is nothing other than what man
decides; she is thus called “the sex,” meaning that the male sees her
essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the
absolute. She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while
he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the
essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.
3
The category of
Other
is as original as consciousness itself. The
duality between Self and Other can be found in the most primitive
societies, in the most ancient mythologies; this division did not always
fall into the category of the division of the sexes, it was not based on
any empirical given: this comes out in works like Granet’s on Chinese
thought, and Dumézil’s on India and Rome. In couples such as
Varuna—Mitra, Uranus—Zeus, Sun—Moon, Day—Night, no
feminine element is involved at the outset; neither in Good—Evil,
auspicious and inauspicious, left and right, God and Lucifer; alterity is
the fundamental category of human thought. No group ever defines
itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself.
It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same
train compartment for the rest of the travelers to become vaguely
hostile “others.” Village people view anyone not belonging to the
village as suspicious “others.” For the native of a country inhabitants
of other countries are viewed as “foreigners”; Jews are the “others”
for anti-Semites, blacks for racist Americans, indigenous people for
colonists, proletarians for the propertied classes. After studying the
diverse forms of primitive
society in depth, Lévi-Strauss could
conclude: “The passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture
is defined by man’s ability to think biological relations as systems of
oppositions; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether
occurring in defined or less clear form, are not so much phenomena to
explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality.”
4
These phenomena could not be understood if human reality were
26

solely a
Mitsein
*
based on solidarity and friendship. On the contrary,
they become clear if, following Hegel, a fundamental hostility to any
other consciousness is found in consciousness itself; the subject
posits itself only in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets
up the other as inessential, as the object.
But the other consciousness has an opposing reciprocal claim:
traveling, a local is shocked to realize that in neighboring countries
locals view him as a foreigner; between villages, clans, nations, and
classes there are wars, potlatches, agreements, treaties, and struggles
that remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the
Other
and bring
out its relativity; whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups
have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation. How
is it, then, that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put
forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential
one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the
latter as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty?
No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential
from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other,
defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing
itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the
Other has to submit to this foreign point of view. Where does this
submission in woman come from?
There are other cases where, for a shorter or longer time, one
category has managed to dominate another absolutely. It is often
numerical inequality that confers this privilege: the majority imposes
its law on or persecutes the minority. But women are not a minority
like American blacks, or like Jews: there are as many women as men
on the earth. Often, the two opposing groups concerned were once
independent of each other; either they were not aware of each other in
the past, or they accepted each other’s
autonomy; and some historical
event subordinated the weaker to the stronger: the Jewish Diaspora,
slavery in America, and the colonial conquests are facts with dates. In
these cases, for the oppressed there was a
before:
they share a past, a
tradition, sometimes a religion, or a culture. In this sense, the parallel
Bebel draws between women and the proletariat would be the best
founded: proletarians are not a numerical minority either, and yet they
have never formed a separate group. However, not
one
event but a
whole historical development explains their existence as a class and
27

accounts for the distribution of
these
individuals in this class. There
have not always been proletarians: there have always been women;
they are women by their physiological structure; as far back as history
can be traced, they have always been subordinate to men; their
dependence is not the consequence of an event or a becoming, it did
not
happen
. Alterity here appears to be an absolute, partly because it
falls outside the accidental nature of historical fact. A situation created
over time can come undone at another time—blacks in Haiti for one
are a good example; on the contrary, a natural condition seems to defy
change. In truth, nature is no more an immutable given than is
historical reality. If woman discovers herself as the inessential and
never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about
this transformation herself. Proletarians say “we.” So do blacks.
Positing themselves as subjects, they thus transform the bourgeois or
whites into “others.” Women—except in certain abstract gatherings
such as conferences—do not use “we”; men say “women,” and
women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit
themselves authentically as Subjects. The proletarians made the
revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are fighting
in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic
agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede
to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.
5
It is that they
lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could
posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of
their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor
or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of
American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis
or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes,
work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—
fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As
bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not
with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with
white men and not with black women. The proletariat could plan to
massacre the
whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of
seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity
entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream
of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is
unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a
28

moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an
original
Mitsein
, and she has not broken it. The couple is a
fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: cleavage of
society by sex is not possible. This is the fundamental characteristic of
woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two
components are necessary to each other.
One might think that this reciprocity would have facilitated her
liberation; when Hercules spins wool at Omphale’s feet, his desire
enchains him. Why was Omphale unable to acquire long-lasting
power? Medea, in revenge against Jason, kills her children: this brutal
legend suggests that the bond attaching the woman to her child could
have given her a formidable upper hand. In
Lysistrata
, Aristophanes
lightheartedly imagined a group of women who, uniting together for
the social good, tried to take advantage of men’s need for them: but it
is only a comedy. The legend that claims that the ravished Sabine
women resisted their ravishers with obstinate sterility also recounts
that by whipping them with leather straps, the men magically won
them over into submission. Biological need—sexual desire and desire
for posterity—which makes the male dependent on the female, has not
liberated women socially. Master and slave are also linked by a
reciprocal economic need that does not free the slave. That is, in the
master-slave relation, the master does not
posit
the need he has for the
other; he holds the power to satisfy this need and does not mediate it;
the slave, on the other hand, out of dependence, hope, or fear,
internalizes his need for the master; however equally compelling the
need may be to them both, it always plays in favor of the oppressor
over the oppressed: this explains the slow pace of working-class
liberation, for example. Now, woman has always been, if not man’s
slave, at least his vassal; the two sexes have never divided the world
up equally; and still today, even though her condition is changing,
woman is heavily handicapped. In no country is her legal status
identical to man’s, and often it puts her at a considerable disadvantage.
Even when her rights are recognized abstractly, long-standing habit
keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs.
Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things
being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater
chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy
many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold
29

the most important positions. In addition to their concrete power, they
are invested with a prestige whose
tradition is reinforced by the
child’s whole education: the present incorporates the past, and in the
past all history was made by males. At the moment that women are
beginning to share in the making of the world, this world still belongs
to men: men have no doubt about this, and women barely doubt it.
Refusing to be the Other, refusing complicity with man, would mean
renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste
confers on them. Lord-man will materially protect liege-woman and
will be in charge of justifying her existence: along with the economic
risk, she eludes the metaphysical risk of a freedom that must invent its
goals without help. Indeed, beside every individual’s claim to assert
himself as subject—an ethical claim—lies the temptation to flee
freedom and to make himself into a thing: it is a pernicious path
because the individual, passive, alienated, and lost, is prey to a foreign
will, cut off from his transcendence, robbed of all worth. But it is an
easy path: the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence
are thus avoided. The man who sets the woman up as an
Other
will
thus find in her a deep complicity. Hence woman makes no claim for
herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she
senses the necessary link connecting her to man without positing its
reciprocity, and because she often derives satisfaction from her role as
Other
.
But a question immediately arises: How did this whole story begin?
It is understandable that the duality of the sexes, like all duality, be
expressed in conflict. It is understandable that if one of the two
succeeded in imposing its superiority, it had to establish itself as
absolute. It remains to be explained how it was that man won at the
outset. It seems possible that women might have carried off the
victory, or that the battle might never be resolved. Why is it that this
world has always belonged to men and that only today things are
beginning to change? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about
an equal sharing of the world between men and women or not?
These questions are far from new; they have already had many
answers; but the very fact that woman is
Other
challenges all the
justifications that men have ever given: these were only too clearly
dictated by their own interest. “Everything that men have written
about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both
30

judge and party,” wrote Poulain de la Barre, a little-known
seventeenth-century feminist. Males have always and everywhere
paraded their satisfaction of feeling they are kings of creation.
“Blessed be the Lord our God, and the Lord of all worlds that has not
made me a woman,” Jews say in their morning prayers; meanwhile,
their wives resignedly murmur: “Blessed be the Lord for creating me
according to his will.” Among the blessings Plato thanked the gods
for was, first, being born free and not a slave and, second, a man and
not a woman. But males could not have enjoyed this privilege so fully
had they not considered it as founded in the absolute and in eternity:
they sought to make the fact of their supremacy a right. “Those who
made and compiled the laws, being men, favored their own sex, and
the jurisconsults have turned the laws into principles,” Poulain de la
Barre continues. Lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers, and
scholars have gone to great lengths to prove that women’s
subordinate condition was willed in heaven and profitable on earth.
Religions forged by men reflect this will for domination: they found
ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora. They have put
philosophy and theology in their service, as seen in the previously
cited words of Aristotle and Saint Thomas. Since ancient times,
satirists and moralists have delighted in depicting women’s
weaknesses. The violent indictments brought against them all through
French literature are well-known: Montherlant, with less verve, picks
up the tradition from Jean de Meung. This hostility seems sometimes
founded but is often gratuitous; in truth, it covers up a more or less
skillfully camouflaged will to self-justification. “It is much easier to
accuse one sex than to excuse the other,” says Montaigne. In certain
cases, the process is transparent. It is striking, for example, that the
Roman code limiting a wife’s rights invokes “the imbecility and
fragility of the sex” just when a weakening family structure makes her
a threat to male heirs. It is striking that in the sixteenth century, to
keep a married woman under wardship, the authority of Saint
Augustine affirming “the wife is an animal neither reliable nor stable”
is called on, whereas the unmarried woman is recognized as capable
of managing her own affairs. Montaigne well understood the
arbitrariness and injustice of the lot assigned to women: “Women are
not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been
introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made
31

these without them. There is a natural plotting and scheming between
them and us.” But he does not go so far as to champion their cause. It
is only in the eighteenth century that deeply democratic men begin to
consider the issue objectively. Diderot, for one, tries to prove that, like
man, woman is a human being. A bit later, John Stuart Mill ardently
defends women. But these philosophers are exceptional in their
impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel once again
becomes a partisan quarrel; one of the consequences of the Industrial
Revolution is that women enter the labor force: at that point, women’s
demands leave the realm of the theoretical and find economic grounds;
their adversaries become all the more aggressive; even though landed
property is partially discredited, the bourgeoisie clings to the old
values
where family solidity guarantees private property: it insists all
the more fiercely that woman’s place be in the home as her
emancipation becomes a real threat; even within the working class,
men tried to thwart women’s liberation because women were
becoming dangerous competitors—especially as women were used to
working for low salaries.
6
To prove women’s inferiority,
antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion,
philosophy, and theology but also on science: biology, experimental
psychology, and so forth. At most they were willing to grant
“separate but equal status” to the
other
sex.
*
That winning formula is
most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into
practice with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian
segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of
discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance: whether it
is race, caste, class, or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the
justification process is the same. “The eternal feminine” corresponds
to “the black soul” or “the Jewish character.” However, the Jewish
problem on the whole is very different from the two others: for the
anti-Semite, the Jew is more an enemy than an inferior, and no place
on this earth is recognized as his own; it would be preferable to see
him annihilated. But there are deep analogies between the situations of
women and blacks: both are liberated today from the same
paternalism, and the former master caste wants to keep them “in their
place,” that is, the place chosen for them; in both cases, they praise,
more or less sincerely, the virtues of the “good black,” the carefree,
childlike, merry soul of the resigned black, and the woman who is a
32

“true woman”—frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman
subjugated to man. In both cases, the ruling caste bases its argument
on the state of affairs it created itself. The familiar line from George
Bernard Shaw sums it up: The white American relegates the black to
the rank of shoe-shine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only
good for shining shoes. The same vicious circle can be found in all
analogous circumstances: when an individual or a group of
individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or
they
are
inferior. But the scope of the verb
to be
must be understood;
bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the
sense of the Hegelian dynamic:
to be
is to have become, to have been
made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general
are
today
inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them
with fewer
possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be
perpetuated.
Many men wish it would be: not all men have yet laid down their
arms. The conservative bourgeoisie continues to view women’s
liberation as a danger threatening their morality and their interests.
Some men feel threatened by women’s competition. In
Hebdo-Latin
the other day, a student declared: “Every woman student who takes a
position as a doctor or lawyer is
stealing
a place from us.” That
student never questioned his rights over this world. Economic
interests are not the only ones in play. One of the benefits that
oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them
feels
superior:
in the United States a “poor white” from the South can
console himself for not being a “dirty nigger”; and more prosperous
whites cleverly exploit this pride. Likewise, the most mediocre of
males believes himself a demigod next to women. It was easier for M.
de Montherlant to think himself a hero in front of women
(handpicked, by the way) than to act the man among men, a role that
many women assumed better than he did. Thus, in one of his articles
in
Le Figaro Littéraire
in September 1948, M. Claude Mauriac—
whom everyone admires for his powerful originality—could
7
write
about women: “
We
listen in a tone [
sic!
] of polite indifference … to
the most brilliant one among them, knowing that her intelligence, in a
more or less dazzling way, reflects ideas that come from us.” Clearly
his female interlocutor does not reflect M. Mauriac’s own ideas, since
he is known not to have any; that she reflects ideas originating with
33

men is possible: among males themselves, more than one of them
takes as his own opinions he did not invent; one might wonder if it
would not be in M. Claude Mauriac’s interest to converse with a good
reflection of Descartes, Marx, or Gide rather than with himself; what
is remarkable is that with the ambiguous “
we,
” he identifies with Saint
Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from their heights he looks
down on the herd of women who dare to speak to him on an equal
footing; frankly, I know of more than one woman who would not put
up with M. Mauriac’s “tone of polite indifference.”
I have stressed this example because of its disarming masculine
naïveté. Men profit in many other more subtle ways from woman’s
alterity. For all those suffering from an inferiority complex, this is a
miraculous liniment; no one is more arrogant toward women, more
aggressive or more disdainful, than a man anxious about his own
virility. Those who are not threatened by their fellow men are far more
likely to recognize woman as a
counterpart; but even for them the
myth of the Woman, of the Other, remains precious for many
reasons;
8
they can hardly be blamed for not wanting to lightheartedly
sacrifice all the benefits they derive from the myth: they know what
they lose by relinquishing the woman of their dreams, but they do not
know what the woman of tomorrow will bring them. It takes great
abnegation to refuse to posit oneself as unique and absolute Subject.
Besides, the vast majority of men do not explicitly make this position
their own. They do not
posit
woman as inferior: they are too imbued
today with the democratic ideal not to recognize all human beings as
equals. Within the family, the male child and then the young man sees
the woman as having the same social dignity as the adult male;
afterward, he experiences in desire and love the resistance and
independence of the desired and loved woman; married, he respects in
his wife the spouse and the mother, and in the concrete experience of
married life she affirms herself opposite him as a freedom. He can
thus convince himself that there is no longer a social hierarchy
between the sexes and that on the whole, in spite of their differences,
woman is an equal. As he nevertheless recognizes some points of
inferiority—professional incapacity being the predominant one—he
attributes them to nature. When he has an attitude of benevolence and
partnership toward a woman, he applies the principle of abstract
equality; and he does not
posit
the concrete inequality he recognizes.
34

But as soon as he clashes with her, the situation is reversed. He will
apply the concrete inequality theme and will even allow himself to
disavow abstract equality.
9
This is how many men affirm, with quasi
good faith, that women
are
equal to men and have no demands to
make, and
at the same time
that women will never be equal to men
and that their demands are in vain. It is difficult for men to measure
the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant
from the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are
so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original
nature.
10
The man most sympathetic to women never knows her
concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men
when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even
fathom. We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and
violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving
praise showered on the “real woman”; nor be won over by men’s
enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world
want to share.
We must not, however, be any less mistrustful of feminists’
arguments: very often their attempt to polemicize robs them of all
value. If the “question of women” is so trivial, it is because masculine
arrogance turned it into a “quarrel”; when people quarrel, they no
longer reason well. What people have endlessly sought to prove is
that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man: created after Adam,
she is obviously a secondary being, some say; on the contrary, say
others, Adam was only a rough draft, and God perfected the human
being when he created Eve; her brain is smaller, but relatively bigger;
Christ was made man, but perhaps out of humility. Every argument
has its opposite, and both are often misleading. To see clearly, one
needs to get out of these ruts; these vague notions of superiority,
inferiority, and equality that have distorted all discussions must be
discarded in order to start anew.
But how, then, will we ask the question? And in the first place,
who are we to ask it? Men are judge and party: so are women. Can an
angel be found? In fact, an angel would be ill qualified to speak,
would not understand all the givens of the problem; as for the
hermaphrodite, it is a case of its own: it is not both a man and a
woman, but neither man nor woman. I think certain women are still
best suited to elucidate the situation of women. It is a sophism to
35

claim that Epimenides should be enclosed within the concept of
Cretan and all Cretans within the concept of liar: it is not a mysterious
essence that dictates good or bad faith to men and women; it is their
situation that disposes them to seek the truth to a greater or lesser
extent. Many women today, fortunate to have had all the privileges of
the human being restored to them, can afford the luxury of
impartiality: we even feel the necessity of it. We are no longer like our
militant predecessors; we have more or less won the game; in the
latest discussions on women’s status, the UN has not ceased to
imperiously demand equality of the sexes, and indeed many of us
have never felt our femaleness to be a difficulty or an obstacle; many
other problems seem more essential than those that concern us
uniquely: this very detachment makes it possible to hope our attitude
will be objective. Yet we know the feminine world more intimately
than men do because our roots are in it; we grasp more immediately
what the fact of being female means for a human being, and we care
more
about knowing it. I said that there are more essential problems;
but this one still has a certain importance from our point of view:
How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What
precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been
denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which
direction should we point them? It is striking that most feminine
literature is driven today by an attempt at lucidity more than by a will
to make demands; coming out of an era of muddled controversy, this
book is one attempt among others to take stock of the current state.
But it is no doubt impossible to approach any human problem
without partiality: even the way of asking the questions, of adopting
perspectives, presupposes hierarchies of interests; all characteristics
comprise values; every so-called objective description is set against an
ethical background. Instead of trying to conceal those principles that
are more or less explicitly implied, we would be better off stating
them from the start; then it would not be necessary to specify on each
page the meaning given to the words “superior,” “inferior,” “better,”
“worse,” “progress,” “regression,” and so on. If we examine some of
the books on women, we see that one of the most frequently held
points of view is that of public good or general interest: in reality, this
is taken to mean the interest of society as each one wishes to maintain
or establish it. In our opinion, there is no public good other than one
36

that assures the citizens’ private good; we judge institutions from the
point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals.
But neither do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness:
that is another frequently encountered point of view; are women in a
harem not happier than a woman voter? Is a housewife not happier
than a woman worker? We cannot really know what the word
“happiness” means, and still less what authentic values it covers; there
is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to
call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy: in
particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the
pretext that happiness is immobility. This is a notion, then, we will not
refer to. The perspective we have adopted is one of existentialist
morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely,
through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual
surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for
present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open
future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is
degradation of existence into “in-itself,” of freedom into facticity; this
fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted
on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both
cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual
concerned with justifying
his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to
transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman
is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers
and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself
as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her
to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by
another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies
in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which
always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that
constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a
human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which
ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within
dependence? What circumstances limit women’s freedom and can she
overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like
to elucidate. This means that in focusing on the individual’s
possibilities, we will define these possibilities not in terms of
happiness but in terms of freedom.
37

Clearly this problem would have no meaning if we thought that a
physiological, psychological, or economic destiny weighed on
woman. So we will begin by discussing woman from a biological,
psychoanalytical, and historical materialist point of view. We will then
attempt to positively demonstrate how “feminine reality” has been
constituted, why woman has been defined as Other, and what the
consequences have been from men’s point of view. Then we will
describe the world from the woman’s point of view such as it is
offered to her,
11
and we will see the difficulties women are up against
just when, trying to escape the sphere they have been assigned until
now, they seek to be part of the human
Mitsein
.
1.
Out of print today, titled
Franchise
.
2.
The Kinsey Report, for example, confines itself to defining the sexual characteristics
of the American man, which is completely different.
3.
This idea has been expressed in its most explicit form by E. Levinas in his essay
Le
temps et l’autre (Time and the Other
). He expresses it like this: “Is there not a situation
where alterity would be borne by a being in a positive sense, as essence? What is the
alterity that does not purely and simply enter into the opposition of two species of the
same genus? I think that the absolutely contrary contrary, whose contrariety is in no
way affected by the relationship that can be established between it and its correlative,
the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other, is the feminine. Sex is
not some specific difference … Neither is the difference between the sexes a
contradiction … Neither is the difference between the sexes the duality of two
complementary terms, for two complementary terms presuppose a preexisting
whole … [A]lterity is accomplished in the feminine. The term is on the same level as,
but in meaning opposed to, consciousness.” I suppose Mr. Levinas is not forgetting
that woman also is consciousness for herself. But it is striking that he deliberately
adopts a man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of the subject and the
object. When he writes that woman is mystery, he assumes that she is mystery for man.
So this apparently objective description is in fact an affirmation of masculine
privilege.
4.
See Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary
Structures of Kinship
). I thank Claude Lévi-Strauss for sharing the proofs of his
thesis, which I drew on heavily, particularly in the second part, pp. 76–89.
*
Mitsein
can be translated as “being with.” The French term
réalité humaine
(human
reality) has been problematically used to translate Heidegger’s
Dasein
.—T
RANS
.
38

5.
See second part,
this page
.
6.
See Part Two,
this page
to
this page
*

“L’égalité dans la difference”
in the French text. Literal translation: “different but
equal.” —T
RANS
.
7.
At least he thought he could.
8.
The article by Michel Carrouges on this theme in
Cahiers du Sud
, no. 292, is
significant. He writes with indignation: “If only there were no feminine myth but only
bands of cooks, matrons, prostitutes, and bluestockings with functions of pleasure or
utility!” So, according to him, woman has no existence for herself; he only takes into
account her
function
in the male world. Her finality is in man; in fact, it is possible to
prefer her poetic “function” to all others. The exact question is why she should be
defined in relation to the man.
9.
For example, man declares that he does not find his wife in any way diminished just
because she does not have a profession: work in the home is just as noble and so on.
Yet at the first argument he remonstrates, “You wouldn’t be able to earn a living
without me.”
10.
Describing this very process will be the object of Volume II of this study.
11.
This will be the subject of a second volume.
39

|
PART ONE
|
DESTINY
40

|
CHAPTER 1
|
Biological Data
Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a
womb, an ovary; she is a female: this word is enough to define her.
From a man’s mouth, the epithet “female” sounds like an insult; but
he, not ashamed of his animality, is proud to hear: “He’s a male!” The
term “female” is pejorative not because it roots woman in nature but
because it confines her in her sex, and if this sex, even in an innocent
animal, seems despicable and an enemy to man, it is obviously
because of the disquieting hostility woman triggers in him.
Nevertheless, he wants to find a justification in biology for this
feeling. The word “female” evokes a saraband of images: an
enormous round egg snatching and castrating the agile sperm;
monstrous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over the servile
males; the praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing
their partners and gobbling them up; the dog in heat running through
back alleys, leaving perverse smells in her wake; the monkey showing
herself off brazenly, sneaking away with flirtatious hypocrisy. And
the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie down
slavishly under the male’s imperial embrace, inert, impatient, shrewd,
stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated. Man projects all
females at once onto woman. And the fact is that she is a female. But
if one wants to stop thinking in commonplaces, two questions arise.
What does the female represent in the animal kingdom? And what
unique kind of female is realized in woman?
Males and females are two types of individuals who are differentiated
within one species for the purposes of reproduction; they can be
defined only correlatively. But it has to be pointed out first that the
very meaning of
division
of the species into two sexes is not clear.
It does not occur universally in nature. In one-celled animals,
infusorians, amoebas, bacilli, and so on, multiplication is
41

fundamentally distinct from sexuality, with cells dividing and
subdividing individually. For some
metazoans, reproduction occurs
by schizogenesis, that is dividing the individual whose origin is also
asexual, or by blastogenesis, that is dividing the individual itself
produced by a sexual phenomenon: the phenomena of budding or
segmentation observed in freshwater hydras, coelenterates, sponges,
worms, and tunicates are well-known examples. In parthenogenesis,
the virgin egg develops in embryonic form without male intervention.
The male plays no role or only a secondary one: unfertilized honeybee
eggs subdivide and produce drones; in the case of aphids, males are
absent for a number of generations, and the unfertilized eggs produce
females. Parthenogenesis in the sea urchin, the starfish, and the toad
has been artificially reproduced. However, sometimes in the protozoa,
two cells can merge, forming what is called a zygote; fertilization is
necessary for honeybee eggs to engender females and aphid eggs,
males. Some biologists have thus concluded that even in species
capable of perpetuating themselves unilaterally, the renewal of genetic
diversity through mixing of parental chromosomes would benefit the
line’s rejuvenation and vigor; in this view, then, in the more complex
forms of life, sexuality is an indispensable function; only elementary
organisms could multiply without sexes, and even so they would
exhaust their vitality. But today this hypothesis is most inexact;
observations have proved that asexual multiplication can occur
indefinitely without any noticeable degeneration; this is particularly
striking in bacilli; more and more—and bolder and even bolder—
parthenogenetic experiments have been carried out, and in many
species the male seems radically useless. Moreover, even if the value
of intercellular exchange could be demonstrated, it would be a purely
ungrounded fact. Biology attests to sexual differentiation, but even if
biology were imbued with finalism, the differentiation of sexes could
not be deduced from cellular structure, laws of cellular multiplication,
or any elementary phenomenon.
The existence of heterogenetic gametes alone does not necessarily
mean there are two distinct sexes;
1
the differentiation of reproductive
cells often does not bring about a division of the species into two
types: both can belong to the same individual. This is true of
hermaphroditic species, so common in plants, and also in many
invertebrates, among which are the annulates and mollusks.
42

Reproduction takes place either by self-fertilization or by cross-
fertilization. Some biologists use this fact to claim the justification of
the established order. They consider gonochorism—that is, the system
in which the different gonads
2
belong to distinct individuals—as
an
improvement on hermaphroditism, realized by evolution; others, by
contrast, consider gonochorism primitive: for those biologists,
hermaphroditism would thus be its degeneration. In any case, these
notions of superiority of one system over another involve highly
contestable theories concerning evolution. All that can be affirmed
with certainty is that these two means of reproduction coexist in
nature, that they both perpetuate species, and that the heterogeneity of
both gametes and gonad-producing organisms seems to be accidental.
The differentiation of individuals into males and females thus occurs
as an irreducible and contingent fact.
Most philosophies have taken sexual differentiation for granted
without attempting to explain it. The Platonic myth has it that in the
beginning there were men, women, and androgynes; each individual
had a double face, four arms, four legs, and two bodies joined
together; one day they were split into two “as one would split eggs in
two,” and ever since then each half seeks to recover its other half: the
gods decided later that new human beings would be created by the
coupling of two unlike halves. This story only tries to explain love:
the differentiation of sexes is taken as a given from the start. Aristotle
offers no better account: for if cooperation of matter and form is
necessary for any action, it is not necessary that active and passive
principles be distributed into two categories of heterogenic
individuals. Saint Thomas declared that woman was an “inessential”
being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the
accidental character of sexuality. Hegel, however, would have been
untrue to his rationalist passion had he not attempted to justify it
logically. According to him, sexuality is the mediation by which the
subject concretely achieves itself as a genus. “The genus is therefore
present in the individual as a straining against the inadequacy of its
single actuality, as the urge to obtain its self-feeling in the other of its
genus, to integrate itself through union with it and through this
mediation to close the genus with itself and bring it into existence
—
copulation
.”
3
And a little further along, “The process consists in
this, that they become in reality what they are in themselves, namely,
43

one genus, the same subjective vitality.” And Hegel then declares that
in order for the process of union to occur, there has to be
differentiation of the two sexes. But his demonstration is not
convincing: the preconceived idea of locating the three moments of the
syllogism in any operation is too obvious here. The surpassing of the
individual toward the species, by which individual and species
accomplish themselves in their
own truth could occur without the
third element, by the simple relation of genitor to child: reproduction
could be asexual. Or the relation to each other could be that of two of
the same kind, with differentiation occurring in the singularity of
individuals of the same type, as in hermaphroditic species. Hegel’s
description brings out a very important significance of sexuality: but
he always makes the same error of equating significance with reason.
It is through sexual activity that men define the sexes and their
relations, just as they create the meaning and value of all the functions
they accomplish: but sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the
human being’s nature. In
Phénoménologie de la perception
(
Phenomenology of Perception
), Merleau-Ponty points out that
human existence calls for revision of the notions of necessity and
contingency. “Existence has no fortuitous attributes, no content which
does not contribute towards giving it its form; it does not give
admittance to any pure fact because it is the process by which facts are
drawn up.” This is true. But it is also true that there are conditions
without which the very fact of existence would seem to be impossible.
Presence in the world vigorously implies the positing of a body that is
both a thing of the world and a point of view on this world: but this
body need not possess this or that particular structure. In
L’être et le
néant
(
Being and Nothingness
), Sartre disputes Heidegger’s
affirmation that human reality is doomed to death because of its
finitude; he establishes that a finite and temporally limitless existence
could be conceivable; nevertheless, if human life were not inhabited
by death, the relationship of human beings to the world and to
themselves would be so deeply upset that the statement “man is
mortal” would be anything but an empirical truth: immortal, an
existent would no longer be what we call a man. One of the essential
features of man’s destiny is that the movement of his temporal life
creates behind and ahead of him the infinity of the past and the future:
the perpetuation of the species appears thus as the correlative of
44

individual limitation, so the phenomenon of reproduction can be
considered as ontologically grounded. But this is where one must
stop; the perpetuation of the species does not entail sexual
differentiation. That it is taken on by existents in such a way that it
thereby enters into the concrete definition of existence, so be it.
Nevertheless, a consciousness without a body or an immortal human
being is rigorously inconceivable, whereas a society can be imagined
that reproduces itself by parthenogenesis or is composed of
hermaphrodites.
Opinions about the respective roles of the two sexes have varied
greatly; they were initially devoid of any scientific basis and only
reflected social myths. It was thought for a long time, and is still
thought in some primitive societies based on matrilineal filiation, that
the father has no part in the child’s conception: ancestral larvae were
supposed to infiltrate the
womb in the form of living germs. With the
advent of patriarchy, the male resolutely claimed his posterity; the
mother had to be granted a role in procreation even though she merely
carried and fattened the living seed: the father alone was the creator.
Artistotle imagined that the fetus was produced by the meeting of the
sperm and the menses: in this symbiosis, woman just provided
passive material, while the male principle is strength, activity,
movement, and life. Hippocrates’ doctrine also recognized two types
of seeds, a weak or female one, and a strong one, which was male.
Artistotelian theory was perpetuated throughout the Middle Ages and
down to the modern period. In the middle of the seventeenth century,
Harvey, slaughtering female deer shortly after they had mated, found
vesicles in the uterine horns that he thought were eggs but that were
really embryos. The Danish scientist Steno coined the term “ovaries”
for the female genital glands that had until then been called “feminine
testicles,” and he noted the existence of vesicles on their surface that
Graaf, in 1672, had erroneously identified as eggs and to which he
gave his name. The ovary was still regarded as a homologue of the
male gland. That same year, though, “spermatic animalcules” were
discovered penetrating the feminine womb. But it was thought that
they went there for nourishment only, and that the individual was
already prefigured in them; in 1694, the Dutchman Hartsoeker drew
an image of the homunculus hidden in the sperm, and in 1699 another
scientist declared he had seen the sperm cast off a kind of slough
45

under which there was a little man, which he also drew. In these
hypotheses woman merely fattened a living and active, and perfectly
constituted, principle. These theories were not universally accepted,
and discussion continued until the nineteenth century. The invention
of the microscope led to the study of the animal egg; in 1827, Baer
identified the mammal’s egg: an element contained inside Graaf’s
follicle. Soon its structure could be studied; in 1835, the sarcode—that
is, the protoplasm—and then the cell were discovered; in 1877, the
sperm was observed penetrating the starfish egg. From that the
symmetry of the two gametes’ nuclei was established; their fusion
was analyzed in detail for the first time in 1883 by a Belgian
zoologist.
But Aristotle’s ideas have not lost all validity. Hegel thought the
two sexes must be different: one is active and the other passive, and it
goes without saying that passivity will be the female’s lot. “Because
of this differentiation, man is thus the active principle while woman is
the passive principle because she resides in her non-developed
unity.”
4
And even when the
ovum was recognized as an active
principle, men continued to pit its inertia against the agility of the
sperm. Today, there is a tendency to see the contrary: the discoveries
of parthenogenesis have led some scientists to reduce the role of the
male to that of a simple physicochemical agent. In some species the
action of an acid or a mechanical stimulation has been shown to
trigger the division of the egg and the development of the embryo; and
from that it was boldly assumed that the male gamete was not
necessary for generation; it would be at most a ferment; perhaps
man’s cooperation in procreation would one day become useless: that
seems to be many women’s desire. But nothing warrants such a bold
expectation because nothing warrants universalizing life’s specific
processes. The phenomena of asexual multiplication and
parthenogenesis are neither more nor less fundamental than those of
sexual reproduction. And it has already been noted that this form is
not a priori favored: but no fact proves it is reducible to a more
elementary mechanism.
Rejecting any a priori doctrine, any implausible theory, we find
ourselves before a fact that has neither ontological nor empirical basis
and whose impact cannot a priori be understood. By examining it in
its concrete reality, we can hope to extract its significance: thus
46

perhaps the content of the word “female” will come to light.
The idea here is not to propose a philosophy of life or to take sides
too hastily in the quarrel between finalism and mechanism. Yet it is
noteworthy that physiologists and biologists all use a more or less
finalistic language merely because they ascribe meaning to vital
phenomena. We will use their vocabulary. Without coming to any
conclusion about life and consciousness, we can affirm that any living
fact indicates transcendence, and that a project is in the making in
every function: these descriptions do not suggest more than this.
In most species, male and female organisms cooperate for
reproduction. They are basically defined by the gametes they produce.
In some algae and fungi, the cells that fuse to produce the egg are
identical; these cases of isogamy are significant in that they manifest
the basal equivalence of the usually differentiated gametes: but their
analogy remains striking. Sperm and ova result from a basically
identical cellular evolution: the development of primitive female cells
into oocytes differs from that of spermatocytes by protoplasmic
phenomena, but the nuclear phenomena are approximately the same.
The idea the biologist Ancel expressed in 1903 is still considered
valid today: “An undifferentiated progerminating cell becomes male or
female depending on the conditions in the genital gland at
the moment
of its appearance, conditions determined by the transformation of
some epithelial cells into nourishing elements, developers of a special
material.” This primary kinship is expressed in the structure of the
two gametes that carry the same number of chromosomes inside each
species. During fertilization, the two nuclei merge their substance, and
the chromosomes in each are reduced to half their original number:
this reduction takes place in both of them in a similar way; the last two
divisions of the ovum result in the formation of polar globules
equivalent to the last divisions of the sperm. It is thought today that,
depending on the species, the male or female gamete determines the
sex: for mammals, the sperm possesses a chromosome that is
heterogenic to the others and potentially either male or female.
According to Mendel’s statistical laws, transmission of hereditary
characteristics takes place equally from the father and the mother.
What is important to see is that in this meeting neither gamete takes
47

precedence over the other: they both sacrifice their individuality; the
egg absorbs the totality of their substance. There are thus two strong
current biases that—at least at this basic biological level—prove false:
The first one is the female’s passivity; the living spark is not enclosed
within either of the two gametes. It springs forth from their meeting;
the nucleus of the ovum is a vital principle perfectly symmetrical to
the sperm’s. The second bias contradicts the first, which does not
exclude the fact that they often coexist: the permanence of the species
is guaranteed by the female since the male principle has an explosive
and fleeting existence. In reality, the embryo equally perpetuates the
germ cells of the father and the mother and retransmits them together
to its descendants, sometimes in a male and sometimes in a female
form. One might say that an androgynous germ cell survives the
individual metamorphoses of the soma from generation to generation.
That being said, there are highly interesting secondary differences
to be observed between the ovum and the sperm; the essential
singularity of the ovum is that it is supplied with material destined to
nourish and protect the embryo; it stocks up on reserves from which
the fetus will build its tissues, reserves that are not a living substance
but an inert material; the result is a massive, relatively voluminous,
spherical or ellipsoidal form. The bird’s egg’s dimensions are well-
known. The woman’s egg measures
0.13
mm, while the human sperm
contains sixty thousand sperm per cubic millimeter: their mass is
extremely small. The sperm has a threadlike tail, a little elongated
head; no foreign substance weighs it down. It is entirely life; this
structure destines it for mobility; the ovum, on the contrary, where the
future of the fetus is stored, is a fixed element:
enclosed in the female
organism or suspended in an exterior environment, it waits passively
for fertilization. The male gamete seeks it out; the sperm is always a
naked cell, while the ovum is, according to the species, protected or
not by a membrane; but in any case, the sperm bumps into the ovum
when it comes into contact with it, makes it waver, and infiltrates it;
the male gamete loses its tail; its head swells, and, twisting, it reaches
the nucleus. Meanwhile, the egg immediately forms a membrane that
keeps other sperm from entering. For echinoderms where fertilization
is external, it is easy to observe the rush of the sperm that surround
the floating and inert egg like a halo. This competition is also another
important phenomenon found in most species; much smaller than the
48

ovum, the sperm are generally produced in considerable quantities,
and each ovum has many suitors.
Thus, the ovum, active in the nucleus, its essential principle, is
superficially passive; its mass, closed upon itself, compact in itself,
evokes the nocturnal heaviness and repose of the in-itself: the ancients
visualized the closed world in the form of a sphere or opaque atom;
immobile, the ovum waits; by contrast, the open sperm, tiny and agile,
embodies the impatience and worry of existence. One should not get
carried away with the pleasure of allegories: the ovum has sometimes
been likened to immanence and the sperm to transcendence. By giving
up its transcendence and mobility, the sperm penetrates the female
element: it is grabbed and castrated by the inert mass that absorbs it
after cutting off its tail; like all passive actions, this one is magical and
disturbing; the male gamete activity is rational, a measurable
movement in terms of time and space. In truth, these are merely
ramblings. Male and female gametes merge together in the egg;
together they cancel each other out in their totality. It is false to claim
that the egg voraciously absorbs the male gamete and just as false to
say that the latter victoriously appropriates the female cell’s reserves
because in the act that merges them, their individuality disappears.
And to a mechanistic philosophy, the movement undoubtedly looks
like a rational phenomenon par excellence; but for modern physics the
idea is no clearer than that of action at a distance; besides, the details
of the physicochemical interactions leading to fertilization are not
known. It is possible, however, to come away with a valuable
indication from this meeting. There are two movements that come
together in life, and life maintains itself only by surpassing itself. It
does not surpass itself without maintaining itself; these two moments
are always accomplished together. It is academic to claim to separate
them: nevertheless, it is either one or the other that dominates. The
two unified gametes go beyond and are perpetuated; but
the ovum’s
structure anticipates future needs; it is constituted to nourish the life
that will awaken in it, while the sperm is in no way equipped to
ensure the development of the germ it gives rise to. In contrast,
whereas the sperm moves around, the ovum is incapable of triggering
the change that will bring about a new explosion of life. Without the
egg’s prescience, the sperm’s action would be useless; but without the
latter’s initiative, the egg would not accomplish its vital potential. The
49

conclusion is thus that fundamentally the role of the two gametes is
identical; together they create a living being in which both of them
lose and surpass themselves. But in the secondary and superficial
phenomena that condition fertilization, it is through the male element
that the change in situation occurs for the new eclosion of life; it is
through the female element that this eclosion is established in a stable
element.
It would be rash to deduce from such an observation that woman’s
place is in the home: but there are rash people. In his book
Tempérament et caractère selon les individus, les sexes et les races
(Nature and Character According to Individuals, Sex, and Race),
Alfred Fouillée claimed he could define woman entirely from the
ovum and man from the sperm; many so-called deep theories are
based on this game of dubious analogies. It is never clear what
philosophy of nature this pseudo-thinking refers to. If one considers
laws of heredity, men and women come equally from a sperm and an
ovum. I suppose that vestiges of the old medieval philosophy—that
the cosmos was the exact reflection of a microcosm—are floating
around in these foggy minds: it was imagined that the ovum is a
female homunculus and woman a giant ovum. These reveries
dismissed since the days of alchemy make a weird contrast with the
scientific precision of descriptions being used at this very moment:
modern biology does not mesh with medieval symbolism; but our
people do not look all that closely. If one is a bit scrupulous, one has
to agree that it is a long way from ovum to woman. The ovum does
not yet even contain the very notion of female. Hegel rightly notes that
the sexual relationship cannot be reduced to that of two gametes.
Thus, the female organism has to be studied in its totality.
It has already been pointed out that for many vegetables and some
primitive animals, among them mollusks, gamete specification does
not lead to individual specification, as they produce both ova and
sperm. Even when the sexes separate, the barriers between them are
not tight like those that separate species; just as gametes are defined
from an originally undifferentiated tissue, males and females develop
more as variations on a common base. For certain animals—the
Bonellia viridis
is the most typical
case
*
—the embryo is first asexual,
and its eventual sexuality is determined by the incertitudes of its
development. It is accepted today that in most species sex
50

determination depends on the genotypical constitution of the egg. The
virgin egg of the honeybee reproducing itself by parthenogenesis
yields males exclusively; that of fruit flies in the exact same conditions
yields females exclusively. When eggs are fertilized, it is to be noted
that—except for some spiders—an approximately equal number of
male and female individuals is procreated; differentiation comes from
the heterogeneity of one of the two types of gametes: for mammals
sperm possess either a male or a female potentiality. It is not really
known what determines the singular character of heterogenic gametes
during spermatogenesis or oogenesis; in any case, Mendel’s statistical
laws are sufficient to explain their regular distribution. For both sexes,
fertilization and the beginning of embryonic development occur in an
identical way; the epithelial tissue destined to evolve into a gonad is
undifferentiated at the outset; at a certain stage of maturation testicles
take shape or later the ovary takes form. This explains why there are
many intermediaries between hermaphroditism and gonochorism;
very often one of the sexes possesses certain organs characteristic of
the complementary sex: the toad is the most striking case of that; the
male has an atrophied ovary called Bidder’s organ that can be made to
produce eggs artificially. Mammals also have vestiges of this sexual
bipotentiality: for example, the pedicled and sessile hydra, the
uterus
masculinus
, mammary glands in the male, Gartner’s duct in the
female, and the clitoris. Even in species where sexual division is the
most clear-cut, there are individuals that are both male and female
simultaneously: cases of intersexuality are numerous in animals and
human beings; and in butterflies and crustaceans there are examples of
gynandromorphism in which male and female characteristics are
juxtaposed in a kind of mosaic. Genotypically defined, the fetus is
nevertheless deeply influenced by the milieu from which it draws its
nourishment: for ants, honeybees, and termites, how nutrition occurs
makes the larva a realized female or thwarts its sexual maturation,
reducing it to the rank of worker; the influence in this case pervades
the whole organism: for insects the soma is sexually defined very
early and does not depend on gonads. For vertebrates, it is essentially
the gonadic hormones that play a regulatory role. Many experiments
have demonstrated that varying the endocrine milieu makes it possible
to act on sex determination; other grafting and
castration experiments
carried out on adult animals have led to the modern theory of
51

sexuality: in male and female vertebrates, the soma is identical and can
be considered a neutral element; the action of the gonad gives it its
sexual characteristics; some of the secreted hormones act as stimulants
and others as inhibitors; the genital tract itself is somatic, and
embryology shows that it takes shape under the influence of
hormones from bisexual precursors. Intersexuality exists when
hormonal balance has not been realized and when neither of the two
sexual potentialities has been clearly accomplished.
Equally distributed in the species, and evolved analogously from
identical roots, male and female organisms seem profoundly
symmetrical once they are formed. Both are characterized by the
presence of gamete-producing glands, ovaries, or testicles, with the
analogous processes of spermatogenesis and ovogenesis, as was seen
earlier; these glands deliver their secretion in a more or less complex
canal according to the hierarchy of the species: the female drops the
egg directly by the oviduct and holds it in the cloaca or in a
differentiated uterus before expelling it; the male either lets go of the
semen outside or is equipped with a copulating organ that allows it to
penetrate the female. Statistically, the male and the female thus look
like two complementary types. They have to be envisaged from a
functional point of view to grasp their singularity.
It is very difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion
of female; defining her as a carrier of ova and the male as a carrier of
sperm is insufficient because the relation of organism to gonads is
extremely variable; inversely, the differentiation of the gametes does
not directly affect the organism as a whole: it was sometimes claimed
that as the ovum was bigger, it consumed more living force than the
sperm; but the latter is secreted in infinitely greater quantity so that in
the two sexes the expenditure balances out. Spermatogenesis was
taken as an example of prodigality and ovulation a model of economy:
but in this phenomenon there is also an absurd profusion; the
immense majority of eggs are never fertilized. In any case, gametes
and gonads are not microcosms of the whole organism. This is what
has to be studied directly.
One of the most noteworthy features when surveying the steps of
the animal ladder is that, from bottom to top, life becomes more
individual; at the bottom it concentrates on the maintenance of the
species, and at the top it puts its energies into single individuals. In
52

lower species, the organism is reduced to barely more than the
reproductive apparatus; in this case, the ovum—and therefore the
female—takes precedence over everything else, since it is above all
the ovum that is dedicated to the sheer repetition of life;
but it is barely
more than an abdomen, and its existence is entirely devoured by the
work of a monstrous ovulation. It reaches gigantic dimensions
compared with the male; but its members are often just stumps, its
body a formless bag; all the organs have degenerated to nourish the
eggs. In truth, although they constitute two distinct organisms, males
and females can hardly be thought of as individuals; they form one
whole with elements that are inextricably linked: these are
intermediary cases between hermaphroditism and gonochorism. For
the entoniscid, parasites that live off the crab, the female is a kind of
whitish sausage surrounded by incubating slivers harboring
thousands of eggs; in their midst are minuscule males as well as
larvae destined to provide replacement males. The enslavement of the
dwarf male is even more total in the edriolydnus: it is attached beneath
the female’s operculum and is without a digestive tube of its own; it is
solely devoted to reproduction. In all these cases the female is just as
enslaved as the male: she is a slave to the species; while the male is
fastened to his spouse, his spouse is also fastened, either to a living
organism on which she feeds as a parasite or to a mineral substratum;
she is consumed by producing eggs the minuscule male fertilizes. As
life takes on more complex forms, individual autonomy develops with
the loosening of the link uniting the sexes; but insects of both sexes
remain tightly subordinate to the eggs. In the case of ephemerals, both
spouses often die after coitus and laying; and in the case of rotifers
and mosquitoes, the male, lacking a digestive apparatus, sometimes
perishes after fertilization, while the female can feed herself and
survive: egg formation and laying take time; the mother dies as soon
as the next generation’s future has been assured. The privilege of
many female insects comes from the fact that fertilization is generally
a rapid process while ovulation and incubation of the eggs demand a
long period of time. For termites, the enormous mush-stuffed queen
that lays an egg a second until she is sterile—and then is pitilessly
massacred—is no less a slave than the dwarf male attached to her
abdomen that fertilizes the eggs as they are expelled. In bee and ant
matriarchies, males are intruders that are massacred each season: at the
53

time of the wedding flight, all the male ants escape from the anthill
and fly toward the females; if they reach and fertilize them, they die
immediately, exhausted; if not, the female workers refuse them entry.
They kill them in front of the entrances or let them starve to death; but
the fertilized female has a sad fate: she digs herself into the earth alone
and often dies from exhaustion while laying the first eggs; if she
manages to reconstitute a colony, she is imprisoned for twelve years
laying eggs ceaselessly; the female workers whose sexuality has been
atrophied live for four years, but their whole life is
devoted to raising
the larvae. Likewise for the bees: the drone that catches the queen in
her wedding flight crashes to the ground eviscerated; the other drones
return to their colony, where they are unproductive and in the way; at
the beginning of the winter, they are killed. But the sterile worker bees
trade their right to life for incessant work; the queen is really the
hive’s slave: she lays eggs ceaselessly; and the old queen dies; some
larvae are nourished so they can try to succeed her. The first one
hatched kills the others in the cradle. The female giant spider carries
her eggs in a bag until they reach maturity: she is bigger and stronger
than the male, and she sometimes devours him after coupling; the
same practices can be seen in the praying mantis, which has taken
shape as the myth of devouring femininity: the egg castrates the
sperm, and the praying mantis assassinates her spouse; these facts
prefigure a woman’s dream of castration. But in truth, the praying
mantis only manifests such cruelty in captivity: free and with rich
enough food around, she rarely makes a meal out of the male; if she
does, it is like the solitary ant that often eats some of her own eggs in
order to have the strength to lay eggs and perpetuate the species.
Seeing in these facts the harbinger of the “battle of the sexes” that sets
individuals as such against each other is just rambling. Neither for the
ants, nor the honeybees, nor the termites, nor the spider, nor the
praying mantis can one say that the female enslaves and devours the
male: it is the species that devours both of them in different ways. The
female lives longer and seems to have more importance; but she has
no autonomy; laying, incubation, and care of the larvae make up her
whole destiny; her other functions are totally or partially atrophied. By
contrast, an individual existence takes shape in the male. He very
often takes more initiative than the female in fertilization; it is he who
seeks her out, who attacks, palpates, seizes her and imposes coitus on
54

her; sometimes he has to fight off other males. Accordingly, the
organs of locomotion, touch, and prehension are also often more
developed; many female butterflies are apterous, whereas their males
have wings; males have more developed colors, elytrons, feet, and
claws; and sometimes this profusion can also be seen in a luxurious
vanity of gorgeous colors. Aside from the fleeting coitus, the male’s
life is useless, gratuitous: next to the diligence of worker females, the
laziness of drones is a privilege worth noting. But this privilege is
outrageous; the male often pays with his life for this uselessness that
contains the germ of independence. A species that enslaves the female
punishes the male attempting to escape: it eliminates him brutally.
In the higher forms of life, reproduction becomes the production of
differentiated organisms; it has a twofold face: maintenance of the
species and creation of new individuals; this innovative aspect asserts
itself as the
singularity of the individual is confirmed. It is thus
striking that these two moments of perpetuation and creation divide;
this break, already marked at the time of the egg’s fertilization, is
present in the generating phenomenon as a whole. The structure of the
egg itself does not order this division; the female, like the male,
possesses a certain autonomy, and her link with the egg loosens; the
female fish, amphibian, and bird are much more than an abdomen; the
weaker the mother-to-egg link, the less labor parturition involves, and
the more undifferentiated is the relation between parents and their
offspring. Sometimes, the newly hatched lives are the father’s
responsibility; this is often the case with fish. Water is an element that
can carry eggs and sperm and enables their meeting; fertilization in the
aquatic milieu is almost always external; fish do not mate: at best
some rub against each other for stimulation. The mother expels the
ova and the father the sperm: they have identical roles. There is no
more reason for the mother to recognize the eggs as her own than the
father. In some species, parents abandon the eggs, which develop
without help; sometimes the mother has prepared a nest for them;
sometimes she watches over them after fertilization; but very often the
father takes charge of them: as soon as he has fertilized them, he
chases away the female, who tries to devour them; he fiercely defends
them from anything that approaches; there are those that put up a kind
of protective nest by emitting air bubbles covered with an isolating
substance; they also often incubate the eggs in their mouths or, like
55

the sea horse, in the folds of the stomach. Analogous phenomena can
be seen in toads: they do not have real coitus; the male embraces the
female and this embrace stimulates the laying: while the eggs are
coming out of the cloaca, the male lets out his sperm. Very often—
and in particular in the toad known as the midwife toad—the father
winds the strings of eggs around his feet and carries them around to
guarantee their hatching. As for birds, the egg forms rather slowly
within the female; the egg is both relatively big and hard to expel; it
has much closer relations with the mother than with the father that
fertilized it during a quick coitus; the female is the one who usually
sits on it and then looks after the young; but very frequently the father
participates in the nest’s construction and the protection and nutrition
of the young; there are rare cases—for example the passerine—where
the male sits on the eggs and then raises the young. Male and female
pigeons secrete a kind of milk in their crop that they feed to the
fledglings. What is noteworthy in all these cases in which fathers play
a nurturing role is that spermatogenesis stops during the period they
devote to their offspring; busy with maintaining life, the father has no
impetus to bring forth new life-forms.
The most complex and concretely individualized life is found in
mammals.
The split of the two vital moments, maintaining and
creating, takes place definitively in the separation of the sexes. In this
branching out—and considering vertebrates only—the mother has the
closest connection to her offspring, whereas the father is more
uninterested; the whole organism of the female is adapted to and
determined by the servitude of maternity, while the sexual initiative is
the prerogative of the male. The female is the prey of the species; for
one or two seasons, depending on the case, her whole life is regulated
by a sexual cycle—the estrous cycle—whose length and periodicity
vary from one species to another. This cycle has two phases: during
the first one the ova mature (the number varies according to the
species), and a nidification process occurs in the womb; in the second
phase a fat necrosis is produced, ending in the elimination of the
structure, that is a whitish discharge. The estrus corresponds to the
period of heat; but heat in the female is rather passive; she is ready to
receive the male, she waits for him; for mammals—and some birds—
she might invite him; but she limits herself to calling him by noises,
displays, or exhibitions; she could never impose coitus. That decision
56

is up to him in the end. Even for insects where the female has major
privileges and consents to total sacrifice for the species, it is usually
the male that provokes fertilization; male fish often invite the female to
spawn by their presence or by touching; for amphibians, the male acts
as a stimulator. But for birds and above all mammals, the male
imposes himself on her; very often she submits to him with
indifference or even resists him. Whether she is provocative or
consensual, it is he who
takes
her: she is
taken
. The word often has a
very precise meaning: either because he has specific organs or
because he is stronger, the male grabs and immobilizes her; he is the
one that actively makes the coitus movements; for many insects, birds,
and mammals, he penetrates her. In that regard, she is like a raped
interiority. The male does not do violence to the species, because the
species can only perpetuate itself by renewal; it would perish if ova
and sperm did not meet; but the female whose job it is to protect the
egg encloses it in herself, and her body that constitutes a shelter for
the egg removes it from the male’s fertilizing action; there is thus a
resistance that has to be broken down, and so by penetrating the egg
the male realizes himself as activity. His domination is expressed by
the coital position of almost all animals; the male is
on
the female.
And the organ he uses is incontestably material too, but it is seen in an
animated state: it is a tool, while the female organ in this operation is
merely an inert receptacle. The male deposits his sperm; the female
receives it. Thus, although she plays a fundamentally active role in
procreation, she endures coitus, which alienates her from herself by
penetration and internal fertilization;
although she feels the sexual
need as an individual need—since in heat she might seek out the male
—she nevertheless experiences the sexual adventure in its immediacy
as an interior story and not in relation to the world and to others. But
the fundamental difference between male and female mammals is that
in the same quick instant, the sperm, by which the male’s life
transcends into another, becomes foreign to it and is separated from
its body; thus the male, at the very moment it goes beyond its
individuality, encloses itself once again in it. By contrast, the ovum
began to separate itself from the female when, ripe, it released itself
from the follicle to fall into the oviduct; penetrated by a foreign
gamete, it implants itself in the uterus: first violated, the female is then
alienated; she carries the fetus in her womb for varying stages of
57

maturation depending on the species: the guinea pig is born almost
adult; the dog close to a fetal state; inhabited by another who is
nourished by her substance, the female is both herself and other than
herself during the whole gestation period; after delivery, she feeds the
newborn with milk from her breasts. This makes it difficult to know
when it can be considered autonomous: at fertilization, birth, or
weaning? It is noteworthy that the more the female becomes a separate
individual, the more imperiously the living continuity is affirmed
beyond any separation. The fish or the bird that expels the virgin
ovum or the fertilized egg is less prey to its offspring than the female
mammal. The female mammal recovers her autonomy after the birth of
the young: a distance is thus established between her and them; and
starting from this separation, she devotes herself to them; she takes
care of them, showing initiative and invention; she fights to defend
them against other animals and even becomes aggressive. But she
does not usually seek to affirm her individuality; she does not oppose
either males or females; she does not have a fighting instinct;
5
in spite
of Darwin’s assertions, disparaged today, the female in general
accepts the male that presents himself. It is not that she lacks
individual qualities—far from it; in periods when she escapes the
servitude of maternity, she can sometimes be the male’s equal: the
mare is as quick as the stallion, the female hound has as keen a nose
as the male, female monkeys show as much intelligence as males
when tested. But this individuality is not asserted: the female abdicates
it for the benefit of the species that demands this abdication.
The male’s destiny is very different; it has just been shown that in
his very surpassing, he separates himself and is confirmed in himself.
This feature
is constant from insects to higher animals. Even fish and
cetaceans that live in schools, loosely gathered within the group, tear
themselves away when in heat; they isolate themselves and become
aggressive toward other males. While sexuality is immediate for the
female, it is indirect in the male: he actively bridges the distance
between desire and its satisfaction; he moves, seeks, feels the female,
caresses her, immobilizes her before penetrating; the organs for the
functions of relation, locomotion, and prehension are often better
developed in the male. It is noteworthy that the active impulsion that
produces his sperm’s multiplication is accompanied by brilliant
feathers, shiny scales, horns, antlers, a crest, song, exuberance;
58

neither the “wedding attire” he puts on in heat nor the displays of
seduction are now thought to have a selective finality; but they are
witness to the power of life that flourishes in him with gratuitous and
magnificent splendor. This vital generosity, the activity deployed in
mating and in coitus itself, the dominating affirmation of his power
over the female—all of this contributes to positing the individual as
such at the moment he surpasses himself. Hegel is right to see the
subjective element in the male while the female remains enclosed in
the species. Subjectivity and separateness immediately mean conflict.
Aggressiveness is one of the characteristics of the male in heat. It
cannot be explained by competition, since there are about the same
number of females as males; it is rather competition that is explained
by this combative will. It is as if before procreating, the male, claiming
as his very own the act that perpetuates the species, confirms the
reality of his individuality in his fight against his fellow creatures. The
species inhabits the female and absorbs much of her individual life;
the male, by contrast, integrates specific living forces in his individual
life. He is undoubtedly also subject to laws that surpass him; he
experiences spermatogenesis and periodic heats; but these processes
affect the organism as a whole much less than the estrus cycle; neither
sperm production nor ovogenesis as such is tiring: the absorbing job
for the female is the development of the egg into an adult animal.
Coitus is a rapid operation that does not reduce the male’s vitality. He
manifests almost no paternal instinct. He very often abandons the
female after mating. When he remains near her as head of a family
group (monogamic family, harem, or herd), he plays a protective and
nurturing role vis-à-vis the whole community; it is rare for him to take
a direct interest in the children. In those species that are favorable to
the flourishing of individual life, the male’s effort at autonomy—
which, in the lower animals, leads to its ruin—is crowned with
success. He is usually bigger than the female, stronger, quicker, more
adventurous; he leads a more independent life whose activities are
more gratuitous; he is
more conquering, more imperious: in animal
societies, it is he who commands.
In nature nothing is ever completely clear: the two types, male and
female, are not always sharply distinguished; there is often a
dimorphism—the color of the coat, the placement of the mottling—
that seems absolutely contingent; it does happen, though, that the two
59

types are not distinguishable, their functions barely differentiated, as
was seen with fish. However, as a whole and especially at the top of
the animal scale, the two sexes represent two diverse aspects of the
species’ life. Their opposition is not, as has been claimed, one of
passivity and activity: not only is the ovum nucleus active, but the
development of the embryo is also a living process and not a
mechanical one. It would be too simple to define this opposition as
one of change and permanence: the sperm creates only because its
vitality is maintained in the egg; the ovum can only exist by
surpassing itself or else it regresses and degenerates. But it is true that
in both these active operations—maintenance and creation—the
synthesis of becoming is not realized in the same way. Maintaining
means denying the dispersion of instants, thereby affirming continuity
in the course of their outpouring; creating means exploding an
irreducible and separate present within a temporal unity, and it is also
true that for the female it is the continuity of life that seeks to realize
itself in spite of separation, while separation into new and
individualized forces is brought about by male initiative; he can affirm
himself in his autonomy; he integrates the specific energy into his
own life; by contrast, female individuality is fought by the interest of
the species; she seems possessed by outside forces: alienated. This
explains why sexual opposition increases rather than abates when the
individuality of organisms asserts itself. The male finds more and
more ways to use the forces of which he is master; the female feels
her subjugation more and more; the conflict between her own interests
and those of the generating forces that inhabit her exasperates her.
Giving birth for cows and mares is far more painful and dangerous
than for female mice and rabbits. Woman, the most individualized of
females, is also the most fragile, the one who experiences her destiny
the most dramatically and who distinguishes herself the most
significantly from her male.
In the human species as in most others, almost as many individuals
of both sexes are born
(100
girls for 104 boys); embryonic evolution
is analogous; however, the original epithelium remains neuter longer
in the female fetus; as a result, it is subjected to hormonal influence
over a longer period, and its development is more often inverted; most
hermaphrodites are thought to be genotypically female subjects who
are masculinized later: it
could be said that the male organism is
60

immediately defined as male, whereas the female embryo is reluctant
to accept its femaleness; but these tentative beginnings of fetal life are
not yet well enough understood for them to be assigned a meaning.
Once formed, the genital apparatus is symmetrical in both sexes; the
hormones of each type belong to the same chemical family, the
sterols, and when all things are considered, all of them derive from
cholesterol; they order the secondary differentiation of the soma.
Neither their formula nor their anatomical singularities define the
human female as such. Her functional evolution is what distinguishes
her from the male. Man’s development is comparatively simple. From
birth to puberty, he grows more or less regularly; at around fifteen or
sixteen years old, spermatogenesis begins and continues until old age;
hormone production occurs at the same time and marks the male
constitution of the soma. When that happens, the male’s sex life is
normally integrated into his individual existence: in terms of desire
and coitus, his surpassing toward the species is an integral part of the
subjective moment of his transcendence: he
is
his body. Woman’s
history is much more complex. At the beginning of embryonic life,
the supply of ovocytes is definitively formed; the ovary contains
about fifty thousand ova, and each one is enclosed in a follicle, with
about four hundred reaching maturity. At the moment of birth the
species has taken possession of her and seeks to affirm itself; on
coming into the world, the woman goes through a kind of first
puberty; ovocytes suddenly grow bigger; then the ovary reduces by
about one-fifth. One could say that the child was granted a reprieve;
while its organism develops, its genital system remains more or less
stationary. Some follicles swell up without reaching maturity; the
girl’s growth is analogous to the boy’s: at the same age she is often
bigger and heavier than he. But at puberty the species reasserts its
rights: influenced by ovarian secretions, the number of growing
follicles increases, the ovary becomes congested and grows, one of
the ova reaches maturity, and the menstrual cycle begins; the genital
system attains its definitive size and form, the soma becomes
feminized, and the endocrine balance is set up. It is worth noting that
this event has all the characteristics of a crisis; the woman’s body
does not accept the species’ installation in her without a fight; and this
fight weakens and endangers her; before puberty, about the same
number of girls die for every 100 boys: from fourteen to eighteen,
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128 girls die for every 100 boys, and from eighteen to twenty-two
105 girls for every 100 boys. This is the period when chlorosis,
tuberculosis, scoliosis, osteomyelitis, and such strike. Puberty is
abnormally early for some subjects: it can occur at four or five years
of age. For others, it does not begin at all: the subject is infantile,
suffering from
amenorrhea or dysmenorrhea. Some women manifest
virile characteristics: too many secretions from the adrenal glands give
them masculine characteristics. These anomalies are absolutely not a
victory of the individual over the tyranny of the species: there is no
way to escape that tyranny because it enslaves individual life at the
same time that it nourishes it; this duality can be seen in the ovarian
functions; the woman’s vitality takes root in the ovary, that of the man
in the testicles: in both cases the castrated individual is not only sterile:
it regresses and degenerates; un-“formed” and badly formed, the
whole organism is impoverished and out of balance; it can only
flourish with the flourishing of the genital system; and yet many
genital phenomena are not in the interest of the subject’s individual
life and even put it in danger. The mammary glands that develop at
puberty have no role in the woman’s individual economy: they can be
removed at any moment in her life. The finality of many ovarian
secretions is in the egg, in its maturity, in the adaptation of the uterus
for its needs: for the organism as a whole, they are a factor of
imbalance more than regulation; the woman is more adapted to the
egg’s needs than to herself. From puberty to menopause she is the
principal site of a story that takes place in her and does not concern
her personally. Anglo-Saxons call menstruation “the curse,” and it is
true that there is no individual finality in the menstrual cycle. It was
thought in Aristotle’s time that the blood that flowed each month, if
fertilization occurred, was to constitute the flesh and blood of the
child; the truth of this old theory is that women endlessly start up the
labor of gestation. For other mammals, this estrous cycle plays itself
out during one season; there is no bloody flow: only in higher
monkeys and women does this cycle take place in pain and blood.
6
For about fourteen days one of the Graafian follicles that envelops the
eggs increases in volume and ripens at the same time that the ovary
secretes the hormone folliculin at the level of the follicle. Ovulation
takes place on the fourteenth day: the walls of the follicle disintegrate
(sometimes causing a slight hemorrhage); the egg falls into the
62

fallopian tubes while the opening evolves into the yellow body. Then
begins the second or corpus luteum phase characterized by the
secretion of the hormone progesterone that acts on the uterus. The
uterus changes in that the wall’s capillary system swells, creases, and
waffles, forming a kind of lacework; this is the construction of a
cradle in the womb
meant to receive the fertilized egg. As these
cellular transformations are irreversible, this construction is not
reabsorbed in cases where there is no fertilization: in other mammals
the useless debris is possibly carried off by the lymph vessels. But for
woman when the endometrial lace collapses, there is an exfoliation of
the lining, the capillaries open up, and a bloody mass seeps out. Then,
while the corpus luteum is reconstituted, a new follicular phase
begins. This complex process, whose details are still quite mysterious,
sets the whole body in motion as it is accompanied by hormonal
secretions that act on the thyroid and pituitary glands, the central and
peripheral nervous systems, and thus on all the organs. Almost all
women—more than 85 percent—show signs of distress during this
period. Blood pressure rises before the beginning of the flow of blood
and then falls; the pulse rate and often the temperature increase; there
are frequent cases of fever; the abdomen is painful; there is often
constipation and then diarrhea, an increase in the liver volume, urea
retention, albumin deficiency, or micro albumin; many women have
hyperemia of the pituitary gland (sore throat), and others complain of
auditory and visual problems; there is a rise in perspiration secretions
accompanied by a sometimes strong sui generis odor at the beginning
of and often throughout the menstrual period. Basal metabolism
increases. The number of red blood cells decreases; however, the
blood carries substances usually kept in reserve in the tissues, in
particular calcium salts; these salts act on the ovary, on the thyroid that
is overactive, and on the pituitary gland that regulates the
metamorphosis of the activated uterine tissue; this glandular instability
weakens the nervous system: the central nervous system is affected,
often causing headaches, and the peripheral nervous system
overreacts: the automatic control by the central nervous system is
reduced, which relaxes the reflexes and the convulsive complexes and
is manifested in great mood changes: woman is more emotional,
nervous, and irritable than usual and can manifest serious
psychological problems. This is when she feels most acutely that her
63

body is an alienated opaque thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and
foreign life that makes and unmakes a crib in her every month; every
month a child is prepared to be born and is aborted in the flow of the
crimson tide; woman
is
her body as man
is
his,
7
but her body is
something other than her.
Woman experiences an even stronger alienation when the fertilized
egg drops into the uterus and develops there; gestation is, of course, a
normal phenomenon that is not harmful to the mother if normal
conditions of health and nutrition prevail: certain beneficial
interactions develop between her and the fetus; however, contrary to
an optimistic theory that is so obviously useful socially, gestation is
tiring work that offers woman no benefit as an individual but that
demands serious sacrifices.
8
In the early months, it often brings with
it appetite loss and vomiting that is not observed in any other domestic
female and shows the body’s revolt against the species taking
possession of it; the body loses phosphorus, calcium, and iron, the
last of these losses being very hard to overcome later; the metabolic
hyperactivity excites the endocrine system; the negative nervous
system is in a heightened state of excitability; the specific weight of
the blood decreases, and it is anemic, like “that of people who fast,
who are starving, or who have been bled many times, and
convalescents.”
9
All that a healthy and well-nourished woman can
hope for after childbirth is to recoup her losses without too much
trouble; but often serious accidents or at least dangerous disorders
occur during pregnancy; and if the woman is not sturdy, if she is not
careful in her personal hygiene, she will be prematurely misshapen
and aged by her pregnancies: it is well-known how frequent this is in
the countryside. Childbirth itself is painful; it is dangerous. This crisis
shows clearly that the body does not always meet the needs of both
the species and the individual; the child sometimes dies, or while
coming into life, it kills the mother; or its birth can cause her a chronic
illness. Breastfeeding is also an exhausting servitude; a set of factors
—the main one undoubtedly being the appearance of a hormone,
progesterone—brings milk secretion into the mammary glands; the
arrival of the milk is painful and is often accompanied by fever, and
the breast-feeder feeds the newborn to the detriment of her own
strength. The conflict between the species and the individual can have
dramatic consequences in childbirth, making the woman’s body
64

distressingly fragile. One often hears that women “have bellyaches”;
true indeed, a hostile element is locked inside them: the species is
eating away at them. Many of their illnesses are the result not of an
external infection but of an internal disorder: false metritis occurs
from a reaction of the uterine lining to an abnormal ovarian excitation;
if the yellow
body persists instead of being reabsorbed after
menstruation, it provokes salpingitis and endometritis, and so on.
Woman escapes from the grip of the species by one more difficult
crisis; between forty-five and fifty, the phenomena of menopause, the
opposite of those of puberty, occur. Ovarian activity decreases and
even disappears: this disappearance brings about a vital
impoverishment of the individual. It is thought that the catabolic
glands, thyroid and pituitary, attempt to compensate for the ovaries’
deficiencies; thus alongside the change-of-life depression there are
phenomena of surges: hot flashes, high blood pressure, nervousness;
there is sometimes an increase in the sex drive. Some women retain
fat in their tissues; others acquire male traits. For many there is a new
endocrine balance. So woman finds herself freed from the servitudes
of the female; she is not comparable to a eunuch, because her vitality
is intact; however, she is no longer prey to powers that submerge her:
she is consistent with herself. It is sometimes said that older women
form “a third sex”; it is true they are not males, but they are no longer
female either; and often this physiological autonomy is matched by a
health, balance, and vigor they did not previously have.
Overlapping women’s specifically sexual differentiations are the
singularities, more or less the consequences of these differentiations;
these are the hormonal actions that determine her soma. On average,
she is smaller than man, lighter; her skeleton is thinner; the pelvis is
wider, adapted to gestation and birth; her connective tissue retains
fats, and her forms are rounder than man’s; the overall look:
morphology, skin, hair system, and so on is clearly different in the
two sexes. Woman has much less muscular force: about two-thirds
that of man; she has less respiratory capacity: lungs, trachea, and
larynx are smaller in woman; the difference in the larynx brings about
that of the voice. Women’s specific blood weight is less than men’s:
there is less hemoglobin retention; women are less robust, more apt to
be anemic. Their pulse rate is quicker, their vascular system is less
stable: they blush easily. Instability is a striking characteristic of their
65

bodies in general; for example, man’s calcium metabolism is stable;
women both retain less calcium salt and eliminate it during
menstruation and pregnancy; the ovaries seem to have a catabolic
action concerning calcium; this instability leads to disorders in the
ovaries and in the thyroid, which is more developed in a woman than
in a man: and the irregularity of endocrine secretions acts on the
peripheral nervous system; muscles and nerves are not perfectly
controlled. More instability and less control make them more
emotional, which is directly linked to vascular variations: palpitations,
redness, and so on; and they are thus subject to convulsive attacks:
tears, nervous laughter, and hysterics.
Many of these characteristics are due to woman’s subordination to
the species. This is the most striking conclusion of this study: she is
the most deeply alienated of all the female mammals, and she is the
one that refuses this alienation the most violently; in no other is the
subordination of the organism to the reproductive function more
imperious nor accepted with greater difficulty. Crises of puberty and
of the menopause, monthly “curse,” long and often troubled
pregnancy, illnesses, and accidents are characteristic of the human
female: her destiny appears even more fraught the more she rebels
against it by affirming herself as an individual. The male, by
comparison, is infinitely more privileged: his genital life does not
thwart his personal existence; it unfolds seamlessly, without crises
and generally without accident. Women live, on average, as long as
men, but are often sick and indisposed.
These biological data are of extreme importance: they play an all-
important role and are an essential element of woman’s situation: we
will be referring to them in all further accounts. Because the body is
the instrument of our hold on the world, the world appears different to
us depending on how it is grasped, which explains why we have
studied these data so deeply; they are one of the keys that enable us to
understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed
destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for a sexual
hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not
condemn her forever to this subjugated role.
It has often been claimed that physiology alone provides answers to
66

these questions: Does individual success have the same chances in the
two sexes? Which of the two in the species plays the greater role? But
the first question does not apply to woman and other females in the
same way, because animals constitute given species and it is possible
to provide static descriptions of them: it is simply a question of
collating observations to decide if the mare is as quick as the stallion,
if male chimpanzees do as well on intelligence tests as their female
counterparts; but humanity is constantly in the making. Materialist
scholars have claimed to posit the problem in a purely static way; full
of the theory of psychophysiological parallelism, they sought to make
mathematical comparisons between male and female organisms: and
they imagined that these measurements directly defined their
functional abilities. I will mention one example of these senseless
discussions that this method prompted. As it was supposed, in some
mysterious way, that the brain secreted thinking, it seemed very
important to decide if the average weight of the female brain was
larger or smaller than
that of the male. It was found that the former
weighs, on average,
1,220
grams, and the latter
1,360
, the weight of the
female brain varying from
1,000
to
1,500
grams and that of the male
from
1,150
to
1,700
. But the absolute weight is not significant; it was
thus decided that the relative weight should be taken into account. It is
1
/
48.4
for the man and
1
/
44.2
for the woman. She is thus supposed to
be advantaged. No. This still has to be corrected: in such
comparisons, the smallest organism always seems to be favored; to
compare two individuals correctly while not taking into account the
body, one must divide the weight of the brain by the power of
0.56
of
the body weight if they belong to the same species. It is considered
that men and women are of two different types, with the following
results:
67

Equality is the result. But what removes much of the interest of
these careful debates is that no relation has been established between
brain weight and the development of intelligence. Nor could one give
a psychic interpretation of chemical formulas defining male and
female hormones. We categorically reject the idea of a
psychophysiological parallelism; the bases of this doctrine have
definitively and long been weakened. I mention it because although it
is philosophically and scientifically ruined, it still haunts a large
number of minds: it has already been shown here that some people are
carrying around antique vestiges of it. We also repudiate any frame of
reference that presupposes the existence of a
natural
hierarchy of
values—for example, that of an evolutionary hierarchy; it is pointless
to wonder if the female body is more infantile than the male, if it is
closer to or further from that of the higher primates, and so forth. All
these studies that confuse a vague naturalism with an even vaguer
ethic or aesthetic are pure verbiage. Only within a human perspective
can the female and the male be compared in the human species. But
the definition of man is that he is a being who is not given, who
makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty rightly said, man is not
a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a fixed reality
but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming;
that is, her
possibilities
have to be defined: what skews the issues so
much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is
today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her
capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been
realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is
transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books.
However, one might say, in the position I adopt—that of
Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—that if the body is not a
thing
,
it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our
projects. Woman is weaker than man; she has less muscular strength,
fewer red blood cells, a lesser respiratory capacity; she runs less
quickly, lifts less heavy weights—there is practically no sport in
which she can compete with him; she cannot enter into a fight with the
male. Added to that are the instability, lack of control, and fragility
that have been discussed: these are facts. Her grasp of the world is
thus more limited; she has less firmness and perseverance in projects
that she is also less able to carry out. This means that her individual
68

life is not as rich as man’s.
In truth these facts cannot be denied: but they do not carry their
meaning in themselves. As soon as we accept a human perspective,
defining the body starting from existence, biology becomes an
abstract science; when the physiological given (muscular inferiority)
takes on meaning, this meaning immediately becomes dependent on a
whole context; “weakness” is weakness only in light of the aims man
sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he
imposes. If he did not want to apprehend the world, the very idea of a
grasp
on things would have no meaning; when, in this apprehension,
the full use of body force—above the usable minimum—is not
required, the differences cancel each other out; where customs forbid
violence, muscular energy cannot be the basis for domination:
existential, economic, and moral reference points are necessary to
define the notion of
weakness
concretely. It has been said that the
human species was an anti-physis; the expression is not really exact,
because man cannot possibly contradict the given; but it is in how he
takes it on that he constitutes its truth; nature only has reality for him
insofar as it is taken on by his action: his own nature is no exception.
It is not possible to measure in the abstract the burden of the
generative function for woman, just as it is not possible to measure
her grasp on the world: the relation of maternity to individual life is
naturally regulated in animals by the cycle of heat and seasons; it is
undefined for woman; only society can decide; woman’s enslavement
to the species is tighter or looser depending on how many births the
society demands and the hygienic conditions in which pregnancy and
birth occur. So if it can be said that among the higher animals
individual existence is affirmed more imperiously in the male than in
the female, in humanity individual “possibilities” depend on the
economic and social situation.
In any case, it is not always true that the male’s individual
privileges confer upon him superiority in the species; the female
regains another kind of autonomy in maternity. Sometimes he
imposes his domination: this is the case in the monkeys studied by
Zuckerman; but often the two halves of the couple lead separate lives;
the lion and the lioness share the care of the habitat equally. Here
again, the case of the human species cannot be reduced to any other;
men do not define themselves first as individuals; men and women
69

have never challenged each other in individual fights; the couple is an
original
Mitsein;
and it is always a fixed or transitory element of a
wider collectivity; within these societies, who, the male or the female,
is the more necessary for the species? In terms of gametes, in terms of
the biological functions of coitus and gestation, the male principle
creates to maintain and the female principle maintains to create: What
becomes of this division in social life? For species attached to foreign
bodies or to the substrata, for those to whom nature grants food
abundantly and effortlessly, the role of the male is limited to
fertilization; when it is necessary to search, chase, or fight to provide
food needed for offspring, the male often helps with their
maintenance; this help becomes absolutely indispensable in a species
where children remain incapable of taking care of their own needs for
a long period after the mother stops nursing them: the male’s work
then takes on an extreme importance; the lives he brought forth could
not maintain themselves without him. One male is enough to fertilize
many females each year: but males are necessary for the survival of
children after birth, to defend them against enemies, to extract from
nature everything they need. The balance of productive and
reproductive forces is different depending on the different economic
moments of human history, and they condition the relation of the male
and the female to children and later among them. But we are going
beyond the field of biology: in purely biological terms, it would not be
possible to posit the primacy of one sex concerning the role it plays in
perpetuating the species.
But a society is not a species: the species realizes itself as existence
in a society; it transcends itself toward the world and the future; its
customs cannot be deduced from biology; individuals are never left to
their nature; they obey this second nature, that is, customs in which
the desires and fears that express their ontological attitude are
reflected. It is not as a body but as a body subjected to taboos and
laws that the subject gains consciousness of and accomplishes
himself. He valorizes himself in the name of certain values. And once
again, physiology cannot ground values: rather, biological data take
on those values the existent confers on them. If the respect or fear
woman inspires prohibits man from using violence against her, the
male’s
muscular superiority is not a source of power. If customs
desire—as in some Indian tribes—that girls choose husbands, or if it
70

is the father who decides on marriages, the male’s sexual
aggressiveness does not grant him any initiative, any privilege. The
mother’s intimate link to the child will be a source of dignity or
indignity for her, depending on the very variable value given to the
child; this very link, as has already been said, will be recognized or
not according to social biases.
Thus we will clarify the biological data by examining them in the
light of ontological economic, social, and psychological contexts.
Woman’s enslavement to the species and the limits of her individual
abilities are facts of extreme importance; the woman’s body is one of
the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But
her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as
taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society;
biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns
us: why is woman the
Other
? The question is how, in her, nature has
been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity
has made of the human female.
1.
Gametes are reproductive cells whose fusion produces an egg.
2.
Gonads are glands that produce gametes.
3.
Hegel,
The Philosophy of Nature
, Part 3, Section 369.
4.
Ibid.
*

Bonellia viridis
is a sandworm that has no sex chromosomes.—T
RANS
.
5.
Some chickens fight in the barnyard for a pecking order. Cows too become head of
the herd if there are no males.
6.
The analysis of these phenomena has been advanced in the last few years by
comparing the phenomena occurring in women with those in the higher monkeys,
especially for the Rh factor. “It is obviously easier to experiment on the latter
animals,” writes Louis Gallien (
La sexualité
[
Sexual Reproduction
]).
7.
“I am thus my body, at least inasmuch as I have experience, and reciprocally, my
body is like a natural subject, like a tentative draft of my total being” (Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
).
8.
I am taking here an exclusively physiological point of view. It is evident that
maternity can be very advantageous psychologically for a woman, just as it can also be
a disaster.
9.
Cf. H. Vignes in
Traité de physiologie normale et pathologique
(Treatise on Normal
71

and Pathological Physiology), Volume 11, edited by Roger and Binet.
72

|
CHAPTER 2
|
The Psychoanalytical Point of View
The enormous advance psychoanalysis made over psychophysiology
is in its consideration that no factor intervenes in psychic life without
having taken on human meaning; it is not the body-object described
by scientists that exists concretely but the body lived by the subject.
The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some
essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation: for
example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it; by contrast, an
organ of slight biological importance like the clitoris plays a primary
role in it. Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself
by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.
An entire system has been erected based on this outlook: we do not
intend here to criticize it as a whole, but only to examine its
contribution to the study of woman. Discussing psychoanalysis as
such is not an easy undertaking. Like all religions—Christianity or
Marxism—it displays an unsettling flexibility against a background of
rigid concepts. Sometimes words are taken in their narrowest
meanings, the term “phallus,” for example, designating very precisely
the fleshy growth that is the male sex organ; at other times, infinitely
broadened, they take on a symbolic value: the phallus would express
all of the virile character and situation as a whole. If one criticizes the
doctrine to the letter, the psychoanalyst maintains that its spirit has
been misunderstood; if one approves of the spirit, he immediately
wants to limit you to the letter. The doctrine is unimportant, he says:
psychoanalysis is a method; but the success of the method strengthens
the doctrinaire in his faith. After all, where would the true features of
psychoanalysis be found if not with psychoanalysts themselves? But
among them, as among Christians and Marxists, there are heretics:
more than one psychoanalyst has declared that “the worst enemies of
psychoanalysis are psychoanalysts themselves.” Many ambiguities
remain to be dissolved, in spite of an often-pedantic scholastic
73

precision. As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
have observed, the
proposition “sexuality is coextensive with existence” can be
understood in two very different ways; it could mean that every avatar
of the existent has a sexual signification, or that every sexual
phenomenon has an existential meaning: these two affirmations can be
reconciled; but often one tends to slip from one to the other. Besides,
as soon as “sexual” and “genital” are distinguished, the notion of
sexuality becomes blurred. “The sexual for Freud is the intrinsic
aptitude to trigger the genital,” says Dalbiez.
*
But nothing is murkier
than the notion of “aptitude,” or of possibility: only reality can
indubitably prove possibility. Not being a philosopher, Freud refused
to justify his system philosophically; his disciples maintain that he
thus eludes any attacks of a metaphysical sort. There are, however,
metaphysical postulates behind all of his affirmations: to use his
language is to adopt a philosophy. It is this very confusion that, while
making criticism awkward, demands it.
Freud was not very concerned with woman’s destiny; it is clear that
he modeled his description of it on that of masculine destiny, merely
modifying some of the traits. Before him, the sexologist Marañón had
declared: “As differentiated energy, the libido is, one might say, a
force of virile significance. We can say as much for the orgasm.”
According to him, women who attain orgasm are “viriloid” women;
sexual fulfillment is a “one-way street” and woman is only at the
halfway point.
1
Freud does not go that far; he accepts that woman’s
sexuality is as developed as man’s; but he barely studies it in itself.
He writes: “The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence,
whether in man or in woman.” He refuses to posit the feminine libido
in its originality: he will thus necessarily see it as a complex deviation
from the human libido in general. And this, he thinks, develops first
identically in both sexes: all children go through an oral phase that
fixes them upon their mother’s breast, then an anal phase, and finally
the genital phase; it is then that they become differentiated. Freud
brought out a fact whose importance had not previously been
recognized: male eroticism is definitively centered on the penis, while
the woman has two distinct erotic systems, one that is clitoral and
develops in infancy and another that is vaginal and develops only after
puberty; when the boy gets to the genital phase, he completes his
development; he has to move from the autoerotic attitude,
where
74

subjective pleasure is sought, to a hetero-erotic attitude that will link
pleasure to an object, usually a woman; this passage will occur at
puberty through a narcissistic phase: but the penis will remain, as in
infancy, the favored erotic organ. Woman, also passing through a
narcissistic phase, must make man the object of her libido; but the
process will be far more complex as she must pass from clitoral to
vaginal pleasure. There is but one genital step for man, while there are
two for woman; she runs a greater risk of not completing her sexual
development, and of remaining at the infantile stage, and consequently
of developing neuroses.
At the autoerotic stage, the child is already more or less strongly
attached to an object: a boy is fixated on his mother and wants to
identify with his father; he is afraid of this ambition and fears that his
father will punish him for it by mutilating him; the castration complex
emanates from the Oedipus complex; so he develops aggressive
feelings toward his father, while at the same time interiorizing his
father’s authority: thus develops the superego that censures
incestuous tendencies; these tendencies are repressed, the complex is
liquidated, and the son is freed from the father, whom he in fact has
installed in himself in the form of moral precepts. The more defined
and strongly fought the Oedipus complex is, the stronger the
superego. Freud first described the history of the girl in a completely
symmetrical way; later he named the feminine form of the infant
complex the Electra complex; but clearly he defined it less in itself
than based on a masculine model; yet he accepts a very important
difference between the two: the little girl first has a maternal fixation,
while the boy is at no time sexually attracted by the father; this
fixation is a carryover from the oral phase; the infant then identifies
with the father; but around the age of five, she discovers the
anatomical difference between the sexes, and she reacts to the absence
of a penis by a castration complex: she imagines having been
mutilated, and suffers from it; she must therefore renounce her virile
pretensions; she identifies with her mother and tries to seduce her
father. The castration complex and the Electra complex reinforce each
other; the feeling of frustration for girls is all the more painful as,
loving her father, the girl would like to resemble him; and inversely
regret strengthens her love: through the tenderness she inspires in her
father, she can compensate for her inferiority. The girl experiences
75

feelings of rivalry and hostility toward her mother. Then her superego
is constituted as well, repressing her incestuous tendencies; but her
superego is more fragile: the Electra complex is less clear than the
Oedipus complex, because her first fixation was maternal; and since
the father was himself the object of this love that he condemned, his
prohibitions had less force than in the case of the rival son. It
can be
seen that, as with her genital development, the little girl’s overall
sexual drama is more complex than her brother’s: she might be
tempted to react to the castration complex by rejecting her femininity,
obstinately coveting a penis, and identifying with her father; this
attitude will lead her to remain at the clitoral stage, to become frigid, or
to turn to homosexuality.
The two essential objections to this description stem from the fact
that Freud copied it from a masculine model. He assumes that a
woman feels like a mutilated man; but the notion of mutilation implies
comparison and valorization; many psychoanalysts accept today that
girls miss having a penis without assuming they were ever stripped of
one; this regret is not even generalized among all girls; and it could
not arise from a simple anatomical encounter; many little girls
discover the masculine constitution very late; and if they do discover
it, it is only by seeing it; the boy has a living experience from his
penis that allows him to take pride in it, but this pride has no
immediate correlation with the humiliation of his sisters since they
only know the masculine organ in its exteriority; this growth, this
delicate stalk of skin, can only inspire their indifference and even
disgust; the girl’s envy, when it appears, is the result of a prior
valorization of virility: Freud takes this for granted when instead he
should account for it.
2
Besides, because there is no original
description of the feminine libido, the notion of the Electra complex is
very vague. Even the presence of a specifically genital Oedipus
complex in boys is by no means general; but, apart from very rare
exceptions, it cannot be stated that the father is a source of genital
excitation for his daughter; one of the great problems of female
eroticism is that clitoral pleasure is localized: it is only in puberty, in
connection with vaginal eroticism, that many erogenous zones
develop in the woman’s body; to say that in a child of ten a father’s
kisses and caresses have an “intrinsic aptitude” to arouse clitoral
pleasure is an assertion that in most cases makes no sense. If it is
76

accepted that the “Electra complex” has only a very diffuse and
affective nature, then the whole question of affectivity is raised, a
question that Freudianism does not provide the means to define, once
it is distinguished from sexuality. In any case, it is not the feminine
libido that deifies the father: the mother is not deified by the desire she
arouses in her son; the fact that feminine desire is focused on a
sovereign being gives it a unique character; but the girl is not
constitutive of her object, she submits to it. The father’s sovereignty is
a fact of social order: Freud fails to account for this; he himself admits
that it is impossible to
know what authority decided at what moment
in history that the father would prevail over the mother: according to
him, this decision represents progress, but its causes are unknown.
“[In this case] it cannot be the father himself, since it is only this
progress that raises him to the rank of an authority,” he writes in his
last work.
3
Adler departed from Freud because he understood the inadequacies
of a system that bases the development of human life on sexuality
alone: he means to reintegrate sexuality into the total personality;
while for Freud all behavior is driven by desire, that is, by seeking
pleasure, Adler sees man as aiming at certain goals; he replaces drives
with motives, finality, and plans; he raises intelligence to such heights
that for him sexuality often has only symbolic value. According to his
theories, the human drama is divided into three steps: each individual
has a will to power but along with it an inferiority complex; this
conflict leads him to use countless ruses rather than confront real-life
obstacles that he fears may be insurmountable; the subject establishes
a distance between himself and the society he fears: thus develop
neuroses that are disturbances of the social sense. As for woman, her
inferiority complex manifests itself in a rejection out of shame of her
femininity: it is not the absence of a penis that unleashes this complex
but the total situation; the girl envies the phallus only as a symbol of
the privileges granted to boys; the father’s place in the family, the
universal predominance of males, and upbringing all confirm her idea
of masculine superiority. Later, in the course of sexual relations, even
the coital posture that places the woman underneath the man is an
added humiliation. She reacts by a “masculine protest”; she either tries
to masculinize herself or uses her feminine wiles to go into battle
against man. Through motherhood she can find in her child the
77

equivalent of the penis. But this supposes that she must first accept
herself completely as woman, and thus accept her inferiority. She is
far more deeply divided against herself than is man.
It is unnecessary to underline here the theoretical differences
between Adler and Freud or the possibilities of reconciliation: neither
the explanation based on drive nor the one based on motive is ever
sufficient: all drives posit a motive, but motive is never grasped except
through drives; a synthesis of Adlerism and Freudianism thus seems
possible. In fact, while bringing in notions of aim and finality, Adler
retains in full the idea of psychic causality; his relation to Freud
resembles somewhat the relation of energeticism to mechanism:
whether it is a question of impact or force of
attraction, the physicist
always recognizes determinism. This is the postulate common to all
psychoanalysts: for them, human history is explained by an interplay
of determined elements. They all allot the same destiny to woman. Her
drama is summed up in a conflict between her “viriloid” and her
“feminine” tendencies; the former are expressed in the clitoral system,
the latter in vaginal eroticism; as a very young girl, she identifies with
her father; she then experiences feelings of inferiority relative to man
and is faced with the alternative of either maintaining her autonomy,
becoming virilized—which, with an underlying inferiority complex,
provokes a tension that risks bringing on neuroses—or else finding
happy self-fulfillment in amorous submission, a solution facilitated by
the love she felt for her sovereign father; it is he whom she is looking
for in her lover or husband, and her sexual love is mingled with her
desire to be dominated. Maternity will be her reward, restoring to her
a new kind of autonomy. This drama seems to be endowed with its
own dynamism; it continues to work itself out through all the mishaps
that distort it, and every woman passively endures it.
Psychoanalysts have no trouble finding empirical confirmations of
their theories: it is known that if Ptolemy’s system is subtly
complicated, his version of the position of the planets could be upheld
for a long time; if an inverse Oedipus complex is superimposed onto
the Oedipus complex and by showing a desire in every anxiety, the
very facts that contradicted Freudianism will be successfully
integrated into it. For a figure to be perceived, it must stand out from
its background, and how the figure is perceived brings out the ground
behind it in positive delineation; thus if one is determined to describe a
78

particular case from a Freudian perspective, one will find the Freudian
schema as the background behind it; but when a doctrine demands the
multiplication of secondary explanations in an indefinite and arbitrary
way, when observation uncovers as many anomalies as normal cases,
it is better to give up the old frameworks. Today as well, every
psychoanalyst works at adapting Freudian concepts to suit himself; he
attempts compromises; for example, a contemporary psychoanalyst
writes: “Whenever there is a complex, there are by definition several
components … The complex consists in grouping these disparate
elements and not in representing one of them by the others.”
4
But the
idea of a simple grouping of elements is unacceptable: psychic life is
not a mosaic; it is altogether complete in every one of its moments,
and this unity must be
respected. This is possible only by recovering
the original intentionality of existence through the disparate facts.
Without going back to this source, man appears a battlefield of drives
and prohibitions equally devoid of meaning and contingent. All
psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its
corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of
the system. Cutting out drives and prohibitions from existential
choice, Freud fails to explain their origin: he takes them as givens. He
tried to replace the notion of value with that of authority; but he admits
in
Moses and Monotheism
that he has no way to account for this
authority. Incest, for example, is forbidden because the father forbade
it: But why did he forbid it? It is a mystery. The superego interiorizes
orders and prohibitions emanating from an arbitrary tyranny;
instinctive tendencies exist, but we do not know why; these two
realities are heterogeneous because morality is posited as foreign to
sexuality; human unity appears as shattered, there is no passage from
the individual to the society: Freud is forced to invent strange fictions
to reunite them.
5
Adler saw clearly that the castration complex could
be explained only in a social context; he approached the problem of
valorization, but he did not go back to the ontological source of values
recognized by society, and he did not understand that values were
involved in sexuality itself, which led him to misunderstand their
importance.
Sexuality certainly plays a considerable role in human life: it could
be said to penetrate it completely; physiology has already
demonstrated how the activity of testes and ovaries is intermixed with
79

that of the soma. The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with
other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always
involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of
existence, it is also from here that their significance can be ascertained:
without this perspective, psychoanalysis takes unexplained facts for
granted. For example, a young girl is said to be “ashamed” of
urinating in a squatting position, with her bottom exposed; but what is
shame? Likewise, before asking if the male is proud because he has a
penis or if his penis is the expression of his pride, we need to know
what pride is and how the subject’s aspirations can be embodied in an
object. Sexuality must not be taken as an irreducible given; the
existent possesses a more primary “quest for being”; sexuality is only
one of these aspects. Sartre demonstrates this in
Being and
Nothingness;
Bachelard also says it in his works on Earth, Air, and
Water: psychoanalysts believe that man’s quintessential truth lies in
his relation to his own body and that of
others like him within society;
but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world
surrounding him that he attempts to discover in work, play, and all
experiences of the “dynamic imagination”; man seeks to connect
concretely with existence through the whole world, grasped in all
possible ways. Working the soil and digging a hole are activities as
primal as an embrace or coitus: it is an error to see them only as
sexual symbols; a hole, slime, a gash, hardness, and wholeness are
primary realities; man’s interest in them is not dictated by libido;
instead, the libido will be influenced by the way these realities were
revealed to him. Man is not fascinated by wholeness because it
symbolizes feminine virginity: rather, his love for wholeness makes
virginity precious. Work, war, play, and art define ways of being in
the world that cannot be reduced to any others; they bring to light
features that impinge on those that sexuality reveals; it is both through
them and through these erotic experiences that the individual chooses
himself. But only an ontological point of view can restore the unity of
this choice.
Psychoanalysts vehemently reject this notion of choice in the name
of determinism and “the collective unconscious”; this unconscious
would provide man with ready-made imagery and universal
symbolism; it would explain analogies found in dreams, lapses,
delusions, allegories, and human destinies; to speak of freedom would
80

be to reject the possibility of explaining these disturbing
concordances. But the idea of freedom is not incompatible with the
existence of certain constants. If the psychoanalytical method is often
productive in spite of errors in theory, it is because there are givens in
every individual case so generalized that no one would dream of
denying them: situations and behavior patterns recur; the moment of
decision springs out of generality and repetition. “Anatomy is
destiny,” said Freud; and this phrase is echoed by Merleau-Ponty:
“The body is generality.” Existence is one, across and through the
separation of existents, manifesting itself in analogous organisms; so
there will be constants in the relationship between the ontological and
the sexual. At any given period, technology and the economic and
social structure of a group reveal an identical world for all its
members: there will also be a constant relation of sexuality to social
forms; analogous individuals, placed in analogous conditions, will
grasp analogous significations in the given; this analogy is not the
basis of a rigorous universality, but it can account for finding general
types in individual cases. A symbol does not emerge as an allegory
worked out by a mysterious unconscious: it is the apprehension of a
signification through an analogue of the signifying object; because of
the identity of the existential situation cutting across all existents and
the identity of the facticity
they have to cope with, significations are
revealed to many individuals in the same way; symbolism did not fall
out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like
language, by the human reality that is at once
Mitsein
and separation;
and this explains that singular invention also has its place: in practice
the psychoanalytical method must accept this whether or not doctrine
authorizes it. This approach enables us to understand, for example, the
value generally given to the penis.
6
It is impossible to account for this
without starting from an existential fact: the subject’s tendency toward
alienation;
the anxiety of his freedom leads the subject to search for
himself in things, which is a way to flee from himself; it is so
fundamental a tendency that as soon as he is weaned and separated
from the Whole, the infant endeavors to grasp his alienated existence
in the mirror, in his parents’ gaze. Primitive people alienate
themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their
individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their
work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. The penis is
81

singularly adapted to play this role of “double” for the little boy: for
him it is both a foreign object and himself; it is a plaything, a doll, and
it is his own flesh; parents and nurses treat it like a little person. So,
clearly, it becomes for the child “an alter ego usually craftier, more
intelligent, and more clever than the individual”;
7
because the urinary
function and later the erection are midway between voluntary
processes and spontaneous processes, because it is the impulsive,
quasi-foreign source of subjectively experienced pleasure, the penis is
posited by the subject as himself and other than himself; specific
transcendence is embodied in it in a graspable way, and it is a source
of pride; because the phallus is set apart, man can integrate into his
personality the life that flows from it. This is why, then, the length of
the penis, the force of the urine stream, the erection, and the
ejaculation become for him the measure of his own worth.
8
It is thus a
constant that the phallus is the fleshly incarnation of transcendence;
since it is also a constant that the child feels transcended, that is,
frustrated in his transcendence by his father, the Freudian idea of the
castration complex will persist. Deprived of this alter ego, the little girl
does not alienate herself in a graspable thing, does not reclaim herself:
she
is thus led to make her entire self an object, to posit herself as the
Other; the question of knowing whether or not she has compared
herself with boys is secondary; what is important is that, even without
her knowing it, the absence of a penis keeps her from being aware of
herself as a sex; many consequences result from this. But these
constants we point out nevertheless do not define a destiny: the
phallus takes on such importance because it symbolizes a sovereignty
that is realized in other areas. If woman succeeded in affirming herself
as subject, she would invent equivalents of the phallus: the doll that
embodies the promise of the child may become a more precious
possession than a penis.
9
There are matrilineal societies where the
women possess the masks in which the collectivity alienates itself; the
penis then loses much of its glory. Only within the situation grasped
in its totality does anatomical privilege found a truly human privilege.
Psychoanalysis could only find its truth within a historical context.
Likewise, woman can no more be defined by the consciousness of
her own femininity than by merely saying that woman is a female: she
finds this consciousness within the society of which she is a member.
Interiorizing the unconscious and all psychic life, the very language of
82

psychoanalysis suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds
within him: the terms “complex,” “tendencies,” and so forth imply
this. But a life is a relation with the world; the individual defines
himself by choosing himself through the world; we must turn to the
world to answer the questions that preoccupy us. In particular,
psychoanalysis fails to explain why woman is the
Other
. Even Freud
accepts that the prestige of the penis is explained by the father’s
sovereignty, and he admits that he does not know the source of male
supremacy.
Without wholly rejecting the contributions of psychoanalysis, some
of which are productive, we will nevertheless not accept its method.
First of all, we will not limit ourselves to taking sexuality as a given:
that this view falls short is demonstrated by the poverty of the
descriptions touching on the feminine libido; I have already said that
psychoanalysts have never studied it head-on, but only based on the
male libido; they seem to ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the
attraction that the male exercises over the female. Freudians and
Adlerians explain woman’s anxiety before male genitalia as an
inversion of frustrated desire. Stekel rightly saw this as an original
reaction; but he accounts for it only superficially: the woman would
fear defloration, penetration, pregnancy, and pain, and this fear
would
stifle her desire; this explanation is too rational.
*
Instead of accepting
that desire is disguised as anxiety or is overcome by fear, we should
consider this sort of pressing and frightened appeal that is female
desire as a basic given; it is characterized by the indissoluble synthesis
of attraction and repulsion. It is noteworthy that many female animals
flee from coitus at the very moment they solicit it: they are accused of
coquetry or hypocrisy; but it is absurd to attempt to explain primitive
behaviors by assimilating them to complex ones: they are, on the
contrary, at the source of attitudes called coquetry and hypocrisy in
women. The idea of a passive libido is disconcerting because the
libido has been defined as a drive, as energy based on the male; but
one could no more conceive a priori of a light being both yellow and
blue: the intuition of green is needed. Reality would be better
delineated if, instead of defining the libido in vague terms of “energy,”
the significance of sexuality were juxtaposed with that of other human
attitudes: taking, catching, eating, doing, undergoing, and so on; for
sexuality is one of the singular modes of apprehending an object; the
83

characteristics of the erotic object as it is shown not only in the sexual
act but in perception in general would also have to be studied. This
examination goes beyond the psychoanalytical framework that posits
eroticism as irreducible.
In addition, we will pose the problem of feminine destiny quite
differently: we will situate woman in a world of values, and we will
lend her behavior a dimension of freedom. We think she has to
choose between the affirmation of her transcendence and her
alienation as object; she is not the plaything of contradictory drives;
she devises solutions that have an ethical hierarchy among them.
Replacing value with authority, choice with drives, psychoanalysis
proposes an ersatz morality: the idea of normality. This idea is indeed
highly useful from a therapeutic point of view; but it has reached a
disturbing extent in psychoanalysis in general. The descriptive schema
is proposed as a law; and assuredly, a mechanistic psychology could
not accept the notion of moral invention; at best it can recognize
less
but never more; at best it acknowledges failures, but never creations.
If a subject does not wholly replicate a development considered
normal, his development will be seen as being interrupted, and this
will be interpreted as a lack and a negation and never a positive
decision. That, among other things, is what renders the
psychoanalysis of great men so shocking: we are told that this
transference or that sublimation was not successfully carried
out in
them; it is never supposed that perhaps they could have rejected it, and
perhaps for good reasons; it is never considered that their behavior
might have been motivated by freely posited aims; the individual is
always explained through his link to the past and not with respect to a
future toward which he projects himself. Therefore, we are never
given more than an inauthentic picture, and in this inauthenticity no
criterion other than normality can possibly be found. The description
of feminine destiny is, from this point of view, altogether striking.
The way psychoanalysts understand it, “to identify” with the mother
or the father is to
alienate oneself
in a model, it is to prefer a foreign
image to a spontaneous movement of one’s own existence, it is to
play at being. We are shown woman solicited by two kinds of
alienations; it is very clear that to play at being a man will be a recipe
for failure; but to play at being a woman is also a trap: being a woman
would mean being an object, the Other; and at the heart of its
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abdication, the Other remains a subject. The real problem for the
woman refusing these evasions is to accomplish herself as
transcendence: this means seeing which possibilities are opened to her
by what are called virile and feminine attitudes; when a child follows
the path indicated by one or another of his parents, it could be because
he freely takes on their projects: his behavior could be the result of a
choice motivated by ends. Even for Adler, the will to power is only a
sort of absurd energy; he calls any project that incarnates
transcendence a “masculine protest”; when a girl climbs trees, it is,
according to him, to be the equal of boys: he does not imagine that she
likes to climb trees; for the mother, the child is anything but a “penis
substitute”; painting, writing, and engaging in politics are not only
“good sublimations”: they are ends desired in themselves. To deny
this is to falsify all of human history. Parallels can be noted between
our descriptions and those of psychoanalysts. From man’s point of
view—adopted by both male and female psychoanalysts—behavior of
alienation is considered feminine, and behavior where the subject
posits his transcendence is considered masculine. Donaldson, a
historian of woman, observed that the definitions “the man is a male
human being, the woman is a female human being” were
asymmetrically mutilated;
*
psychoanalysts in particular define man as
a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a
human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. The
psychoanalyst describes the child and the young girl as required to
identify with the father and the mother, torn between “viriloid” and
“feminine”
tendencies, whereas we conceive her as hesitating between
the role of
object
, of
Other
that is proposed to her and her claim for
freedom; thus it is possible to agree on certain points: in particular
when we consider the paths of inauthentic flight offered to women.
But we do not give them the same Freudian or Adlerian signification.
For us woman is defined as a human being in search of values within
a world of values, a world where it is indispensable to understand the
economic and social structure; we will study her from an existential
point of view, taking into account her total situation.
*

La méthode psychanalytique et la doctrine freudienne (Psychoanalytical Method
and the Doctrine of Freud
).—T
RANS
.
85

1.
Curiously, this theory is found in D. H. Lawrence. In
The Plumed Serpent
, Don
Cipriano sees to it that his mistress never reaches orgasm: she must vibrate along with
the man, and not find individualized pleasure.
2.
This discussion will be taken up again in more detail in Volume II,
Chapter 12
.
3.
Cf.
Moses and Monotheism
.
4.
Baudouin,
L’âme enfantine et la psychanalyse
(The Child’s Soul and
Psychoanalysis).
5.
Freud,
Totem and Taboo
.
6.
We will come back to this subject in more detail in Volume II,
Chapter 1
7.
Alice Bálint,
The Psychoanalysis of the Nursery
.
8.
The case of little peasant boys who entertain themselves by having excrement
contests has been brought to my attention: the one producing the biggest and most
solid feces enjoys a prestige that no other success, in games or even in fighting, could
replace. Fecal matter here played the same role as the penis: it was a matter of
alienation in both cases.
9.
We will come back to these ideas in
Part Two
; mention is made here for the sake of
methodology.
*
Stekel,
Frigidity in Woman
, which was published in French translation by Gallimard
in 1937.—T
RANS
.
*
Sir James Donaldson,
Woman, Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and
Rome, and Among the Early Christians
.—T
RANS
.
86

|
CHAPTER 3
|
The Point of View of Historical Materialism
The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some very
important truths. Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical
reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit
to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it. This appropriation
is not an interior, subjective operation: it is carried out objectively in
praxis. Thus woman cannot simply be considered a sexed organism:
among biological data, only those with concrete value in action have
any importance; woman’s consciousness of herself is not defined by
her sexuality alone: it reflects a situation that depends on society’s
economic structure, a structure that indicates the degree of technical
evolution humanity has attained. We have seen that two essential traits
characterize woman biologically: her grasp on the world is narrower
than man’s; and she is more closely subjugated to the species. But
these facts have a totally different value depending on the economic
and social context. Throughout human history, grasp on the world is
not defined by the naked body: the hand, with its prehensile thumb,
moves beyond itself toward instruments that increase its power; from
prehistory’s earliest documents, man is always seen as armed. In the
past, when it was a question of carrying heavy clubs and of keeping
wild beasts at bay, woman’s physical weakness constituted a flagrant
inferiority: if the instrument requires slightly more strength than the
woman can muster, it is enough to make her seem radically
powerless. But on the other hand, technical developments can cancel
out the muscular inequality separating man and woman: abundance
only creates superiority relative to a need; having too much is not
better than having enough. Thus operating many modern machines
requires only a part of masculine resources; if the necessary minimum
is not superior to woman’s capacities, she becomes man’s work
equal. Today enormous deployments of energy can be commanded at
the touch of a switch. The burdens that come with maternity vary
87

greatly depending on customs: they are overwhelming if numerous
pregnancies are imposed on the woman and if she must feed and raise
her children without help; if she procreates as she wishes and if
society helps her during her pregnancies and provides child care,
maternal duties are lighter and can be easily compensated for in the
realm of work.
Engels retraces woman’s history from this point of view in
The
Origin of the Family;
to him, this history depends essentially on the
history of technology. In the Stone Age, when the land belonged to all
members of the clan, the rudimentary nature of the primitive spade
and hoe limited agricultural possibilities: feminine strength was at the
level of work needed for gardening. In this primitive division of labor,
the two sexes already constitute two classes in a way; there is equality
between these classes; while the man hunts and fishes, the woman
stays at home; but the domestic tasks include productive work: pottery
making, weaving, gardening; and in this way, she has an important
role in economic life. With the discovery of copper, tin, bronze, and
iron, and with the advent of the plow, agriculture expands its reach:
intensive labor is necessary to clear the forests and cultivate the fields.
So man has recourse to the service of other men, reducing them to
slavery. Private property appears: master of slaves and land, man also
becomes the proprietor of the woman. This is the “great historical
defeat of the female sex.” It is explained by the disruption of the
division of labor brought about by the invention of new tools. “The
same cause that had assured woman her previous authority in the
home, her restriction to housework, this same cause now assured the
domination of the man; domestic work thence faded in importance
next to man’s productive work; the latter was everything, the former
an insignificant addition.” So paternal right replaces maternal right:
transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from
woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family
founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed.
Man reigning sovereign permits himself, among other things, his
sexual whims: he sleeps with slaves or courtesans, he is polygamous.
As soon as customs make reciprocity possible, woman takes revenge
through infidelity: adultery becomes a natural part of marriage. This is
the only defense woman has against the domestic slavery she is
bound to: her social oppression is the consequence of her economic
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oppression. Equality can only be reestablished when both sexes have
equal legal rights; but this enfranchisement demands that the whole of
the feminine sex enter public industry. “Woman cannot be
emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale
and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has
become possible only within a large modern industry that not only
accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”
Thus woman’s fate is intimately bound to the fate of socialism as
seen also in Bebel’s vast work on women. “Women and the
proletariat,” he writes, “are both oppressed.” And both must be set
free by the same economic development resulting from the upheaval
caused by the invention of machines. The problem of woman can be
reduced to that of her capacity for work. Powerful when technology
matched her possibilities, dethroned when she became incapable of
benefiting from them, she finds again equality with man in the modern
world. Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this
equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day
this resistance is broken down. It already has broken down in the
U.S.S.R., Soviet propaganda affirms. And when socialist society is
realized throughout the whole world, there will no longer be men or
women, but only workers, equal among themselves.
Although the synthesis outlined by Engels marks an advance over
those we have already examined, it is still disappointing: the most
serious problems are dodged. The whole account pivots around the
transition from a communitarian regime to one of private property:
there is absolutely no indication of how it was able to occur; Engels
even admits that “for now we know nothing about it”;
1
not only is he
unaware of its historical details, but he offers no interpretation of it.
Similarly, it is unclear if private property necessarily led to the
enslavement of woman. Historical materialism takes for granted facts
it should explain: it posits the
interest
that attaches man to property
without discussing it; but where does this interest, the source of social
institutions, have its own source? This is why Engels’s account
remains superficial, and the truths he uncovers appear contingent. It is
impossible to go deeper into them without going beyond historical
materialism. It cannot provide solutions to the problems we indicated,
because they concern the whole man and not this abstraction,
Homo
economicus
.
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It is clear, for example, that the very idea of individual possession
can acquire meaning only on the basis of the original condition of the
existent. For that idea to appear, it is first necessary that there be in the
subject a tendency to posit himself in his radical singularity, an
affirmation of his existence as autonomous and separate. Obviously
this claim remained subjective, interior, and without truth as long as
the individual lacked the practical means to satisfy it objectively: for
lack of the right tools, at first he could not experience his power over
the world, he felt lost in nature and in
the group, passive, threatened,
the plaything of obscure forces; it was only in identifying with the
whole clan that he dared to think himself: the totem, the mana, and the
earth were collective realities. The discovery of bronze enabled man,
tested by hard and productive work, to find himself as creator,
dominating nature; no longer afraid of nature, having overcome
resistance, he dares to grasp himself as autonomous activity and to
accomplish himself in his singularity.
2
But this accomplishment
would never have been realized if man had not originally wanted it;
the lesson of labor is not inscribed in a passive subject: the subject
forged and conquered himself in forging his tools and conquering the
earth. On the other hand, the affirmation of the subject is not enough
to explain ownership: in challenges, struggles, and individual combat,
every consciousness can try to rise to sovereignty. For the challenge
to have taken the form of the potlatch, that is, of economic rivalry, and
from there first for the chief and then for the clan members to have
laid claim to private goods, there had to be another original tendency
in man: in the preceding chapter we said that the existent can only
succeed in grasping himself by alienating himself; he searches for
himself through the world, in the guise of a foreign figure he makes
his own. The clan encounters its own alienated existence in the totem,
the mana, and the territory it occupies; when the individual separates
from the community, he demands a singular embodiment: the mana is
individualized in the chief, then in each individual; and at the same
time each one tries to appropriate a piece of land, tools, or crops. In
these riches of his, man finds himself because he lost himself in them:
it is understandable then that he can attribute to them an importance as
basic as that of his life itself. Thus man’s
interest
in his property
becomes an intelligible relationship. But clearly the tool alone is not
enough to explain it; the whole attitude of the tool-armed man must be
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grasped, an attitude that implies an ontological infrastructure.
Similarly, it is impossible to
deduce
woman’s oppression from
private property. Here again, the shortcomings of Engels’s point of
view are obvious. While he clearly understood that woman’s
muscular weakness was a concrete inferiority only in relation to
bronze and iron tools, he failed to
see that limits to her work capacity
constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only from a certain
perspective. Because man is transcendence and ambition, he projects
new demands with each new tool: after having invented bronze
instruments, he was no longer satisfied with developing gardens and
wanted instead to clear and cultivate vast fields. This will did not
spring from bronze itself. Woman’s powerlessness brought about her
ruin because man apprehended her through a project of enrichment
and expansion. And this project is still not enough to explain her
oppression: the division of labor by sex might have been a friendly
association. If the original relation between man and his peers had
been exclusively one of friendship, one could not account for any
kind of enslavement: this phenomenon is a consequence of the
imperialism of human consciousness, which seeks to match its
sovereignty objectively. Had there not been in human consciousness
both the original category of the Other and an original claim to
domination over the Other, the discovery of the bronze tool could not
have brought about woman’s oppression. Nor does Engels account
for the specific character of this oppression. He tried to reduce the
opposition of the sexes to a class conflict: in fact, he did it without real
conviction; this thesis is indefensible. True, the division of labor by
sex and the oppression resulting from it bring to mind class division
in some ways: but they should not be confused; there is no biological
basis for division by class; in work the slave becomes conscious of
himself against the master; the proletariat has always experienced its
condition in revolt, thus returning to the essential, constituting a threat
to its exploiters; and the goal of the proletariat is to cease to exist as a
class. We have said in the introduction how different woman’s
situation is, specifically because of the community of life and interests
that create her solidarity with man, and due to the complicity he
encounters in her: she harbors no desire for revolution, she would not
think of eliminating herself as a sex: she simply asks that certain
consequences of sexual differentiation be abolished. And more
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serious still, woman cannot in good faith be regarded only as a
worker; her reproductive function is as important as her productive
capacity, both in the social economy and in her personal life; there are
periods in history when it is more useful to have children than till the
soil. Engels sidestepped the problem; he limits himself to declaring
that the socialist community will abolish the family, quite an abstract
solution; everyone knows how often and how radically the U.S.S.R.
has had to change its family policy to balance out production needs of
the moment with the needs of repopulation; besides, eliminating the
family does not necessarily liberate woman: the example of Sparta and
that of the Nazi regime prove that notwithstanding
her direct
attachment to the state, she might still be no less oppressed by males.
A truly socialist ethic—one that seeks justice without restraining
liberty, one that imposes responsibilities on individuals but without
abolishing individual freedom—will find itself most uncomfortable
with problems posed by woman’s condition. It is impossible to
simply assimilate gestation to a
job
or
service
like military service. A
deeper breach is created in a woman’s life by requiring her to have
children than by regulating citizens’ occupations: no state has ever
dared institute compulsory coitus. In the sexual act and in maternity,
woman engages not only time and energy but also essential values.
Rationalist materialism tries in vain to ignore this powerful aspect of
sexuality: sexual instinct cannot be regulated; according to Freud, it
might even possess an inherent denial of its own satisfaction; what is
certain is that it cannot be integrated into the social sphere, because
there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time, of the
individual against the universal: to try to channel and exploit it risks
killing it, because live spontaneity cannot be disposed of like inert
matter; nor can it be compelled in the way a freedom can be. There is
no way to directly oblige a woman to give birth: all that can be done is
to enclose her in situations where motherhood is her only option: laws
or customs impose marriage on her, anticonception measures and
abortion are banned, divorce is forbidden. These old patriarchal
constraints are exactly the ones the U.S.S.R. has brought back to life
today; it has revived paternalistic theories about marriage; and in
doing so, it has asked woman to become an erotic object again: a
recent speech asked Soviet women citizens to pay attention to their
clothes, to use makeup, and to become flirtatious to hold on to their
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husbands and stimulate their desire. Examples like this prove how
impossible it is to consider the woman as a solely productive force:
for man she is a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object, an
Other through whom he seeks himself. Although totalitarian or
authoritarian regimes may all try to ban psychoanalysis and declare
that personal emotional conflicts have no place for citizens loyally
integrated into the community, eroticism is an experience where
individuality always prevails over generality. And for democratic
socialism where classes would be abolished but not individuals, the
question of individual destiny would still retain all its importance:
sexual differentiation would retain all its importance. The sexual
relation that unites woman with man is not the same as the one he
maintains with her; the bond that attaches her to the child is irreducible
to any other. She was not created by the bronze tool alone: the
machine is not sufficient to abolish her. To demand for woman all the
rights, all the possibilities of the human being in general does not
mean one must be blind to her singular situation.
To know this
situation, it is necessary to go beyond historical materialism, which
only sees man and woman as economic entities.
So we reject Freud’s sexual monism and Engels’s economic
monism for the same reason. A psychoanalyst will interpret all
woman’s social claims as a phenomenon of “masculine protest”; for
the Marxist, on the other hand, her sexuality only expresses her
economic situation, in a rather complex, roundabout way; but the
categories clitoral and vaginal, like the categories bourgeois and
proletarian, are equally inadequate to encompass a concrete woman.
Underlying the personal emotional conflicts as well as the economic
history of humanity there is an existential infrastructure that alone
makes it possible to understand in its unity the unique form that is a
life. Freudianism’s value derives from the fact that the existent is a
body: the way he experiences himself as a body in the presence of
other bodies concretely translates his existential situation. Likewise,
what is true in the Marxist thesis is that the existent’s ontological
claims take on a concrete form based on the material possibilities
offered to him, particularly based on those that technology opens to
him. But if they are not incorporated into the whole of human reality,
sexuality and technology of themselves will fail to explain anything.
This is why in Freud prohibitions imposed by the superego and the
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drives of the ego appear as contingent facts; and in Engels’s account
of the history of the family, the most important events seem to arise
unexpectedly through the whims of mysterious chance. To discover
woman, we will not reject certain contributions of biology,
psychoanalysis, or historical materialism: but we will consider that the
body, sexual life, and technology exist concretely for man only
insofar as he grasps them from the overall perspective of his
existence. The value of muscular strength, the phallus, and the tool
can only be defined in a world of values: it is driven by the
fundamental project of the existent transcending itself toward being.
1.
Friedrich Engels,
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
.
2.
Gaston Bachelard in
La terre et les rêveries de la volonté
(
Earth and Reveries of
Will
) carries out, among others, an interesting study of the blacksmith’s work. He
shows how man asserts and separates himself from himself by the hammer and anvil.
“The temporal existence of the blacksmith is both highly particular and larger than
life. Through momentary violence, the worker, uplifted, gains mastery over time”; and
further on: “Those who forge take on the challenge of the universe rising against
them.”
94

|
PART TWO
|
HISTORY
95

|
CHAPTER 1
|
This world has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons
given for this have ever seemed sufficient. By reviewing prehistoric
and ethnographic data in the light of existentialist philosophy, we can
understand how the hierarchy of the sexes came to be. We have
already posited that when two human categories find themselves face-
to-face, each one wants to impose its sovereignty on the other; if both
hold to this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either
hostile or friendly, but always tense. If one of the two has an
advantage over the other, that one prevails and works to maintain the
relationship by oppression. It is thus understandable that man might
have had the will to dominate woman: but what advantage enabled
him to accomplish this will?
Ethnologists give extremely contradictory information about
primitive forms of human society, even more so when they are well-
informed and less systematic. It is especially difficult to formulate an
idea about woman’s situation in the preagricultural period. We do not
even know if, in such different living conditions from today’s,
woman’s musculature or her respiratory system was not as developed
as man’s. She was given hard work, and in particular it was she who
carried heavy loads; yet this latter fact is ambiguous: probably if she
was assigned this function, it is because within the convoy men kept
their hands free to defend against possible aggressors, animals or
humans; so their role was the more dangerous one and demanded
more strength. But it seems that in many cases women were robust
and resilient enough to participate in warrior expeditions. According
to the accounts by Herodotus and the traditions of the Amazons from
Dahomey as well as ancient and modern testimonies, women were
known to take part in bloody wars or vendettas; they showed as much
courage and cruelty as males: there are references to women who bit
their teeth into their enemies’ livers. In spite of this, it is likely that
then as now men had the advantage of physical force; in the age of the
clubs and wild animals, in
the age when resistance to nature was at its
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greatest and tools were at their most rudimentary, this superiority
must have been of extreme importance. In any case, as robust as
women may have been at that time, the burdens of reproduction
represented for them a severe handicap in the fight against a hostile
world: Amazons were said to mutilate their breasts, which meant that
at least during the period of their warrior lives they rejected maternity.
As for ordinary women, pregnancy, giving birth, and menstruation
diminished their work capacity and condemned them to long periods
of impotence; to defend themselves against enemies or to take care of
themselves and their children, they needed the protection of warriors
and the catch from hunting and fishing provided by the males. As
there obviously was no birth control, and as nature does not provide
woman with sterile periods as it does for other female mammals,
frequent pregnancies must have absorbed the greater part of their
strength and their time; they were unable to provide for the lives of the
children they brought into the world. This is a primary fact fraught
with great consequence: the human species’ beginnings were difficult;
hunter, gatherer, and fishing peoples reaped meager bounty from the
soil, and at great cost in effort; too many children were born for the
group’s resources; the woman’s absurd fertility kept her from
participating actively in the growth of these resources, while it was
constantly creating new needs. Indispensable to the perpetuation of
the species, she perpetuated it too abundantly: so it was man who
controlled the balance between reproduction and production. Thus
woman did not even have the privilege of maintaining life that the
creator male had; she did not play the role of ovum to his
spermatozoid or womb to his phallus; she played only one part in the
human species’ effort to persist in being, and it was thanks to man
that this effort had a concrete result.
Nonetheless, as the production-reproduction balance always finds a
way of stabilizing itself—even at the price of infanticide, sacrifices, or
wars—men and women are equally indispensable from the point of
view of group survival; it could even be supposed that at certain
periods when food was plentiful, his protective and nourishing role
might have subordinated the male to the wife-mother. There are
female animals that derive total autonomy from motherhood; so why
has woman not been able to make a pedestal for herself from it? Even
in those moments when humanity most desperately needed births—
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since the need for manual labor prevailed over the need for raw
materials to exploit—and even in those times when motherhood was
the most venerated, maternity was not enough for women to conquer
the highest rank.
1
The reason for this is that humanity is
not a simple
natural species: it does not seek to survive as a species; its project is
not stagnation: it seeks to surpass itself.
The primitive hordes were barely interested in their posterity.
Connected to no territory, owning nothing, embodied in nothing
stable, they could formulate no concrete idea of permanence; they
were unconcerned with survival and did not recognize themselves in
their descendants; they did not fear death and did not seek heirs;
children were a burden and not of great value for them; the proof is
that infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples; and
many newborns who are not massacred die for lack of hygiene in a
climate of total indifference. So the woman who gives birth does not
take pride in her creation; she feels like the passive plaything of
obscure forces, and painful childbirth a useless and even bothersome
accident. Later, more value was attached to children. But in any case,
to give birth and to breast-feed are not
activities
but natural functions;
they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no
motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she
passively submits to her biological destiny. Because housework alone
is compatible with the duties of motherhood, she is condemned to
domestic labor, which locks her into repetition and immanence; day
after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it
produces nothing new. Man’s case is radically different. He does not
provide for the group in the way worker bees do, by a simple vital
process, but rather by acts that transcend his animal condition.
Homo
faber
has been an inventor since the beginning of time: even the stick
or the club he armed himself with to knock down fruit from a tree or
to slaughter animals is an instrument that expands his grasp of the
world; bringing home freshly caught fish is not enough for him: he
first has to conquer the seas by constructing dugout canoes; to
appropriate the world’s treasures, he annexes the world itself.
Through such actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and
projects paths to them: he realizes himself as existent. To maintain
himself, he creates; he spills over the present and opens up the future.
This is the reason fishing and hunting expeditions have a sacred
98

quality. Their success is greeted by celebration and triumph; man
recognizes his humanity in them. This pride is still apparent today
when he builds a dam, a skyscraper, or an atomic reactor. He has not
only worked to preserve the given world: he has burst its borders; he
has laid the ground for a new future.
His activity has another dimension that endows him with supreme
dignity: it is often dangerous. If blood were only a food, it would not
be worth more than milk: but the hunter is not a butcher: he runs risks
in the struggle against wild animals. The warrior risks his own life to
raise the prestige of the horde—his clan. This is how he brilliantly
proves that life is not the
supreme value for man but that it must serve
ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her
exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in
risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why
throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that
gives birth but to the one that kills.
Here we hold the key to the whole mystery. On a biological level, a
species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is
nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By
transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of
Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure
repetition. With an animal, the gratuitousness and variety of male
activities are useless because no project is involved; what it does is
worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the
species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new
instruments, invents and forges the future. Positing himself as
sovereign, he encounters the complicity of woman herself: because
she herself is also an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her
and her project is not repetition but surpassing herself toward another
future; she finds the confirmation of masculine claims in the core of
her being. She participates with men in festivals that celebrate the
success and victories of males. Her misfortune is to have been
biologically destined to repeat Life, while in her own eyes Life in
itself does not provide her reasons for being, and these reasons are
more important than life itself.
Certain passages where Hegel’s dialectic describes the relationship
of master to slave would apply far better to the relationship of man to
woman. The Master’s privilege, he states, arises from the affirmation
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of Spirit over Life in the fact of risking his life: but in fact the
vanquished slave has experienced this same risk, whereas the woman
is originally an existent who gives
Life
and does not risk
her
life;
there has never been combat between the male and her; Hegel’s
definition applies singularly to her. “The other [consciousness] is the
dependent consciousness for which essential reality is animal life, that
is, life given by another entity.” But this relationship differs from the
relationship of oppression because woman herself aspires to and
recognizes the values concretely attained by males. It is the male who
opens up the future toward which she also transcends; in reality,
women have never pitted female values against male ones: it is men
wanting to maintain masculine prerogatives who invented this
division; they wanted to create a feminine domain—a rule of life, of
immanence—only to lock woman in it. But it is above and beyond all
sexual specification that the existent seeks self-justification in the
movement of his transcendence: the very submission of women
proves this. Today what women claim is to be recognized
as existents
just like men, and not to subordinate existence to life or the man to his
animality.
Thus an existential perspective has enabled us to understand how
the biological and economic situation of primitive hordes led to male
supremacy. The female, more than the male, is prey to the species;
humanity has always tried to escape from its species’ destiny; with the
invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity and project
for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the
animal. It is because humanity puts itself into question in its being—
that is, values reasons for living over life—that man has set himself as
master over woman; man’s project is not to repeat himself in time: it is
to reign over the instant and to forge the future. Male activity, creating
values, has constituted existence itself as a value; it has prevailed over
the indistinct forces of life; and it has subjugated Nature and Woman.
We must now see how this situation has continued and evolved
through the centuries. What place has humanity allotted to this part of
itself that has been defined in its core as Other? What rights have been
conceded to it? How have men defined it?
1.
Sociology no longer gives credit to Bachofen’s lucubrations.
100

|
CHAPTER 2
|
We have just seen that women’s fate is very harsh in primitive hordes;
in female animals the reproductive function is limited naturally, and
when it occurs, the particular animal is more or less released from
other toil; only domestic females are sometimes exploited to the point
of exhaustion of their forces as reproducers and in their individual
capacities by a demanding master. This was undoubtedly the case of
woman at a time when the struggle against a hostile world demanded
the full employment of community resources; added to the fatigues of
incessant and unregulated procreation were those of hard domestic
duties. Nevertheless, some historians maintain that precisely at that
time, male superiority was the least marked; which means that this
superiority is lived in an immediate form, not yet posited and willed;
no one tries to compensate for the cruel disadvantages that handicap
woman; but neither does anyone try to break her down, as will later
happen in paternalistic regimes. No institution actually ratifies the
inequality of the sexes; in fact, there are no institutions: no property,
no inheritance, no legal system. Religion is neutral; the totems that are
worshipped are asexual.
It is when nomads settled the land and became farmers that
institutions and law appeared. Man no longer has to limit himself to
combating hostile forces; he begins to express himself concretely
through the figure he imposes on the world, thinking the world and
thinking himself; at that juncture, sexual differentiation is reflected in
the group structure, and it takes on a particular character: in
agricultural communities, woman is often vested with extraordinary
prestige. This prestige is explained essentially by the new importance
that children assume in a civilization based on working the land; by
settling a territory, men begin to appropriate it. Property appears in a
collective form; it demands posterity from its owners; motherhood
becomes a sacred function. Many tribes live under a communal
regime: this does not mean that women belong to all the men in the
community;
it is no longer thought today that promiscuous marriage
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was ever practiced; but men and women only have a religious, social,
and economic existence as a group: their individuality remains a
purely biological fact; marriage, whatever its form—monogamy,
polygamy, polyandry—is itself nothing but a secular incident that
does not create a mystical link. For the wife it is in no way a source of
servitude, as she remains an integral part of her clan. The clan as a
whole, gathered under the same totem, mystically shares the same
mana and materially shares the common enjoyment of a territory. But
in the alienation process mentioned before, the clan grasps itself in
this territory in the guise of an objective and concrete figure; through
the permanence of the land, the clan thus realizes itself as a unity
whose identity persists throughout the passage of time. Only this
existential process makes it possible to understand the identification
that has survived to this day among the clan, the gens, the family, and
property. In the thinking of nomadic tribes, only the moment exists;
the agricultural community replaces this thinking with the concept of a
life rooted in the past and incorporating the future: the totem ancestor
who gives his name to the clan members is venerated; and the clan
takes an abiding interest in its descendants: it will survive through the
land that he bequeaths to them and that they will exploit. The
community conceives of its unity and wills its existence beyond the
present: it sees itself in its children, it recognizes them as its own, and
it accomplishes and surpasses itself through them.
But many primitives are unaware of the father’s role in the
procreation of children, who are thought to be the reincarnation of
ancestral larvae floating around certain trees, certain rocks, in certain
sacred places, and descending into the woman’s body; in some cases,
they believe she must not be a virgin if this infiltration is to take place;
but other peoples believe that it also takes place through the nostrils or
mouth; at any rate, defloration is secondary here, and for mystical
reasons the prerogative is rarely the husband’s. The mother is clearly
necessary for the birth of the child; she is the one who keeps and
nourishes the germ within her, and so the life of the clan is propagated
in the visible world through her. This is how she finds herself playing
the principal role. Very often, children belong to their mother’s clan,
bear her name, and share her rights, particularly the use of the land
belonging to the clan. So communal property is transmitted through
women: through them the fields and their harvests are reserved to
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members of the clan, and inversely it is through their mothers that
members are destined to a given piece of land. The land can thus be
considered as mystically belonging to women: their hold on the soil
and its fruits is both religious and legal. The tie that binds them is
stronger than one of
ownership; maternal right is characterized by a
true assimilation of woman to the land; in each, through its avatars,
the permanence of life is achieved, life that is essentially generation.
For nomads, procreation seems only an accident, and the riches of the
earth are still unknown; but the farmer admires the mystery of
fertilization that burgeons in the furrows and in the maternal womb.
He knows that he was conceived like the cattle and the harvests, and
he wants his clan to conceive other humans who will perpetuate it in
perpetuating the fertility of the fields; nature as a whole seems like a
mother to him; the earth is woman, and the woman is inhabited by the
same obscure forces as the earth.
1
This is part of the reason
agricultural work is entrusted to woman: able to call up the ancestral
larvae within her, she also has the power to make fruit and wheat
spring from the sowed fields. In both cases it is a question of a magic
conjuration, not of a creative act. At this stage, man no longer limits
himself to gathering the products of the earth: but he does not yet
understand his power; he hesitates between technical skill and magic;
he feels passive, dependent on Nature that doles out existence and
death by chance. To be sure, he recognizes more or less the function
of the sexual act as well as the techniques for cultivating the soil: but
children and crops still seem like supernatural gifts; and the
mysterious emanations flowing from the feminine body bring forth
into this world the riches latent in the mysterious sources of life. Such
beliefs are still alive today among numerous Indian, Australian, and
Polynesian tribes, and become all the more important as they match
the practical interests of the collectivity.
2
Motherhood relegates
woman to a sedentary existence; it is natural for her to stay at home
while men hunt, fish, and go to war. But primitive people rarely
cultivate more than a modest garden contained within their own
village limits, and its cultivation is a domestic task; Stone Age
instruments require little effort; economics and mystical belief agree to
leave agricultural work to women. Domestic work, as it is taking
shape, is also their lot: they weave rugs and blankets; they shape
pottery. And they are often in charge of barter; commerce is in their
103

hands. The life of the clan is thus maintained and extended through
them; children, herds, harvests, tools, and the whole prosperity of the
group of which they are the soul depend on their work and their
magic virtues. Such strength inspires in men a respect mingled with
fear, reflected in their worship. It is in women that the whole of
foreign Nature is concentrated.
It has already been said here that man never thinks himself without
thinking the Other; he grasps the world under the emblem of duality,
which is not initially sexual. But being naturally different from man,
who posits himself as the same, woman is consigned to the category
of Other; the Other encompasses woman; at first she is not important
enough to incarnate the Other alone, so a subdivision at the heart of
the Other develops: in ancient cosmographies, a single element often
has both male and female incarnations; thus for the Babylonians, the
Ocean and the Sea were the double incarnation of cosmic chaos.
When the woman’s role grows, she comes to occupy nearly the whole
region of the Other. Then appear the feminine divinities through
whom fertility is worshipped. A discovery made in Susa shows the
oldest representation of the Great Goddess, the Great Mother in a
long robe and high coiffure, which other statues show crowned with
towers; excavations in Crete have yielded several effigies of her. She
can be steatopygous and crouched, or thin and standing, sometimes
clothed, and often naked, her arms pressed beneath her swollen
breasts. She is the queen of heaven, a dove is her symbol; she is also
the empress of hades, she comes out slithering, symbolized by a
serpent. She can be seen in mountains, woods, the sea, and springs.
She creates life everywhere; if she kills, she resurrects. Fickle,
lascivious, and cruel like Nature, propitious and yet dangerous, she
reigns over all of Asia Minor, over Phrygia, Syria, Anatolia, and over
all of western Asia. She is known as Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte to
Semitic peoples, and Gaea, Rhea, or Cybele to the Greeks; she is
found in Egypt in the form of Isis; male divinities are subordinated to
her. Supreme idol in faraway regions of heaven and hades, woman on
earth is surrounded by taboos like all sacred beings—she is herself
taboo; because of the powers she holds, she is seen as a magician or a
sorceress; she is included in prayers, and she can be at times a
priestess like the druids among the ancient Celts; in certain cases she
participates in the government of the tribe, and at times she even
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governs on her own. These distant ages have left us no literature. But
the great patriarchal periods conserve in their mythology, monuments,
and traditions the memory of times when women occupied very high
positions. From a feminine point of view,
the Brahman period is a
regression from that of Rig-Veda, and the latter a regression from the
primitive stage that preceded it. The pre-Islamic bedouin women had a
much higher status than that accorded them by the Koran. The great
figures of Niobe and Medea evoke an era when mothers, considering
their children to be their own property, took pride in them. And in the
Homeric poems, Andromache and Hecuba have an importance that
classic Greece no longer granted to women hidden in the shadows of
the gynaeceum.
These facts all lead to the supposition that in primitive times a
veritable reign of women existed; this hypothesis, proposed by
Bachofen, was adopted by Engels; the passage from matriarchy to
patriarchy seems to him to be “the great historical defeat of the
feminine sex.” But in reality this golden age of Woman is only a
myth. To say that woman was the
Other
is to say that a relationship of
reciprocity between the sexes did not exist: whether Earth, Mother, or
Goddess, she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself
beyond
human rule: she was thus
outside
of this rule. Society has
always been male; political power has always been in men’s hands.
“Political authority, or simply social authority, always belongs to
men,” Lévi-Strauss affirms at the end of his study of primitive
societies. For men, the counterpart—or the other—who is also the
same, with whom reciprocal relationships are established, is always
another male individual. The duality that can be seen in one form or
another at the heart of society pits one group of men against another;
and women are part of the goods men possess and a means of
exchange among themselves: the mistake comes from confusing two
forms of mutually exclusive alterity. Insofar as woman is considered
the absolute Other, that is—whatever magic powers she has—as the
inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject.
3
Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself
for-itself
before a male group; they have never had a direct or
autonomous relationship with men. “The relationship of reciprocity
which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and
women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the
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occasion of this relationship,” said Lévi-Strauss.
4
Woman’s concrete
condition is not
affected by the type of lineage that prevails in the
society to which she belongs; whether the regime is patrilineal,
matrilineal, bilateral, or undifferentiated (undifferentiation never being
precise), she is always under men’s guardianship; the only question is
if, after marriage, she is still subjected to the authority of her father or
her oldest brother—authority that will also extend to her children—or
of her husband. In any case: “The woman is never anything more than
the symbol of her lineage. Matrilineal descent is the authority of the
woman’s father or brother extended to the brother-in-law’s village.”
5
She only mediates the law; she does not possess it. In fact, it is the
relationship of two masculine groups that is defined by the system of
filiation, and not the relation of the two sexes. In practice, woman’s
concrete condition is not consistently linked to any given type of law.
It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high
position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at
the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are
sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate
of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state
of abjection. And cases where a woman remains in her clan and her
husband makes rapid, even clandestine visits to her are very rare. She
almost always goes to live under her husband’s roof: this fact is proof
enough of male domination. “Behind the variations in the type of
descent,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “the permanence of patrilocal residence
attests to the basic asymmetrical relationship between the sexes which
is characteristic of human society.” Since she keeps her children with
her, the result is that the territorial organization of the tribe does not
correspond to its totemic organization: the former is contingent, the
latter rigorously constructed; but in practice, the first was the more
important because the place where people work and live counts more
than their mystical connection. In the more widespread transitional
regimes, there are two kinds of rights, one based on religion and the
other on the occupation and labor on the land, and they overlap.
Though only a secular institution, marriage nevertheless has great
social importance, and the conjugal family, though stripped of
religious signification, is very alive on a human level. Even within
groups where great sexual freedom is found, it is considered
conventional for a woman who brings a child into the world to be
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married; alone with an offspring, she cannot constitute an autonomous
group; and her brother’s religious protection does not suffice; a
husband’s presence is required. He often has many heavy
responsibilities for the children; they do not belong to his clan, but it
is nonetheless he who
feeds and raises them; between husband and
wife, and father and son, bonds of cohabitation, work, common
interest, and tenderness are formed. Relations between this secular
family and the totemic clan are extremely complex, as the diversity of
marriage rites attests. In primitive times, a husband buys a wife from a
foreign clan, or at least there is an exchange of goods from one clan to
another, the first giving over one of its members and the second
delivering cattle, fruits, or work in return. But as husbands take
charge of wives and their children, it also happens that they receive
remuneration from their brides’ brothers. The balance between
mystical and economic realities is an unstable one. Men often have a
closer attachment to their sons than to their nephews; it is as a father
that a man will choose to affirm himself when such affirmation
becomes possible. And this is why every society tends toward a
patriarchal form as its development leads man to gain awareness of
himself and to impose his will. But it is important to emphasize that
even at times when he was still confused by the mysteries of Life,
Nature, and Woman, he never relinquished his power; when, terrified
by the dangerous magic woman possesses, he posits her as the
essential, it is he who posits her, and he who realizes himself thereby
as the essential in this alienation he grants; in spite of the fecund
virtues that infuse her, man remains her master, just as he is master of
the fertile earth; she is destined to be subordinated, possessed, and
exploited, as is also Nature, whose magic fertility she incarnates. The
prestige she enjoys in the eyes of men comes from them; they kneel
before the Other, they worship the Goddess Mother. But as powerful
as she may appear, she is defined through notions created by the male
consciousness. All of the idols invented by man, however terrifying
he may have made them, are in fact dependent upon him, and this is
why he is able to destroy them. In primitive societies, this dependence
is not acknowledged and posited, but its existence is implicit, in itself:
and it will readily become mediatory as soon as man develops a
clearer consciousness of self, as soon as he dares to assert himself
and stand in opposition. And in fact, even when man grasps himself
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as given, passive, and subject to the vagaries of rain and sun, he still
realizes himself as transcendence, as project; already, spirit and will
assert themselves within him against life’s confusion and
contingencies. The totem ancestor, of which woman assumes multiple
incarnations, is more or less distinctly a male principle under its
animal or tree name; woman perpetuates carnal existence, but her role
is only that of nourisher, not of creator; in no domain whatsoever
does she create; she maintains the life of the tribe by providing
children and bread, nothing more; she lives condemned to immanence;
she incarnates only the static aspect of society, closed in on itself.
Meanwhile, man continues to monopolize the functions that open
this
society to nature and to the whole of humanity; the only efforts
worthy of him are war, hunting, and fishing; he conquers foreign prey
and annexes it to the tribe; war, hunting, and fishing represent an
expansion of existence, his going beyond into the world; the male is
still the only incarnation of transcendence. He does not yet have the
practical means to totally dominate Woman-Earth, he does not yet dare
stand up to her: but already he wants to tear himself away from her. I
think the profound reason for the well-known custom of exogamy, so
widespread in matrilineal societies, is to be found in this
determination. Even though man is unaware of the role he plays in
procreation, marriage has great importance for him; this is where he
attains adult dignity and receives his share of a piece of the world;
through his mother he is bound to the clan, his ancestors, and
everything that constitutes his own subsistence; but in all of these
secular functions—work or marriage—he aspires to escape this circle
and assert transcendence against immanence, to open up a future
different from the past where he is rooted; depending on the types of
relations recognized in different societies, the banning of incest takes
on different forms, but from primitive times to our days it has
remained the same: man wishes to possess that which he
is
not; he
unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself. The
wife must not be part of the husband’s mana, she must be foreign to
him: thus foreign to his clan. Primitive marriage is sometimes founded
on abduction, real or symbolic: because violence done to another is
the clearest affirmation of another’s alterity. Taking his wife by force,
the warrior proves he is able to annex the riches of others and burst
through the bounds of the destiny assigned to him at birth; purchasing
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her under various forms—paying tribute, rendering services—has,
less dramatically, the same signification.
6
Little by little, man mediated his experience, and in his
representations, as in his practical existence, the male principle
triumphed. Spirit prevailed over Life, transcendence over immanence,
technology over magic, and reason over superstition. The devaluation
of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity: for
she derived her prestige not from her positive value but from man’s
weakness; she incarnated disturbing natural mysteries: man escapes
her grasp when he frees himself from nature. In passing from stone to
bronze, he is able to conquer the land through his work and conquer
himself as well. The farmer is subjected to the vagaries of the soil, of
germination, and of seasons; he is passive, he beseeches, and he
waits: this explains why totem spirits peopled the human world; the
peasant endured the whims of these forces that took possession of
him. On the contrary, the worker fashions a tool according to his own
design; he imposes on it the form that fits his project; facing an inert
nature that defies him but that he overcomes, he asserts himself as
sovereign will; if he quickens his strokes on the anvil, he quickens the
completion of the tool, whereas nothing can hasten the ripening of
grain; his responsibility develops with what he makes: his movement,
adroit or maladroit, makes it or breaks it; careful, skillful, he brings it
to a point of perfection he can be proud of: his success depends not
on the favor of the gods but on himself; he challenges his fellow
workers, he takes pride in his success; and while he still leaves some
place for rituals, applied techniques seem far more important to him;
mystical values become secondary, and practical interests take
precedence; he is not entirely liberated from the gods, but he distances
himself by distancing them from himself; he relegates them to their
Olympian heaven and keeps the terrestrial domain for himself; the
great Pan begins to fade at the first sound of his hammer, and man’s
reign begins. He discovers his power. He finds cause and effect in the
relationship between his creating arm and the object of his creation:
the seed planted germinates or not, while metal always reacts in the
same way to fire, to tempering, and to mechanical treatment; this
world of tools can be framed in clear concepts: rational thinking,
logic, and mathematics are thus able to emerge. The whole
representation of the universe is overturned. Woman’s religion is
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bound to the reign of agriculture, a reign of irreducible duration,
contingencies, chance, anticipation, and mystery; the reign of
Homo
faber
is the reign of time that can be conquered like space, the reign of
necessity, project, action, and reason. Even when he contends with the
earth, he will henceforth contend with it as a worker; he discovers that
the soil can be fertilized, that it is good to let it lie fallow, that certain
seeds should be treated certain ways: it is he who makes the crops
grow; he digs canals, he irrigates
or drains the land, he lays out roads,
he builds temples: he creates the world anew. The peoples who
remained under the heel of the Mother Goddess where matrilineal
filiation was perpetuated were also those arrested in a primitive state
of civilization. Woman was venerated only inasmuch as man was a
slave to his own fears, a party to his own impotence: it was out of fear
and not love that he worshipped her. Before he could accomplish
himself, he had to begin by dethroning her.
7
It is the male principle of
creative force, light, intelligence, and order that he will henceforth
recognize as a sovereign. Standing beside the Mother Goddess
emerges a god, a son, or a lover who is still inferior to her, but who
looks exactly like her, and who is associated with her. He also
incarnates the fertility principle: he is a bull, the Minotaur, or the Nile
fertilizing the plains of Egypt. He dies in autumn and is reborn in
spring after the spouse-mother, invulnerable yet tearful, has devoted
her forces to searching for his body and bringing him back to life.
Appearing in Crete, this couple can also be found all along the banks
of the Mediterranean: Isis and Horus in Egypt, Astarte and Adonis in
Phoenicia, Cybele and Attis in Asia Minor, and Rhea and Zeus in
Hellenic Greece. And then the Great Mother was dethroned. In Egypt,
where woman’s condition is exceptionally favorable, the goddess
Nout, incarnating the sky, and Isis, the fertile land, wife of the Nile,
Osiris, continue to be extremely important; but it is nonetheless Ra,
the sun god, virile light and energy, who is the supreme king. In
Babylon, Ishtar is only the wife of Bel-Marduk; and it is he who
created things and guaranteed harmony. The god of the Semites is
male. When Zeus reigns in heaven, Gaea, Rhea, and Cybele have to
abdicate: all that is left to Demeter is a still imposing but secondary
divinity. The Vedic gods have wives, but these are not worshipped as
they are. The Roman Jupiter has no equal.
8
Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the
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result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their
biological
privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as
sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated
part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back
afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus
condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol,
she was never the one who chose her lot. “Men make gods and
women worship them,” said Frazer; it is men who decide if their
supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in
society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed
her own law.
Perhaps, however, if productive work had remained at the level of
her strength, woman would have achieved the conquest of nature
with
man; the human species affirmed itself against the gods through male
and female individuals; but she could not obtain the benefits of tools
for herself. Engels only incompletely explained her decline: it is
insufficient to say that the invention of bronze and iron profoundly
modified the balance of productive forces and brought about women’s
inferiority; this inferiority is not in itself sufficient to account for the
oppression she has suffered. What was harmful for her was that, not
becoming a labor partner for the worker, she was excluded from the
human
Mitsein:
that woman is weak and has a lower productive
capacity does not explain this exclusion; rather, it is because she did
not participate in his way of working and thinking and because she
remained enslaved to the mysteries of life that the male did not
recognize in her an equal; by not accepting her, once she kept in his
eyes the dimension of
other
, man could only become her oppressor.
The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine
incapacity into a curse. Man wanted to exhaust the new possibilities
opened up by new technology: he called upon a servile workforce,
and he reduced his fellow man to slavery. Slave labor being far more
efficient than work that woman could supply, she lost the economic
role she played within the tribe. And in his relationship with the slave,
the master found a far more radical confirmation of his sovereignty
than the tempered authority he exercised on woman. Venerated and
revered for her fertility, being
other
than man, and sharing the
disquieting character of the
other
, woman, in a certain way, kept man
dependent on her even while she was dependent on him; the
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reciprocity of the master-slave relationship existed
in the present
for
her, and it was how she escaped slavery. As for the slave, he had no
taboo to protect him, being nothing but a servile man, not just
different, but inferior: the dialectic of the slave-master relationship will
take centuries to be actualized; within the organized patriarchal
society, the slave is only a beast of burden with a human face: the
master exercises tyrannical authority over him; this exalts
his pride:
and he turns it against the woman. Everything he wins, he wins
against her; the more powerful he becomes, the more she declines. In
particular, when he acquires ownership of land,
9
he also claims
woman as property. Formerly he was possessed by
the
mana, by
the
earth: now he has
a
soul,
property;
freed from
Woman
, he now lays
claim to
a
woman and a posterity of his own. He wants the family
labor he uses for the benefit of his fields to be totally
his
, and for this
to happen, the workers must belong to him: he subjugates his wife
and his children. He must have heirs who will extend his life on earth
because he bequeaths them his possessions, and who will give him in
turn, beyond the tomb, the necessary honors for the repose of his
soul. The cult of the domestic gods is superimposed on the
constitution of private property, and the function of heirs is both
economic and mystical. Thus, the day agriculture ceases to be an
essentially magic operation and becomes creative labor, man finds
himself to be a generative force; he lays claim to his children and his
crops at the same time.
10
There is no ideological revolution more important in the primitive
period than the one replacing matrilineal descent with agnation; from
that time on, the mother is lowered to the rank of wet nurse or servant,
and the father’s sovereignty is exalted; he is the one who holds rights
and transmits them. Apollo, in Aeschylus’s
Eumenides
, proclaims
these new truths: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her
child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent
is he who mounts. A stranger she preserves a stranger’s seed, if no
god interfere.” It is clear that these affirmations are not the results of
scientific discoveries; they are acts of faith. Undoubtedly, the
experience of technical cause and effect from which man draws the
assurance of his creative powers makes him recognize he is as
necessary to procreation as the mother. Idea guided observation; but
the latter is restricted to granting the father a role equal to that of the
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mother: it led to the supposition that, as for nature, the condition for
conception was the encounter of sperm and menses; Aristotle’s idea
that woman is merely matter, and “the principle of movement which is
male in all living beings is better and more divine,” is an idea that
expresses a will to power that goes beyond all of what is known. In
attributing his posterity exclusively
to himself, man frees himself
definitively from subjugation by women, and he triumphs over
woman in the domination of the world. Doomed to procreation and
secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical
prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.
Men represented this triumph as the outcome of a violent struggle.
One of the most ancient cosmologies, belonging to the Assyro-
Babylonians, tells of their victory in a text that dates from the seventh
century but that recounts an even older legend. The Sun and the Sea,
Aton and Tiamat, gave birth to the celestial world, the terrestrial
world, and the great gods; but finding them too turbulent, they
decided to destroy them; and Tiamat, the woman-mother, led the
struggle against the strongest and most fine-looking of her
descendants, Bel-Marduk; he, having challenged her in combat, killed
her and slashed her body in two after a frightful battle; with one half
he made the vault of heaven, and with the other the foundation for the
terrestrial world; then he gave order to the universe and created
humanity. In the
Eumenides
drama, which illustrated the triumph of
patriarchy over maternal right, Orestes also assassinates Clytemnestra.
Through these bloody victories, the virile force and the solar forces of
order and light win over feminine chaos. By absolving Orestes, the
tribunal of the gods proclaims he is the son of Agamemnon before
being the son of Clytemnestra. The old maternal right is dead: the
audacious male revolt killed it. But we have seen that in reality, the
passage to paternal rights took place through gradual transitions.
Masculine conquest was a reconquest: man only took possession of
that which he already possessed; he put law into harmony with reality.
There was neither struggle, nor victory, nor defeat. Nevertheless,
these legends have profound meaning. At the moment when man
asserts himself as subject and freedom, the idea of the Other becomes
mediatory. From this day on, the relationship with the Other is a
drama; the existence of the Other is a threat and a danger. The ancient
Greek philosophy, which Plato, on this point, does not deny, showed
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that alterity is the same as negation, thus Evil. To posit the Other is to
define Manichaeism. This is why religions and their codes treat
woman with such hostility. By the time humankind reaches the stage
of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively
established: it is males who write the codes. It is natural for them to
give woman a subordinate situation; one might imagine, however, that
they would consider her with the same benevolence as children and
animals. But no. Afraid of woman, legislators organize her
oppression. Only the harmful aspects of the ambivalent virtues
attributed to her are retained: from sacred she becomes unclean.
Eve,
given to Adam to be his companion, lost humankind; to punish men,
the pagan gods invent women, and Pandora, the firstborn of these
female creatures, is the one who unleashes all the evil that humanity
endures. The Other is passivity confronting activity, diversity
breaking down unity, matter opposing form, disorder resisting order.
Woman is thus doomed to Evil. “There is a good principle that created
order, light, and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness,
and woman,” says Pythagoras. The Laws of Manu define her as a vile
being to be held in slavery. Leviticus assimilates her to beasts of
burden, owned by the patriarch. The laws of Solon confer no rights
on her. The Roman code puts her in guardianship and proclaims her
“imbecility.” Canon law considers her “the devil’s gateway.” The
Koran treats her with the most absolute contempt.
And yet Evil needs Good, matter needs the idea, and night needs
light. Man knows that to satisfy his desires, to perpetuate his
existence, woman is indispensable to him; he has to integrate her in
society: as long as she submits to the order established by males, she
is cleansed of her original stain. This idea is forcefully expressed in
the Laws of Manu: “Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom
a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she
assumes, like a river united with the ocean, and she is admitted after
death to the same celestial paradise.” The Bible too praises the
“virtuous woman.” Christianity, in spite of its loathing of the flesh,
respects the devoted virgin and the chaste and docile wife. Within a
religious group, woman can even hold an important religious position:
Brahmani in India and Flaminica in Rome are as holy as their
husbands; in a couple, the man is dominant, but both male and female
principles remain essential to the childbearing function, to life, and to
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the social order.
This very ambivalence of the Other, of the Female, will be reflected
in the rest of her history; until our times she will be subordinated to
men’s will. But this will is ambiguous: by total annexation, woman
will be lowered to the rank of a thing; of course, man attempts to
cover with his own dignity what he conquers and possesses; in his
eyes the Other retains some of her primitive magic; one of the
problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant
and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries,
and this will also entail an evolution in woman’s destiny.
11
1.
“Hail, Earth, mother of all men, may you be fertile in the arms of God and filled with
fruits for the use of man,” says an old Anglo-Saxon incantation.
2.
For the Bhantas of India, or in Uganda, a sterile woman is considered dangerous for
gardens. In Nicobar, it is believed that the harvest will be better if it is brought in by a
pregnant woman. In Borneo, seeds are chosen and preserved by women. “One seems to
feel in women a natural affinity with the seeds that are said by the women to be in a
state of pregnancy. Sometimes women will spend the night in the rice fields during its
growth period” (Hose and MacDougall). In India of yore, naked women pushed the
plow through the field at night. Indians along the Orinoco left the sowing and
planting to women because “women knew how to conceive seed and bear children, so
the seeds and roots planted by them bore fruit far more abundantly than if they had
been planted by male hands” (Frazer). Many similar examples can be found in Frazer.
3.
It will be seen that this distinction has been perpetuated. Periods that regard woman
as
Other
are those that refuse most harshly to integrate her into society as a human
being. Today she only becomes an
other
peer by losing her mystical aura.
Antifeminists have always played on this ambiguity. They readily agree to exalt the
woman as Other in order to make her alterity absolute and irreducible, and to refuse her
access to the human
Mitsein
.
4.
Lévi-Strauss,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
.
5.
Ibid.
6.
In Lévi-Strauss’s thesis already cited, there is, in a slightly different form, a
confirmation of this idea. What comes out of this study is that the prohibition of
incest is in no way the primal factor underlying exogamy; but it reflects the positive
desire for exogamy in a negative form. There is no intrinsic reason that it be improper
for a woman to have intercourse with men in her clan; but it is socially useful that she
be part of the goods by which each clan, instead of closing in on itself, establishes a
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reciprocal relationship with another clan: “Exogamy has a value less negative than
positive … it prohibits endogamous marriage … certainly not because a biological
danger is attached to consanguineous marriage, but because exogamous marriage
results in a social benefit.” The group should not for its own private purposes
consume women who constitute one of its possessions, but should use them as an
instrument of communication; if marriage with a woman of the same clan is forbidden,
“the sole reason is that she is
same
whereas she must (and therefore can) become
other …
the same women that were originally offered can be exchanged in return. All
that is necessary on either side is the
sign of otherness
, which is the outcome of a
certain position in a structure and not of any innate characteristic.”
7.
Of course, this condition is necessary but not sufficient: there are patrilineal
civilizations immobilized in a primitive stage; others, like the Mayas, regressed. There
is no absolute hierarchy between societies of maternal right and those of paternal
right: but only the latter have evolved technically and ideologically.
8.
It is interesting to note (according to H. Bégouën,
Journal of Psychology
, 1934) that
in the Aurignacian period there were numerous statuettes representing women with
overly emphasized sexual attributes: they are noteworthy for their plumpness and the
size accorded to their vulvas. Moreover, grossly sketched vulvas on their own were
also found in caves. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian epochs, these effigies
disappear. In the Aurignacian, masculine statuettes are very rare, and there are never
any representations of the male organ. In the Magdalenian epoch, some representations
of vulvas are still found, though in small quantities, but a great quantity of phalluses
was discovered.
9.
See Part One,
Chapter 3
, in this volume.
10.
In the same way that woman was identified with furrows, the phallus was identified
with the plow, and vice versa. In a drawing representing a plow from the Kassite period,
there are traces of the symbols of the generative act; afterward, the phallus-plow
identity was frequently reproduced in art forms. The word
lak
in some Austro-Asian
languages designates both phallus and plow. An Assyrian prayer addresses a god
whose “plow fertilized the earth.”
11.
We will examine this evolution in the Western world. The history of the woman in
the East, in India, and in China was one of long and immutable slavery. From the
Middle Ages to today, we will center this study on France, where the situation is
typical.
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|
CHAPTER 3
|
Once woman is dethroned by the advent of private property, her fate
is linked to it for centuries: in large part, her history is intertwined
with the history of inheritance. The fundamental importance of this
institution becomes clear if we keep in mind that the owner alienated
his existence in property; it was more important to him than life itself;
it goes beyond the strict limits of a mortal lifetime, it lives on after the
body is gone, an earthly and tangible incarnation of the immortal soul;
but this continued survival can occur only if property remains in the
owner’s hands: it can remain his after death only if it belongs to
individuals who are extensions of himself and recognized, who are
his own
. Cultivating paternal lands and worshipping the father’s spirit
are one and the same obligation for the heir: to ensure the survival of
ancestors on earth and in the underworld. Man will not, therefore,
agree to share his property or his children with woman. He will never
really be able to go that far, but at a time when patriarchy is powerful,
he strips woman of all her rights to hold and transmit property. It
seems logical, in fact, to deny her these rights. If it is accepted that a
woman’s children do not belong to her, they inevitably have no link
with the group the woman comes from. Woman is no longer passed
from one clan to another through marriage: she is radically abducted
from the group she is born into and annexed to her husband’s; he
buys her like a head of cattle or a slave, he imposes his domestic
divinities on her: and the children she conceives belong to her
spouse’s family. If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly
transmit her paternal family’s riches to that of her husband: she is
carefully excluded from the succession. But inversely, because she
owns nothing, woman is not raised to the dignity of a person; she
herself is part of man’s patrimony, first her father’s and then her
husband’s. Under a strictly patriarchal regime, a father can condemn
to death his male and female children at birth; but in the case of a male
child, society most often put limits on this power: a normally
constituted newborn male is allowed
to live, whereas the custom of
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exposure is very widespread for girls; there was massive infanticide
among Arabs: as soon as they were born, girls were thrown into
ditches. Accepting a female child is an act of generosity on the
father’s part; the woman enters such societies only through a kind of
grace bestowed on her, and not legitimately like males. In any case,
the stain of birth is far more serious for the mother when a girl is
born: among Hebrews, Leviticus demands twice as much cleansing as
for a newborn boy. In societies where “blood money” exists, only a
small sum is required when the victim is of the feminine sex: her
value compared with a male’s is like a slave’s with a free man’s.
When she is a young girl, the father has total power over her; on her
marriage he transmits it entirely to her spouse. Since she is his
property like the slave, the beast of burden, or the thing, it is natural
for a man to have as many wives as he wishes; only economic
reasons put limits on polygamy; the husband can disown his wives at
whim, and society barely accords them any guarantees. In return,
woman is subjected to rigorous chastity. In spite of the taboos,
matriarchal societies allow great freedom of behavior; prenuptial
chastity is rarely demanded; and adultery not judged severely. On the
contrary, when woman becomes man’s property, he wants a virgin,
and he demands total fidelity at the risk of severe penalty; it would be
the worst of crimes to risk giving heritage rights to a foreign
offspring: this is why the paterfamilias has the right to put a guilty
wife to death. As long as private property lasts, conjugal infidelity on
the part of a woman is considered a crime of high treason. All codes
up to our time have perpetuated inequality in issues concerning
adultery, arguing the seriousness of the fault committed by the woman
who might bring an illegitimate child into the family. And though the
right to take the law into one’s own hands has been abolished since
Augustus, the Napoleonic Code still holds out the promise of the
jury’s leniency for a husband who avenges himself. When woman
belonged to both a patrilineal clan and a conjugal family, she was able
to preserve a good amount of freedom, as the two series of bonds
overlapped and even conflicted with each other and as each system
served to support her against the other: for example, she could often
choose the husband of her fancy, since marriage was only a secular
event and had no effect on society’s deep structure. But under the
patriarchal regime, she was the property of a father who married her
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off as he saw fit; then attached to her husband’s household, she was
no more than his thing and the thing of the family (
genos
) in which
she was placed.
When family and private patrimony incontestably remain the bases
of society, woman also remains totally alienated. This is what has
happened in
the Muslim world. The structure is feudal in that there
has never been a state strong enough to unify and dominate the
numerous tribes: no power holds in check that of the patriarch chief.
The religion that was created when the Arab people were warriors and
conquerors professed the utmost disdain toward women. “Men are
superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has
gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make
from their substance for them,” says the Koran; the woman has never
held real power or mystic prestige. The bedouin woman works hard,
she plows and carries burdens: this is how she sets up a reciprocal
bond with her husband; she moves around freely, her face uncovered.
The Muslim woman, veiled and shut in, is still today a kind of slave
in most levels of society. I recall an underground cave in a troglodyte
village in Tunisia where four women were squatting: the old, one-
eyed, and toothless wife, her face ravaged, was cooking dough on a
small brazier surrounded by acrid smoke; two slightly younger but
equally disfigured wives were rocking children in their arms; one was
breastfeeding; seated before a weaver’s loom was a young idol,
magnificently dressed in silk, gold, and silver, knotting strands of
wool. Leaving this gloomy den—realm of immanence, womb, and
tomb—in the corridor leading up toward the light, I met the male,
dressed in white, sparklingly clean, smiling, sunny. He was returning
from the market, where he had bantered about world affairs with other
men; he would spend a few hours in this retreat of his own, in the
heart of this vast universe to which he belonged and from which he
was not separated. For the old withered creatures, for the young bride
doomed to the same degeneration, there was no other universe but the
murky cave from which they would emerge only at night, silent and
veiled.
The Jews of biblical times have more or less the same customs as
the Arabs. The patriarchs are polygamous and can renounce their
wives almost at whim; at the risk of harsh punishment, the young
bride has to be delivered to her spouse as a virgin; in cases of
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adultery, she is stoned; she is confined to domestic labor, as the image
of virtuous women demonstrates: “She seeketh wool and flax … she
riseth also while it is yet night … her candle goeth not off at
night … she eateth not the bread of idleness.” Even chaste and
industrious, she is impure and burdened with taboos; she cannot
testify in court. Ecclesiastes treats her with the deepest disgust: “And I
find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets,
and her hands as bands … one man among a thousand have I found;
but a woman among all those have I not found.” When her husband
dies, custom and even law require her to marry a brother of the
deceased.
This custom called levirate is found among many Oriental peoples.
In all regimes where woman is under guardianship, one of the
problems is what to do with widows. The most radical solution is to
sacrifice them on their husbands’ tombs. But it is not true that even in
India the law imposes such holocausts; the Laws of Manu permit a
wife to survive a husband; spectacular suicides have never been more
than an aristocratic fashion. It is far more frequent for the widow to be
handed over to her husband’s heirs. The levirate sometimes takes the
form of polyandry; to avoid the ambiguities of widowhood, all the
brothers in the family become the husbands of the woman, a custom
that serves to preserve the clan against the possible infertility of the
husband. According to a text of Caesar’s, in Brittany all the men of
one family had a certain number of women in common.
This form of radical patriarchy was not established everywhere. In
Babylon, Hammurabi’s Code recognized certain rights of woman: she
receives a share of the paternal inheritance, and when she marries, her
father provides her with a dowry. In Persia, polygamy is customary;
woman is bound to absolute obedience to the husband her father
chooses for her as soon as she is nubile; but she is more respected
than among most Oriental peoples; incest is not forbidden, and
marriage takes place frequently among sisters and brothers; she is in
charge of educating the children up to the age of seven for boys and
until marriage for girls. Woman can share in her husband’s estate if
the son proves himself unworthy; if she is a “privileged wife,” she is
entrusted with the guardianship of minor children in the case of her
husband’s death and with the business management in the absence of
an adult son. The rules of marriage clearly point out the importance
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posterity has for the head of a family. It is likely that there were five
forms of marriage:
1
(1) The woman married with the consent of her
parents; she was then called the “privileged wife”; her children
belonged to her husband. (2) When the woman was an only child, her
firstborn would be given up to her parents to replace their daughter;
then she would become a “privileged wife.” (3) If a man died
unmarried, his family would take a woman from outside, give her a
dowry, and marry her: she was called an “adopted wife”; half of her
children belonged to the deceased and the other half to the living
husband. (4) A widow without children who remarried was called a
servant wife: she owed half of the children of her second marriage to
her deceased husband. (5) The woman who married without the
consent of her parents could not inherit from them until the
oldest son,
coming of age, would give her to his father as a “privileged wife”; if
her husband died before, she was considered a minor and put under
guardianship. The status of the adopted wife and the servant wife
establishes the right of every man to be survived by descendants who
are not necessarily connected by a blood relationship. This confirms
what was said above; this relationship was in a way invented by man
when he sought to annex for himself—beyond his finite life—
immortality in this world and in the underworld.
In Egypt, woman’s condition was the most favorable. When
Goddess Mothers married, they maintained their standing; social and
religious unity resides in the couple; woman is an ally, a complement
to man. Her magic is so unthreatening that even the fear of incest is
overcome, and no differentiation is made between a sister and a
spouse.
2
She has the same rights as men, the same legal power; she
inherits, and she owns property. This uniquely fortunate situation is in
no way haphazard: it stems from the fact that in ancient Egypt the land
belonged to the king and the higher castes of priests and warriors; for
private individuals, landed property was only usufructuary; the land
was inalienable, property transmitted by inheritance had little value,
and there was no problem about sharing it. Because of this absence of
personal patrimony, woman maintained the dignity of a person. She
married whom she wanted, and as a widow she could remarry as she
wished. The male practiced polygamy, but although all of his children
were legitimate, he had only one real wife, the only one associated
with religion and linked to him legally: the others were mere slaves,
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deprived of all rights. The chief wife did not change status by
marrying: she remained mistress of her possessions and was free to
engage in contracts. When the pharaoh Bocchoris established private
property, woman’s position was too strong to be dislodged;
Bocchoris opened the era of contracts, and marriage itself became
contractual. There were three types of contracts: one dealt with servile
marriage; woman became man’s thing, but she could specify that he
would not have a concubine other than her; nonetheless, the legal
spouse was considered equal to man, and all their property was held
in common; the husband would often agree to pay her a sum of
money in the case of divorce. Later, this custom led to a type of
contract remarkably favorable to women; the husband agreed to
absolve her of her debt. There were serious punishments for adultery,
but divorce was fairly open for the two spouses. The presence of
contracts soundly restrained polygamy;
women got possession of the
wealth and transmitted it to their children, which brought about the
creation of a plutocratic class. Ptolemy Philopator decreed that women
could no longer alienate their property without marital authorization,
which kept them as eternal minors. But even in times when they had a
privileged status, unique in the ancient world, they were not socially
equal to men; taking part in religion and government, they could have
the role of regent, but the pharaoh was male; priests and warriors
were males; woman’s role in public life was a secondary one; and in
private life, fidelity was required of her without reciprocity.
The customs of the Greeks are very similar to Oriental ones; yet
they do not practice polygamy. No one knows exactly why.
Maintaining a harem always entails heavy costs: only the ostentatious
Solomon, the sultans from
The Thousand and One Nights
, kings,
chiefs, or rich property owners could afford the luxury of a vast
seraglio; an ordinary man had to be satisfied with three or four
women; a peasant rarely possessed more than two. Besides—except
in Egypt, where there was no specific landed property—the concern
for preserving the patrimony intact led to granting the oldest son
special rights on paternal inheritance; from this stemmed a hierarchy
among women, the mother of the principal heir invested with dignity
far superior to that of his other wives. If the wife herself has property
of her own or if she is dowered, she is considered a person by her
husband: he is joined to her by both a religious and an exclusive
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bond. From there on, the custom that only recognizes one wife was
undoubtedly established: but the reality was that the Greek citizen
continued to be comfortably “polygamous” since he could find the
satisfaction of his desires from street prostitutes or gynaeceum
servants. “We have hetarias for spiritual pleasures,” says
Demosthenes, “concubines (
pallakes
) for sensual pleasure, and wives
to give us sons.” The
pallakis
replaced the wife in the master’s bed if
she was ill, indisposed, pregnant, or recovering from childbirth; so
there was no great difference between a gynaeceum and a harem. In
Athens, the wife is shut up in her quarters, held by law under severe
constraint, and watched over by special magistrates. She spends her
whole life as a minor; she is under the control of her guardian: either
her father, or her husband, or her husband’s heir or, by default, the
state, represented by public officials; here are her masters, and they
use her like merchandise, the guardian’s control extending over both
her person and her property; the guardian can transmit her rights as he
wishes: the father gives his daughter up for adoption or in marriage;
the husband can repudiate his wife and hand her over to another
husband. But Greek law assures woman of a dowry used to support
her and that must be restored in full to her if the marriage is dissolved;
the law also authorizes the woman to file for divorce in certain rare
cases; but these are the only guarantees that society grants. Of course,
all inheritance is bequeathed to the male children, and the dowry is
considered not acquired property but a kind of duty imposed on the
guardian. However, thanks to this dowry custom, the widow no
longer passes for a hereditary possession in the hands of her
husband’s heirs: she returns to her family’s guardianship.
One of the problems arising from societies based on agnation is the
fate of inheritance in the absence of any male descendants. The
Greeks had instituted the custom of
epiklerate:
the female heir had to
marry her oldest relative in the paternal family (
genos);
thus the
property her father bequeathed to her would be transmitted to children
belonging to the same group, and the estate remained the property of
the paternal
genos;
the
epikleros
was not a female heir but only a
machine to procreate a male heir; this custom placed her entirely at
man’s mercy as she was automatically handed over to the firstborn of
her family’s men, who most often turned out to be an old man.
Since the cause of women’s oppression is found in the resolve to
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perpetuate the family and keep the patrimony intact, if she escapes the
family, she escapes this total dependence as well; if society rejects the
family by denying private property, woman’s condition improves
considerably. Sparta, where community property prevailed, was the
only city-state where the woman was treated almost as the equal of
man. Girls were brought up like boys; the wife was not confined to
her husband’s household; he was only allowed furtive nocturnal
visits; and his wife belonged to him so loosely that another man could
claim a union with her in the name of eugenics: the very notion of
adultery disappears when inheritance disappears; as all the children
belonged to the city as a whole, women were not jealously enslaved to
a master: or it can be explained inversely, that possessing neither
personal wealth nor individual ancestry, the citizen does not possess a
woman either. Women underwent the burdens of maternity as men
did war: but except for this civic duty, no restraints were put on their
freedom.
Along with the free women just discussed and slaves living within
the
genos
—unconditionally owned by the family head—are the
prostitutes found in Greece. Primitive people were familiar with
hospitality prostitution, turning over a woman to a guest passing
through, which undoubtedly had mystical explanations; and with
sacred prostitution, intended for the common good by releasing the
mysterious forces of fertility. These customs existed in classical
antiquity. Herodotus reports that in the fifth century
B.c.
, every woman
in Babylon had to give herself once in her life to a stranger in the
temple of Mylitta for a coin she contributed to the temple’s coffers;
she then returned home to live in chastity. Religious prostitution has
continued to our day among Egyptian almahs and Indian
bayadères
,
who make up respectable castes of musicians and dancers. But most
often, in Egypt, India, and western Asia, sacred prostitution slipped
into legal prostitution, the priestly class finding this trade profitable.
There were venal prostitutes even among the Hebrews. In Greece,
especially along the coast or on the islands where many foreigners
stopped off, temples of “young girls hospitable to strangers,” as
Pindar called them, could be found: the money they earned was
intended for religious establishments, that is, for priests and indirectly
for their maintenance. In reality, in a hypocritical way, sailors’ and
travelers’ sexual needs—in Corinth and other places—were exploited;
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and this was already venal prostitution. Solon was the one who turned
this into an institution. He bought Asian slaves and shut them up in
dicterions
located in Athens near the temple of Venus, not far from
the port, under the management of
pornotropos
in charge of the
financial administration of the establishment; each girl received wages,
and the net profit went to the state. After that,
kapaileia
, private
establishments, were opened: a red Priapus served as their display
sign. Soon, in addition to slaves, poor Greek women were taken in as
residents. The
dicterions
were considered so necessary that they were
recognized as inviolable places of asylum. Nonetheless, courtesans
were marked with infamy, they had no social rights, and their children
were exempted from providing for them; they had to wear specific
outfits made of multicolored cloth decorated with flower bouquets,
and their hair was dyed with saffron. Besides the women shut up in
dicterions
, there were free courtesans, who could be placed in three
categories:
dicteriads
, much like today’s registered prostitutes;
auletrids
, who were dancers and flute players; and hetaeras,
demimondaines who often came from Corinth having had official
liaisons with high-ranking Greek men and who played the social role
of modern-day “worldly women.” The first ones were found among
freed women or lower-class Greek girls; exploited by procurers, they
led a pitiful life. The second type succeeded in getting rich thanks to
their musical talent: the most famous of all was Lamia, mistress of
Ptolemy of Egypt, then of his vanquisher, the king of Macedonia,
Demetrius Poliorcetes. As for the last category, many were well-
known for sharing in the glory of their lovers. Disposing of
themselves and their fortunes freely, intelligent, cultivated, and artistic,
they were treated like persons by the men who were captivated by
their charms. And because they escaped from their families, because
they lived on the margins of society, they also escaped men: they
could seem to be their counterparts, almost their equals. In Aspasia, in
Phryne, and in Lais, the superiority of the free woman asserted itself
over the virtuous mother of a family.
These brilliant exceptions aside, the Greek woman is reduced to
semi-slavery; she does not even have the freedom to complain:
Aspasia and the more passionate Sappho are barely able to make a
few grievances heard. In Homer, there are remnants of the heroic
period when women had some power: still, the warriors roundly send
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them off to their chambers. The same scorn is found in Hesiod: “He
who confides in a woman confides in a thief.” In the great classical
period, woman is resolutely confined to the gynaeceum. “The best
woman is she of whom men speak the least,” said Pericles. Plato,
who proposed admitting a council of matrons to the Republic’s
administration and giving girls a liberal education, is an exception; he
provoked Aristophanes’ raillery; to a woman who questions him
about public affairs, a husband responds, in
Lysistrata:
“This is none
of your business. Shut up, or you’ll be beaten … go back to your
weaving.” Aristotle expresses the common point of view in declaring
that woman is woman because of a deficiency, that she must live
closed up at home and obey man. “The slave is entirely deprived of
the freedom to deliberate; woman does have it, but she is weak and
powerless,” he states. According to Xenophon, a woman and her
spouse are complete strangers to each other: “Are there people you
communicate with less than your wife?—There are not many”; all that
is required of a woman in
Oeconomicus
is to be an attentive, prudent,
economical housewife, busy as a bee, a model of organization. The
modest status to which women are reduced does not keep the Greeks
from being deeply misogynist. In the seventh century B.c.,
Archilochus writes biting epigrams against women; Simonides of
Amorgos says, “Women are the greatest evil God ever created: if they
sometimes seem useful, they soon change into trouble for their
masters.” For Hipponax: “There are but two days in life when your
wife brings you joy: her wedding day and her funeral.” But it is the
Ionians who, in Miletus’s stories, are the most spiteful: for example,
the tale of the matron of Ephesus. Mostly women are attacked for
being lazy, shrewish, or spendthrift, in fact precisely the absence of
the qualities demanded of them. “There are many monsters on the
earth and in the sea, but the greatest is still woman,” wrote Menander.
“Woman is a pain that never goes away.” When the institution of the
dowry brought a certain importance to women, it was her arrogance
that was deplored; this is one of Aristophanes’—and notably
Menander’s—familiar themes. “I married a witch with a dowry. I
took her for her fields and her house, and that, O
Apollo, is the worst
of evils!” “Damn him who invented marriage and then the second, the
third, the fourth, and the rest who followed them.” “If you are poor
and you marry a rich woman, you will be reduced to being both a
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slave and poor.” The Greek woman was too closely controlled to be
attacked for her conduct; and it was not the flesh in her that was
vilified. It was more the responsibilities and duties of marriage that
weighed on men; this leads to the supposition that in spite of her
rigorous conditions, and although she had almost no recognized
rights, she must have held an important place in the household and
enjoyed some authority; doomed to obedience, she could disobey; she
could bombard her husband with tantrums, tears, nagging, and
insults; marriage, meant to enslave woman, was a ball and chain for
the husband as well. In the character of Xanthippe is embodied all the
grievances of the Greek citizen against the shrewish wife and the
adversities of conjugal life.
The conflict between family and state defines the history of the
Roman woman. The Etruscans constituted a matrilineal filiation
society, and it is probable that at the time of the monarchy Rome still
practiced exogamy linked to a matriarchal regime: the Latin kings did
not transmit power through heredity. What is certain is that after
Tarquinius’s death, patriarchy asserts itself: agricultural property and
the private estate—thus the family—become society’s nucleus.
Woman will be strictly subservient to the patrimony and thus to the
family group: laws deprive her of even those guarantees accorded to
Greek women; she lives her life in powerlessness and servitude. She
is, of course, excluded from public affairs and prohibited from any
“masculine office”; she is a perpetual minor in civil life. She is not
directly deprived of her paternal inheritance but, through circuitous
means, is kept from using it: she is put under the authority of a
guardian. “Guardianship was established in the interest of the
guardians themselves,” said Gaius, “so that woman—of whom they
are the presumptive heirs—could not rob them of their inheritance
with a will, nor diminish the inheritance by alienations or debts.”
Woman’s first guardian is her father; in his absence, paternal male
relatives fulfill that function. When the woman marries, she passes
“into the hands” of her husband; there are three types of marriage: the
confarreatio
, where the spouses offer a spelt cake to the Capitoline
Jupiter in the presence of the
flamen dialis;
the
coemptio
, a fictitious
sale in which the plebeian father “mancipated” his daughter to her
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husband; and the
usus
, the result of a cohabitation of one year; all
three were with
manu
, meaning that the male spouse replaces the
father or his male relatives; his wife is considered one of his
daughters, and he thenceforth
has complete power over her person
and her property. But from the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables,
because the Roman woman belonged to both paternal and conjugal
clans, conflicts arose, giving rise to her legal emancipation. As a
result, the
manu
marriage dispossesses her male agnates. To defend
the paternal relatives’ interests,
sine manu
marriage comes into being;
in this case, the woman’s property remains under the guardians’
control, and the husband’s rights are only over her person; and even
this power is shared with the paterfamilias, who keeps his daughter
under his absolute authority. The family court is in charge of settling
disputes arising between father and husband: such an institution gives
the woman recourse from her father to her husband or from her
husband to her father; she is not one individual’s thing. Moreover,
although a gens is very powerful—as the existence of this court
proves—independent of public courts, the father, as head of the
family, is above all a citizen: his authority is unlimited, he rules
absolutely over wife and children; but they are not his property;
rather, he administers their existence for the public good; the woman,
who brings his children into the world and whose domestic duties
often extend to agricultural tasks, is very useful to the country and
deeply respected. Here is an important fact that recurs throughout
history: abstract rights cannot sufficiently define the concrete situation
of woman; this situation depends in great part on the economic role
she plays; and very often, abstract freedom and concrete powers vary
inversely. Legally more enslaved than the Greek woman, the Roman
is more deeply integrated in society; at home she sits in the atrium,
which is the center of the domicile, rather than being relegated to the
gynaeceum; it is she who presides over the slaves’ work; she
oversees the children’s education, and her influence on them often
extends to an advanced age; she shares her husband’s work and his
concerns, she is considered a co-owner of his property; the marriage
formula
“Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia”
is not an empty formula;
*
the
matron is called
domina;
she is mistress of the home, associate in
religion, not a slave but man’s companion; the tie that unites her to
him is so sacred that in five centuries not one divorce is recorded. She
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is not confined to her quarters: she is present at meals and
celebrations, she goes to the theater; men give her right-of-way on the
street, consuls and lictors stand aside for her. Legend accords her an
eminent role in history: those of the Sabine women, Lucretia, and
Virginia are well-known; Coriolanus yields to the supplications of his
mother’s and his wife’s pleas; the law of
Licinius consecrating the
triumph of Roman democracy is said to have been inspired by his
wife; Cornelia forges the soul of the Gracchi. “Everywhere men
govern women,” said Cato, “and we who govern all men are
governed by our women.”
Little by little the legal situation of Roman women adapts to their
practical situation. During the patrician oligarchy, each paterfamilias is
an independent ruler within the Republic; but when state power
becomes established, it opposes the concentration of wealth and the
arrogance of powerful families. Family courts bow to public justice.
And woman acquires ever greater rights. Four powers originally
limited her freedom: the father and the husband controlled her person,
her guardian and
manus
her property. The state takes authority over
the opposition of father and husband to restrict their rights: the state
court will now rule over adultery cases, divorce, and so on. In the
same way, guardians and
manus
destroy each other. In the interest of
the guardian, the
manus
had already been separated from marriage;
later, the
manus
becomes an expedient that women use to escape their
guardians, either by contracting fictitious marriages or by securing
obliging guardians from their father or from the state. Under imperial
legislation, guardianship will be entirely abolished. Woman
simultaneously gains a positive guarantee of her independence: her
father is obliged to provide her with a dowry; and it will not go back
to the agnates after the marriage’s dissolution, nor does it ever belong
to her husband; a woman can at any moment demand restitution by a
sudden divorce, which puts man at her mercy. “In accepting the
dowry, he sold his power,” said Plautus. From the end of the
Republic on, the mother’s right to her children’s respect was
recognized as equal to the father’s; she is granted custody of her
children in case of guardianship or of the husband’s bad conduct.
When she had three children and the deceased had no heirs, a Senate
decree, under Hadrian, entitled her to an
ab intestat
succession right
for each of them. And under Marcus Aurelius the Roman family’s
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evolution was completed: from 178 on, the mother’s children become
her heirs, over her male relatives; from then on, the family is based on
coniunctio sanguinis
, and the mother is equal to the father; the
daughter inherits like her brothers.
Nevertheless, the history of Roman law shows a tendency that
contradicts the one just described: rendering the woman independent
of the family, the central power takes her back under its guardianship
and subjects her to various legal restraints.
In fact, she would assume an unsettling importance if she could be
both rich and independent; so what is conceded with one hand is
taken
away from her with the other. The Oppian Law that banned
luxury was voted when Hannibal threatened Rome; when the danger
passed, women demanded its abrogation; in a famous speech, Cato
asked that it be upheld: but a demonstration by matrons assembled in
the public square carried the repeal against him. More severe laws
were proposed as mores loosened, but without great success: they did
little more than give rise to fraud. Only the Velleian Senate decree
triumphed, forbidding woman to “intercede” for others,
3
depriving
her of nearly every legal capacity. It is when woman is probably the
most emancipated that the inferiority of her sex is proclaimed, a
remarkable example of the male justification process already
discussed: when her rights as girl, wife, or sister are no longer
limited, she is refused equality with men because of her sex; the
pretext for persecuting her becomes “imbecility and fragility of the
sex.”
The fact is that matrons did not put their newfound freedom to the
best use; but it is also true that they were forbidden to take the best
advantage of it. These two contradictory strains—an individualistic
strain that tears woman from the family and a state-controlled strain
that abuses her as an individual—result in an unbalanced situation for
her. She can inherit, she has equal rights with the father concerning
the children, she can will her property thanks to the institution of the
dowry, she escapes conjugal restraints, she can divorce and remarry
as she wishes: but she is emancipated only in a negative way because
she is offered no employment for her vital forces. Economic
independence remains abstract since it yields no political capacity;
therefore, lacking the power to
act
, Roman women
demonstrate:
they
cause a ruckus in towns, they besiege the courts, they brew, they
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foment plots, they lay down prescriptions, they inflame civil wars,
they march along the Tiber carrying the statue of the Mother of the
Gods, thus introducing Oriental divinities to Rome; in the year 114
the scandal of the vestal virgins breaks out, and their college is then
disbanded. As public life and virtue are out of reach, and when the
dissolution of the family renders the former private virtues useless
and outdated, there is no longer any moral code for women. They
have two choices: either to respect the same values as their
grandmothers or to no longer recognize any. The end of the first
century and beginning of the second see numerous women living as
companions and partners of their spouses, as in the time of the
Republic: Plotina shares the glory and responsibilities of Trajan;
Sabina becomes so famous for her good deeds that statues deify her
while she is
still alive; under Tiberius, Sextia refuses to live on after
Aemilius Scaurus, and Pascea to live on after Pomponius Labeus;
Paulina opens her veins at the same time as Seneca; Pliny the
Younger makes Arria’s “Paete, non dolet” famous; Martial admires
the irreproachable wives and devoted mothers Claudia Rufina,
Virginia, and Sulpicia. But numerous women refuse motherhood, and
many women divorce; laws continue to ban adultery: some matrons
even go so far as to register as prostitutes to avoid being constrained
in their debaucheries.
4
Until then, Latin literature had always
respected women: then satirists went wild against them. They
attacked, in fact, not women in general but mainly contemporary
women. Juvenal reproaches their hedonism and gluttony; he accuses
them of aspiring to men’s professions: they take an interest in politics,
immerse themselves in court cases, debate with grammarians and
rhetoricians, develop passions for hunting, chariot racing, fencing,
and wrestling. But in fact they rival men mainly because of their own
taste for amusement and vice; they lack sufficient education for higher
aims; and besides, no objective is even proposed to them; action
remains forbidden to them. The Roman woman of the ancient
Republic has a place on earth, but she is still chained to it by lack of
abstract rights and economic independence; the Roman woman of the
decline is typical of false emancipation, possessing, in a world where
men are still the only masters, nothing but empty freedom: she is free
“for nothing.”
131

1.
This account is taken from Clement Huart,
La Perse antique et la civilisation
iranienne (Ancient Persia and Iranian Civilization
).
2.
In some cases the brother
had to
marry his sister.
*
“Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”—T
RANS
.
3.
That is, to enter into contracts with another.
4.
Rome, like Greece, officially tolerated prostitution. There were two categories of
courtesans: those living closed up in brothels, and others,
bonae meretrices
, freely
exercising their profession. They did not have the right to wear the clothing of
matrons; they had a certain influence on fashion, customs, and art, but they never held
a position as lofty as the hetaeras of Athens.
132

|
CHAPTER 4
|
The evolution of the feminine condition was not a continuous process.
With the great invasions, all of civilization is put into question. Roman
law itself is under the influence of a new ideology, Christianity; and in
the centuries that follow, barbarians impose their laws. The economic,
social, and political situation is overturned: and women’s situation
suffers the consequences.
Christian ideology played no little role in women’s oppression.
Without a doubt, there is a breath of charity in the Gospels that spread
to women as well as to lepers; poor people, slaves, and women are the
ones who adhere most passionately to the new law. In the very early
days of Christianity, women who submitted to the yoke of the Church
were relatively respected; they testified along with men as martyrs; but
they could nonetheless worship only in secondary roles; deaconesses
were authorized only to do lay work: caring for the sick or helping the
poor. And although marriage is considered an institution demanding
mutual fidelity, it seems clear that the wife must be totally subordinate
to the husband: through Saint Paul the fiercely antifeminist Jewish
tradition is affirmed. Saint Paul commands self-effacement and
reserve from women; he bases the principle of subordination of
women to man on the Old and New Testaments. “The man is not of
the woman; but the woman of the man”; and “Neither was man
created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” And elsewhere:
“For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of
the church.” In a religion where the flesh is cursed, the woman
becomes the devil’s most fearsome temptation. Tertullian writes:
“Woman! You are the devil’s gateway. You have convinced the one
the devil did not dare to confront directly. It is your fault that God’s
Son had to die. You should always dress in mourning and rags.”
Saint Ambrose: “Adam was led to sin by Eve and not Eve by Adam.
It is right and just that he whom she led into sin, she shall receive as
master.” And Saint John Chrysostom: “Of all the
wild animals, none
can be found as harmful as woman.” When canon law is written in the
133

fourth century, marriage is treated as a concession to human failings,
incompatible with Christian perfection. “Take up the hatchet and cut
the roots of the sterile tree of marriage,” writes Saint Jerome. In the
time of Gregory VI, when celibacy was imposed on priests, woman’s
dangerous character was more harshly asserted: all the Fathers of the
Church proclaim her wretchedness. Saint Thomas will remain true to
this tradition, declaring that woman is only an “occasional” and
incomplete being, a sort of failed man. “Man is the head of woman
just as Christ is the head of man,” he writes. “It is a constant that
woman is destined to live under the authority of man and has no
authority of her own.” Thus, the only marriage regime canon law
recognizes is by dowry, rendering woman helpless and powerless.
Not only is she prohibited from male functions, but she is also barred
from making court depositions, and her testimony holds no weight.
The emperors are more or less under the influence of the Church
Fathers; Justinian’s legislation honors woman as spouse and mother
but subjugates her to those functions; her helplessness is due not to
her sex but to her situation within the family. Divorce is prohibited,
and marriage has to be a public event; the mother has the same
authority over her children as the father, and she has equal rights to
their inheritance; if her husband dies, she becomes their legal tutor.
The Velleian Senate decree is modified: from that time on she can
intercede for the benefit of a third party; but she cannot contract for
her husband; her dowry becomes inalienable; it is her children’s
patrimony, and she is forbidden to dispose of it.
In barbarian-occupied territories, these laws are juxtaposed with
Germanic traditions. The German customs were unique. They had
chiefs only in wartime; in peacetime the family was an autonomous
society; it seemed to be midway between matrilineal filiation clans and
patriarchal gens; the mother’s brother had the same power as the
father and the same authority over their niece and daughter as her
husband. In a society where all capacity was rooted in brute force,
woman was entirely powerless; but the rights that were guaranteed to
her by the twofold domestic powers on which she depended were
recognized; subjugated, she was nonetheless respected; her husband
purchased her, but the price of this purchase constituted a dowry that
belonged to her; and besides, her father dowered her; she received her
portion of the paternal inheritance and, in the case of parents being
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murdered, a portion of the fine paid by the murderer. The family was
monogamous, adultery being severely punished and marriage
respected. The woman still lived under wardship, but she was a close
partner of her husband. “In peace and in war, she shares his lot; she
lives with him, she dies
with him,” says Tacitus. She went to war
with him, brought food to the soldiers, and encouraged them by her
presence. As a widow, part of her deceased husband’s power was
transmitted to her. Since her incapacity was rooted in her physical
frailty, it was not considered an expression of moral inferiority. Some
women were priestesses and prophets, so it could be assumed that
their education was superior to men’s. Among the objects that legally
reverted to women in questions of inheritance were, later, jewelry and
books.
This is the tradition that continues into the Middle Ages. The
woman is absolutely dependent on her father and husband: during
Clovis’s time, the
mundium
weighs on her throughout her life;
*
but
the Franks rejected Germanic chastity: under the Merovingians and
Carolingians polygamy reigns; the woman is married without her
consent and can be repudiated by her husband, who holds the right of
life or death over her according to his whim. She is treated like a
servant. Laws protect her but only inasmuch as she is the man’s
property and the mother of his children. Calling her a prostitute
without having proof is considered an insult liable to a fine fifteen
times more than any insult to a man; kidnapping a married woman is
equivalent to a free man’s murder; taking a married woman’s hand or
arm is liable to a fine of fifteen to thirty-five sous; abortion is
forbidden under threat of a hundred-sou fine; murder of a pregnant
woman costs four times that of a free man; a woman who has proved
herself fertile is worth three times a free man; but she loses all worth
when she can no longer be a mother; if she marries a slave, she
becomes an outlaw, and her parents have the right to kill her. She has
no rights as an individual. But while the state is becoming powerful,
the shift that had occurred in Rome occurs here as well: the wardship
of the disabled, children, and women no longer belongs to family law
but becomes a public office; starting from Charlemagne, the
mundium
that weighs down the woman belongs to the king; he only intervenes
at first in cases in which the woman is deprived of her natural
guardians; then, little by little, he confiscates the family powers; but
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this change does not bring about the Frank woman’s emancipation.
The
mundium
becomes the guardian’s responsibility; his duty is to
protect his ward: this protection brings about the same slavery for
woman as in the past.
When feudalism emerges out of the convulsions of the early
Middle Ages, woman’s condition looks very uncertain. What
characterizes feudal
law is the confusion between sovereign and
property law, between public and private rights. This explains why
woman is both put down and raised up by this system. She first finds
herself denied all private rights because she lacks political capacity.
Until the eleventh century, order is based on force alone and property
on armed power. A fief, legal experts say, is “property held against
military service”; woman cannot hold feudal property, because she is
incapable of defending it. Her situation changes when fiefs become
hereditary and patrimonial; in Germanic law some aspects of maternal
law survived, as has already been shown: if there were no male heirs,
the daughter could inherit. This leads, around the eleventh century, to
the feudal system’s acceptance of female succession. However,
military service is still required of the vassals; and woman’s lot does
not improve with her ability to inherit; she still needs a male guardian;
the husband plays that role: he is invested with the title, holds the fief,
and has the usufruct of the goods. Like the Greek
epikleros
, woman is
the instrument and not the bearer through which the domain is
transmitted; that does not emancipate her; in a way she is absorbed by
the fief, she is part of the real property. The domain is no longer the
family’s thing as it was for Roman gens: it is the lord’s property, and
the woman also belongs to the lord. He is the one who chooses a
spouse for her; when she has children, she gives them to him rather
than to her husband: they will be vassals who will defend his
property. She is therefore a slave of the domain and of its master
through the “protection” of a husband who was imposed on her: few
periods of history seem harsher for woman’s lot. An heiress means
land and a château: suitors fight over this prey, and the girl is
sometimes not even twelve years old when her father or his lord gives
her to some baron as a gift. The more marriages, the more domains
for a man; and thus the more repudiations; the Church hypocritically
authorizes them; as marriage was forbidden between relatives up to
the seventh degree, and as kinship was defined by spiritual relations
136

such as godmother and godfather as well as by blood relations, some
pretext or other can always be found for an annulment; many women
in the eleventh century were repudiated four or five times. Once
widowed, the woman immediately has to accept a new master. In the
chansons de geste Charlemagne has, all at once, the widows of his
barons who had died in Spain remarry; in
Girard de Vienne
, the
Burgundy duchess goes herself to the king to demand a new spouse.
“My husband has just died, but what good is mourning? Find me a
powerful husband because I need to defend my land”; many epics
show the king or lord dealing tyrannically with girls and widows.
One also sees the husband treating the woman given to him as a gift
without any respect; he abuses
and slaps her, drags her by her hair,
and beats her; all that Beaumanoir in
Coutumes de Beauvaisis
(Customs of Beauvaisis) asks is that the husband “punish his wife
reasonably.” This warlike civilization has only scorn for women. The
knight is not interested in women: his horse is a treasure of much
higher value to him; in the epics, girls are always the ones to make the
first step toward young men; once married, they alone are expected to
be faithful; the man dissociates them from his life. “Cursed be the
knight who takes counsel from a lady on when to joust.” And in
Renaud de Montauban, there is this diatribe: “Go back into your
painted and golden quarters, sit ye down in the shade, drink, eat,
embroider, dye silk, but do not busy yourself with our affairs. Our
business is to fight with the sword and steel. Silence!” The woman
sometimes shares the males’ harsh life. As a girl, she excels in all
physical exercises, she rides, hunts, hawks; she barely receives any
education and is raised with no regard for modesty: she welcomes the
château’s guests, takes care of their meals and baths, and she
“pleasures” them to sleep; as a woman, she sometimes has to hunt
wild animals, undertake long and difficult pilgrimages; when her
husband is far away, it is she who defends the seigneury. These ladies
of the manor, called viragoes, are admired because they behave
exactly like men: they are greedy, treacherous, and cruel, and they
tyrannize their vassals. History and legend have bequeathed the
memory of several of them: the chatelaine Aubie, after having a tower
built higher than any donjon, then had the architect’s head cut off so
her secret would be kept; she chased her husband from his domain: he
stole back and killed her. Mabel, Roger de Montgomerie’s wife,
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delighted in reducing her seigneury’s nobles to begging: their revenge
was to decapitate her. Juliane, bastard daughter of Henry I of
England, defended the château of Breteuil against him, luring him into
an ambush for which he punished her severely. Such acts remain
exceptional, however. Ordinarily, the lady spent her time spinning,
praying for the dead, waiting for her spouse, and being bored.
It has often been claimed that courtly love, born in the twelfth
century in the Mediterranean south of France, brought about an
improvement in woman’s lot. There are several opposing hypotheses
as to its origins: according to some people, “courtliness” comes from
the lord’s relations with his young vassals; others link it to Cathar
heresies and the cult of the Virgin; still others say that profane love
derives from the love of God in general. It is not so sure that courts of
love ever existed. What is sure is that faced with Eve the sinner, the
Church comes to glorify the Mother of the Redeemer: she has such a
large following that in the thirteenth century it can be said that God
was made woman; a mysticism of woman thus develops
in religion.
Moreover, leisure in château life enables the noble ladies to promote
and nurture the luxury of conversation, politeness, and poetry; women
of letters such as Béatrice de Valentinois, Eleanor of Aquitaine and
her daughter Marie of France, Blanche of Navarre, and many others
attract and patronize poets; first in the Midi and then in the North
culture thrives, giving women new prestige. Courtly love was often
described as platonic; Chrétien de Troyes, probably to please his
protector, banishes adultery from his novels: the only guilty love he
depicts is that of Lancelot and Guinevere; but in fact, as the feudal
husband was both a guardian and a tyrant, the wife sought a lover
outside of marriage; courtly love was a compensation for the barbarity
of official customs. “Love in the modern sense does not exist in
antiquity except outside of official society,” notes Engels: at the very
point where antiquity broke off its penchant for sexual love, the
Middle Ages took it up again with adultery. And this is the form that
love will take as long as the institution of marriage lasts.
While courtly love might ease woman’s lot, it does not modify it
substantially. Ideologies like religion and poetry do not lead to female
liberation; woman gains a little ground at the end of the feudal age for
other reasons entirely. When the supremacy of royal power is
imposed on feudatories, the lord loses a large part of his rights: his
138

right, in particular, to decide on his vassals’ marriages is
progressively suppressed; at the same time, the feudal lord loses the
use of his ward’s property; the benefits attached to wardship fall into
disuse; and when the service of the fief is converted to a monetary fee,
wardship itself disappears; woman was unable to perform military
service, but she was as capable as a man of paying the financial
obligations; the fief is then little more than a simple patrimony, and
there is no longer any reason for the two sexes not to be placed on an
equal footing. In fact, women in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy
remain subjected to a perpetual wardship; but France accepts, in
Beaumanoir’s words, that “a girl is worth a man.” Germanic tradition
gave women a defender as a guardian; when she no longer needs a
defender, she goes without a guardian; as a sex, she is no longer taxed
with incapacity. Unmarried or widowed, she has all the rights of man;
property grants her sovereignty: she governs the fief that she owns,
meaning she dispenses justice, signs treaties, and decrees laws. She is
even seen playing a military role, commanding troops, taking part in
fighting; before Joan of Arc there were women soldiers, and however
surprising La Pucelle is, she is not shocking.
Nonetheless, so many factors converge to thwart woman’s
independence that they are never all abolished simultaneously;
physical weakness
is no longer an issue; but feminine subordination
remains useful to society in cases where the woman is married. Thus
marital power outlives the feudal regime. The paradox still being
perpetuated today is established: the woman most fully integrated into
society is the one with the fewest privileges in the society. In civil
feudality, marriage has the same features as in military feudality: the
husband remains the wife’s guardian. When the bourgeoisie is
formed, it observes the same laws. In common law as in feudal law,
the only emancipation is outside marriage; the daughter and the
widow have the same capacities as the man; but by marrying, the
woman falls under the husband’s guardianship and administration; he
can beat her; he watches over her behavior, relations, and
correspondence and disposes of her fortune, not through a contract,
but by the very fact of marriage. “As soon as the marriage is
consummated,” Beaumanoir says, “the possessions of each party are
held in common by virtue of the marriage and the man is the guardian
of them.” It is in the interest of property that the nobility and the
139

bourgeoisie demand one master to administer it. The wife is not
subordinated to the husband because she is judged basically
incapable: when nothing else prevents it, woman’s full capacities are
recognized. From feudality to today, the married woman is
deliberately sacrificed to private property. It is important to see that the
greater the property owned by the husband, the greater this servitude:
the propertied classes are those in which woman’s dependence has
always been the most concrete; even today, the patriarchal family
survives among rich landowners; the more socially and economically
powerful man feels, the more he plays the paterfamilias with
authority. On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link
reciprocal. Neither feudality nor the Church enfranchised woman.
Rather, it was from a position of servitude that the patriarchal family
moved to an authentically conjugal one. The serf and his wife owned
nothing; they simply had the common use of their house, furniture,
and utensils: man had no reason to want to become master of woman
who owned nothing; but the bonds of work and interest that joined
them raised the spouse to the rank of companion. When serfdom is
abolished, poverty remains; in small rural communities and among
artisans, spouses live on an equal footing; woman is neither a thing
nor a servant: those are the luxuries of a rich man; the poor man
experiences the reciprocity of the bond that attaches him to his other
half; in freely contracted work, woman wins concrete autonomy
because she has an economic and social role. The farces and fabliaux
of the Middle Ages reflect a society of artisans, small merchants, and
peasants in which the husband’s only privilege over his wife is to be
able to beat her: but she pits craftiness against force to reestablish
equality. However, the rich woman pays for her idleness with
submission.
In the Middle Ages, the woman still retained some privileges: she
took part in local meetings in the villages, she participated in the
primary meetings for the deputies’ election to the Estates-General; her
husband could exercise his own authority only over movables: his
wife’s consent was necessary to alienate real estate. The sixteenth
century sees the codification of the laws perpetuated throughout the
ancien régime; by that time feudal habits and customs had totally
disappeared, and nothing protects women from men’s claims that they
should be chained to the household. The influence of Roman law, so
140

condescending for women, can be perceived here; as in Roman times,
the violent diatribes against the stupidity and fragility of the sex were
not at the root of the code but are used as justifications; it is after the
fact that men find reasons to act as it suits them. “Among all the bad
characteristics that women possess,” one reads in the
Songe du
verger
,
*
I find that there are nine principal ones: To begin with, a woman
hurts herself as a result of her own nature; second, women are
by nature extremely stingy; third, they are driven by sudden
whims; fourth, they are bad by their own volition; fifth, they are
impostors. Women are known to be false, and according to civil
law a woman may not be accepted as a witness to a will. A
woman always does the opposite of what she is commanded to
do … Women accuse themselves willingly and announce their
own vituperation and shame. They are crafty and malicious.
Saint Augustine said that “A woman is a beast who is neither
firm nor stable”; she is hateful, to the confusion of her husband;
she nourishes wrongdoing and stands at the beginning of all the
pleas and tensions; and is the path and road of all iniquity.
Similar texts abound around this time. The interest of this one is that
each accusation is meant to justify one of the provisions of the code
against women and the inferior situation in which they are kept.
Naturally, any “male office” is forbidden to them; the Velleian decree
of the Senate is reinstated, depriving them of all civil capacity;
birthright and masculine privilege place them second in line for the
paternal inheritance. Unmarried, the daughter remains under the
father’s guardianship; if he does not marry her off, he generally sends
her to a convent. An unwed mother has the right
to seek out the
father, but such a right merely provides for the costs of lying-in and
the infant’s food; a married woman becomes subject to the husband’s
authority: he determines the place of residence, directs the household,
repudiates the adulteress wife, shuts her up in a monastery, or later
obtains a lettre de cachet to send her to the Bastille;
*
no deed is valid
without his authorization; everything the wife brings to the marriage
becomes part of the dowry in the Roman meaning of the word; but as
marriage is indissoluble, the husband has to die before the wife can
141

recover her property, giving rise to the adage
“Uxor non est proprie
socia sed speratur fore.”
†
As she does not manage her capital,
although she has rights to it, she does not have the responsibility for
it; it does not provide any substance to her action: she has no concrete
grasp on the world. Even her children belong to the father rather than
to her, as in the time of the
Eumenides:
she “gives” them to her
spouse, whose authority is far greater than hers and who is the real
master of her posterity; even Napoleon will use this argument,
declaring that just as a pear tree is the property of the owner of the
pears, the wife is the property of the man to whom she provides
children. The status of the French wife remains as such throughout
the ancien régime; little by little jurisprudence will abolish the Velleian
decree, but not until the Napoleonic Code does it disappear
definitively. The husband is responsible for the wife’s debts as well
as her behavior, and she is accountable to him alone; she has almost
no direct relations with public authorities or autonomous relations
with anyone outside her family. She looks more like a servant in work
and motherhood than an associate: objects, values, and human beings
that she creates are not her own property but her family’s, that is,
man’s, as he is the head. Her situation is far from being more liberal
in other countries—it is, on the contrary, less liberal; some maintained
guardianship; and in all of them, the married woman’s capacities are
nonexistent and moral standards strict. All the European codes were
drafted on the basis of canon, Roman, and Germanic law, all were
unfavorable to the woman, and all the countries recognized private
property and the family, deferring to the demands of these institutions.
In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest
wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on
society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity
pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid
of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by
dissoluteness.” Later, Saint
Thomas—or at least the theologian that
signed his name to Book IV of
De regimine principium
—asserted:
“Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it
by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to
a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an
unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral
license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but
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when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy
rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure.
In vain did one of Charlemagne’s capitularies vigorously forbid it,
in vain did Saint Louis order prostitutes to be chased out of the city in
1254 and brothels to be destroyed in 1269: in the town of Damietta,
Joinville tells us, prostitutes’ tents were adjacent to the king’s. Later,
attempts by Charles IX of France and Marie-Thérèse of Austria in the
eighteenth century also failed. The organization of society made
prostitution necessary. “Prostitutes,” Schopenhauer would pompously
say later, “are human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy.” And
Lecky, a historian of European morality, expressed the same idea:
“Supreme type of vice, prostitutes are the most active guardians of
virtue.” Their situation and the Jews’ were often rightly compared:
1
usury and money lending were forbidden by the Church exactly as
extra-conjugal sex was; but society can no more do without financial
speculators than free love, so these functions fell to the damned
castes: they were relegated to ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. In
Paris, loose women worked in pens where they arrived in the
morning and left after the curfew had tolled; they lived on special
streets and did not have the right to stray, and in most other cities
brothels were outside town walls. Like Jews, they had to wear
distinctive signs on their clothes. In France the most common one was
a specific-colored aglet hung on the shoulder; silk, fur, and honest
women’s apparel were often prohibited. They were
by law
taxed with
infamy, had no recourse whatsoever to the police and the courts, and
could be thrown out of their lodgings on a neighbor’s simple claim.
For most of them, life was difficult and wretched. Some were closed
up in public houses. Antoine de Lalaing, a French traveler, left a
description of a Spanish establishment in Valencia in the late fifteenth
century. “The place,” he said, was
about the size of a small city, surrounded by walls with only one
door. And in front of it there were gallows for criminals that
might be inside; at the door, a man appointed to this task takes
the canes of
those wishing to enter and tells them that if they
want to hand over their money, and if they have the money, he
will give it to the porter. If it is stolen overnight, the porter will
not answer for it. In this place there are three or four streets full
143

of small houses, in each of which are prettily and cleanly dressed
girls in velvet and satin. There are almost three hundred of them;
their houses are well kept and decorated with good linens. The
decreed price is four pennies of their money, which is the
equivalent of our gros … There are taverns and cabarets. It is not
easy to recognize these houses by daylight, while at night or in
the evening the girls are seated at their doorways, with pretty
lamps hanging near them in order to make it easier to see them at
leisure. There are two doctors appointed and paid by the town to
visit the girls every week in order to discover if they have any
disease or intimate illness. If the town is stricken with any
sickness, the lords of the place are required to maintain the girls
at their expense and the foreigners are sent away to any place
they wish to go.
2
The author even marvels at such effective policing. Many prostitutes
lived freely; some of them earned their living well. As in the period of
the courtesans, high gallantry provided more possibilities for feminine
individualism than the life of an “honest woman.”
A condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman; legal
independence is in stark and shocking contrast to the wife’s servitude;
she is an oddity and so customs hasten to withdraw everything law
grants her; she has total civil capacity: but those laws are abstract and
empty; she has no economic autonomy, no social dignity, and
generally the spinster remains hidden in the shadow of the paternal
family or finds others like her behind convent walls: there she knows
no other form of freedom but disobedience and sin—just as decadent
Roman women were emancipated only by vice. Negativity continues
to be women’s lot as long as their emancipation remains negative.
In such conditions it is clear how rare it was for a wife to act or
merely to make her presence felt: among the working classes,
economic oppression cancels out sexual inequality; but it deprives the
individual of opportunities; among the nobility and bourgeoisie, the
wife is abused because of her sex; she has a parasitic existence; she is
poorly educated; she needs exceptional
circumstances if she is to
envisage and carry out any concrete project. Queens and regents have
that rare good fortune: their sovereignty exalts them above their sex;
French Salic law denies women the right of access to the throne; but
144

they sometimes play a great role beside their husbands or after their
deaths: for example, Saint Clotilda, Saint Radegunda, and Blanche of
Castile. Convent life makes woman independent of man: some
abbesses wield great power; Héloïse gained fame as an abbess as
much as a lover. In the mystical, thus autonomous, relation that binds
them to God, feminine souls draw their inspiration and force from a
virile soul; and the respect society grants them enables them to
undertake difficult projects. Joan of Arc’s adventure is something of a
miracle: and it is, moreover, a very brief adventure. But Saint
Catherine of Siena’s story is meaningful; she creates a great reputation
in Sienna for charitable activity and for the visions that testify to her
intense inner life within a very normal existence; she thus acquires the
necessary authority for success generally lacking in women; her
influence is invoked to hearten those condemned to death, to bring
back to the fold those who are lost, to appease quarrels between
families and towns. She is supported by the community that
recognizes itself in her, which is how she is able to fulfill her
pacifying mission, preaching submission to the pope from city to city,
carrying on a vast correspondence with bishops and sovereigns, and
finally chosen by Florence as ambassador to go and find the pope in
Avignon. Queens, by divine right, and saints, by their shining virtues,
are assured of support in the society that allows them to be men’s
equal. Of others, a silent modesty is required. The success of a
Christine de Pizan is due to exceptional luck: even so, she had to be
widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her
living by her pen.
Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to
women. Courtly poets did exalt love; many codes of courtly love
appear, such as André le Chapelain’s poem and the famous
Roman de
la Rose
, in which Guillaume de Lorris encourages young men to
devote themselves to the service of ladies. But against this
troubadour-inspired literature are pitted bourgeois-inspired writings
that cruelly attack women: fabliaux, farces, and plays criticize women
for their laziness, coquetry, and lust. Their worst enemies are the
clergy. They incriminate marriage. The Church made it a sacrament
and yet prohibited it for the Christian elite: this is the source of the
contradiction of the
querelle des femmes
.
*
It is denounced with
singular
vigor in
The Lamentations of Matheolus
, famous in its time,
145

published fifteen years after the first part of the
Roman de la Rose
,
and translated into French one hundred years later. Matthew lost his
“clergy” by taking a wife; he cursed his marriage, cursed women and
marriage in general. Why did God create woman if there is this
incompatibility between marriage and clergy? Peace cannot exist in
marriage: it had to be the devil’s work; or else God did not know
what he was doing. Matthew hopes that woman will not rise on
Judgment Day. But God responds to him that marriage is a purgatory
thanks to which heaven is reached; and carried to the heavens in a
dream, Matthew sees a legion of husbands welcoming him to the
shouts of “Here, here the true martyr!” Jean de Meung, another cleric,
is similarly inspired; he enjoins young men to get out from under the
yoke of women; first he attacks love:
Love is hateful country
Love is amorous hate
.
He attacks marriage that reduces man to slavery, that dooms him to be
cuckolded; and he directs a violent diatribe against woman. In return,
woman’s champions strive to demonstrate her superiority. Here are
some of the arguments apologists for the weaker sex drew on until the
seventeenth century:
Mulier perfetur viro scilicet.
Materia:
quia Adam factus esst de
limo terrae, Eva de costa Adae.
Loco:
quia Adam factus est extra
para-disum, Eva in paradiso.
In conceptione:
quia mulier
concepit Deum, quid homo non potuit.
Apparicione:
quia
Christus apparuit mulieri post mortem resurrectionem, scilicet
Magdalene.
Exaltatione:
quia mulier exaltata est super chorus
angelorum, scilicet beata Maria.
3
To which their opponents replied that if Christ first appeared to
women, it is because he knew they were talkative, and he was in a
hurry to make his resurrection known.
The quarrel continues throughout the fifteenth century. The author
of
The Fifteen Joys of Marriage
indulgently describes the misfortunes
of poor husbands. Eustache Deschamps writes an interminable poem
on the same theme. It is here that the “quarrel of the
Roman de la
146

Rose
” begins. This is the first time a woman takes up her pen to
defend her sex: Christine de Pizan attacks the clerics energetically in
The Epistle to the God of Love
. The clerics rise up immediately to
defend Jean de Meung; but Gerson, chancellor of the University of
Paris, takes Christine’s side; he writes his treatise in French to reach a
wide public. Martin Le Franc throws the indigestible
Ladies’
Chaperon
—still being read two hundred years later—onto the
battlefield.
*
And Christine intervenes once again. Her main demand is
for women’s right to education: “If the custom were to put little girls
in school and they were normally taught sciences like the boys, they
would learn as perfectly and would understand the subtleties of all the
arts and sciences as they do.”
In truth this dispute concerns women only indirectly. No one
dreams of demanding a social role for them other than what they are
assigned. It is more a question of comparing the life of the cleric to the
state of marriage; it is a masculine problem brought up by the
Church’s ambiguous attitude to marriage. Luther settles this conflict
by rejecting the celibacy of priests. Woman’s condition is not
influenced by this literary war. While railing against society as it is,
the satire of farces and fabliaux does not claim to change it: it mocks
women but does not plot against them. Courtly poetry glorifies
femininity: but such a cult does not in any way imply the assimilation
of the sexes. The
querelle
is a secondary phenomenon in which
society’s attitude is reflected but which does not modify it.
It has already been said that the wife’s legal status remained
practically unchanged from the early fifteenth century to the nineteenth
century; but in the privileged classes her concrete condition does
change. The Italian Renaissance is a period of individualism
propitious to the burgeoning of strong personalities, regardless of sex.
There were some women at that time who were powerful sovereigns,
like Jean of Aragon, Joan of Naples, and Isabella d’Este; others were
adventurer condottieri who took up arms like men: thus Girolamo
Riario’s wife fought for Forli’s freedom; Hippolyta Fioramenti
commanded the Duke of Milan’s troops and during the siege of Pavia
led a company of noblewomen to the ramparts. To defend their city
against Montluc, Sienese women marshaled three thousand female
147

troops commanded by women. Other Italian women became famous
thanks to their culture or talents: for example, Isotta Nogarola,
Veronica Gambara, Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, who was
Michelangelo’s friend, and especially Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of
Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, who wrote, among other things,
hymns and a life of Saint John the Baptist and the Virgin. A majority
of these distinguished women were courtesans; joining free moral
behavior with freethinking, ensuring their economic autonomy
through their profession, many were treated by men with deferential
admiration; they protected the arts and were interested in literature and
philosophy, and they themselves often wrote or painted: Isabella da
Luna, Caterina di San Celso, and Imperia, who was a poet and
musician, took up the tradition of Aspasia and Phryne. For many of
them, though, freedom still takes the form of license: the orgies and
crimes of these great Italian ladies and courtesans remain legendary.
This license is also the main freedom found in the following
centuries for women whose rank or fortune liberates them from
common morality; in general, it remains as strict as in the Middle
Ages. As for positive accomplishments, they are possible only for a
very few. Queens are always privileged: Catherine de Medici,
Elizabeth of England, and Isabella the Catholic are great sovereigns. A
few great saintly figures are also worshipped. The astonishing destiny
of Saint Teresa of Avila is explained approximately in the same way
as Saint Catherine’s: her self-confidence is inspired by her confidence
in God; by carrying the virtues connected with her status to the
highest, she garners the support of her confessors and the Christian
world: she is able to emerge beyond a nun’s ordinary condition; she
founds and runs monasteries, she travels, takes initiatives, and
perseveres with a man’s adventurous courage; society does not thwart
her; even writing is not effrontery: her confessors order her to do it.
She brilliantly shows that a woman can raise herself as high as a man
when, by an astonishing chance, a man’s possibilities are granted to
her.
But in reality such possibilities are very unequal; in the sixteenth
century, women are still poorly educated. Anne of Brittany summons
many women to the court, where previously only men had been seen;
she strives to form a retinue of girls of honor: but she is more
interested in their upbringing than in their culture. Among women
148

who a little later distinguish themselves by their minds, intellectual
influence, and writings, most are noblewomen: the duchess of Retz,
Mme de Lignerolles, the Duchess of Rohan and her daughter Anne;
the most famous were princesses: Queen Margot and Margaret of
Navarre. Pernette Du Guillet seems to have been
a bourgeois; but
Louise Labé is undoubtedly a courtesan: in any case, she felt free to
behave unconventionally.
Women in the seventeenth century will continue to distinguish
themselves essentially in intellectual spheres; social life and culture are
spreading; women play a considerable role in salons; by the very fact
they are not involved in the construction of the world, they have the
leisure to indulge in conversation, the arts, and literature; they are not
formally educated, but through discussions, readings, and instruction
by private preceptors or public lectures they succeed in acquiring
greater knowledge than their husbands: Mlle de Gournay, Mme de
Rambouillet, Mlle de Scudéry, Mme de La Fayette, and Mme de
Sévigné enjoy great reputations in France; and outside France similar
renown is associated with the names of Princess Elisabeth, Queen
Christine, and Mlle de Schurman, who corresponded with the whole
scholarly world. Thanks to this culture and the ensuing prestige,
women manage to encroach on the masculine universe; from literature
and amorous casuistry many ambitious women slide toward political
intrigue. In 1623 the papal nuncio wrote: “In France all the major
events, all the important plots, most often depend on women.” The
princesse de Condé foments the “women’s conspiracy”; Anne of
Austria readily takes the advice of the women surrounding her;
Richelieu lends an indulgent ear to the duchesse d’Aiguillon; the roles
played by Mme de Montbazon, the duchesse de Chevreuse, Mlle de
Montpensier, the duchess de Longueville, Anne de Gonzague, and
many others in the Fronde are well-known. Lastly, Mme de
Maintenon is a brilliant example of the influence a skillful woman
adviser could wield on state affairs. Organizers, advisers, and
schemers, women assure themselves of a highly effective role by
oblique means: the princesse des Ursins in Spain governs with more
authority but her career is brief. Alongside these great noblewomen, a
few personalities assert themselves in a world that escapes bourgeois
constraints; a hitherto unknown species appears: the actress. The
presence of a woman onstage is noted for the first time in 1545; in
149

1592 there is still only one; at the beginning of the seventeenth
century most of them are actors’ wives; they then become more and
more independent both onstage and in their private lives. As far as the
courtesan is concerned, after being Phryne or Imperia, she finds her
highest incarnation in Ninon de Lenclos: from capitalizing on her
femininity, she surpasses it; from living among men, she takes on
virile qualities; her independent moral behavior disposes her to
independent thinking: Ninon de Lenclos brought freedom to the
highest point a woman could at that time.
In the eighteenth century, woman’s freedom and independence
continue
to grow. Customs remained strict in principle: girls receive
no more than a cursory education; they are married off or sent to a
convent without being consulted. The bourgeoisie, the rising class that
is being consolidated, imposes a strict morality on the wife. But on the
other hand, with the nobility breaking up, the greatest freedom of
behavior is possible for women of the world, and even the
haute
bourgeoisie
is contaminated by these examples; neither convent nor
conjugal home can contain the woman. Once again, for the majority of
women, this freedom remains negative and abstract: they limit
themselves to the pursuit of pleasure. But those who are intelligent
and ambitious create avenues for action for themselves. Salon life
once again blossoms: The roles played by Mme Geoffrin, Mme du
Deffand, Mlle de Lespinasse, Mme d’Epinay, and Mme de Tencin are
well-known; protectors and inspiration, women make up the writer’s
favorite audience; they are personally interested in literature,
philosophy, and sciences: like Mme Du Châtelet, for example, they
have their own physics workshops or chemistry laboratory; they
experiment; they dissect; they intervene more actively than ever before
in political life: one after the other, Mme de Prie, Mme de Mailly,
Mme de Châteauneuf, Mme de Pompadour, and Mme du Barry
govern Louis XV; there is barely a minister without his Egeria, to
such a point that Montesquieu thinks that in France everything is done
by women; they constitute, he says, “a new state within the state”; and
Collé writes on the eve of 1789: “They have so taken over
Frenchmen, they have subjugated them so greatly that they think
about and feel only for themselves.” Alongside society women there
are also actresses and prostitutes who enjoy great fame: Sophie
Arnould, Julie Talma, and Adrienne Lecouvreur.
150

Throughout the ancien régime the cultural domain is the most
accessible to women who try to assert themselves. Yet none reached
the summits of a Dante or a Shakespeare; this can be explained by the
general mediocrity of their condition. Culture has never been the
privilege of any but the feminine elite, never of the masses; and
masculine geniuses often come from the masses; even privileged
women encountered obstacles that barred their access to the heights.
Nothing stopped the ascent of a Saint Teresa, a Catherine of Russia,
but a thousand circumstances conspired against the woman writer. In
her small book
A Room of One’s Own
, Virginia Woolf enjoyed
inventing the destiny of Shakespeare’s supposed sister; while he
learned a little Latin, grammar, and logic in school, she was closed up
at home in total ignorance; while he poached, ran around in the
countryside, and slept with local women, she was mending kitchen
towels under her parents’ watchful eyes; if, like him, she bravely left
to seek her fortune in
London, she could not become an actress
earning her living freely: either she would be brought back to her
family and married off by force; or seduced, abandoned, and
dishonored, she would commit suicide out of despair. She could also
be imagined as a happy prostitute, a Moll Flanders, as Daniel Defoe
portrayed her: but she would never have run a theater and written
plays. In England, Virginia Woolf notes, women writers always
engender hostility. Dr. Johnson compared them to “a dog’s walking
on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it
done at all.” Artists care about what people think more than anyone
else; women narrowly depend on it: it is easy to imagine how much
strength it takes for a woman artist simply to dare to carry on
regardless; she often succumbs in the fight. At the end of the
seventeenth century, Lady Winchilsea, a childless noblewoman,
attempts the feat of writing; some passages of her work show she had
a sensitive and poetic nature; but she was consumed by hatred, anger,
and fear:
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen
,
Such an intruder on the rights of men
,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed
,
The fault by no virtue can be redeemed
.
*
151

Almost all her work is filled with indignation about woman’s
condition. The Duchess of Newcastle’s case is similar; also a
noblewoman, she creates a scandal by writing. “Women live like
cockroaches or owls, they die like worms,” she furiously writes.
Insulted and ridiculed, she had to shut herself up in her domain; and
in spite of a generous temperament and going half-mad, she produced
nothing more than wild imaginings. It is not until the eighteenth
century that a bourgeois widow, Mrs. Aphra Behn,
†
lived by her pen
like a man; others followed her example, but even in the nineteenth
century they were often obliged to hide; they did not even have a
“room of their own”; that is, they did not enjoy material independence,
one of the essential conditions for inner freedom.
As has already been seen, because of the development of social life
and its close link to intellectual life, French women’s situation is a
little more favorable. Nevertheless, people are largely hostile to the
bluestockings. During the Renaissance, noblewomen and intellectuals
inspire a movement
in favor of their sex; Platonic doctrines imported
from Italy spiritualize love and woman. Many well-read men strive to
defend her.
La nef des dames vertueuses
(The Ship of Virtuous
Ladies),
Le chevalier des dames
(The Ladies’ Chevalier), and so on
were published. Erasmus in
Le petit sénat
(The Little Senate) gives
the floor to Cornelia, who unabashedly details the grievances of her
sex. “Men are tyrants … They treat us like toys … they make us their
launderers and cooks.” Erasmus demands that women be allowed to
have an education. Cornelius Agrippa, in a very famous work,
Déclamation de la noblesse et de l’excellence du sexe féminin
(Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
),
devotes himself to showing feminine superiority. He takes up the old
cabbalistic arguments: Eve means Life and Adam Earth. Created after
man, woman is more finished then he. She is born in paradise, he
outside. When she falls into the water, she floats; man sinks. She is
made from Adam’s rib and not from earth. Her monthly cycles cure
all illnesses. Eve merely wandered in her ignorance, whereas Adam
sinned, which is why God made himself a man; moreover, after his
resurrection he appeared to women. Then Agrippa declares that
women are more virtuous than men. He lists “virtuous women” that
the sex can take pride in, which is also a commonplace of these
praises. Lastly, he mounts an indictment of male tyranny: “Acting
152

against divine right and violating natural law with impunity, the
tyranny of men has deprived women of the freedom they receive at
birth.” Yet she engenders children; she is as intelligent and even
subtler than man; it is scandalous that her activities are limited,
“undoubtedly done not by God’s order, nor by necessity or reason,
but by the force of usage, by education, work and principally by
violence and oppression.” He does not, of course, demand sexual
equality, but wants woman to be treated with respect. The work was
immensely successful; there is also
Le fort inexpugnable (The
Impregnable Fort
), another praise of woman; and
La parfaite amye
(The Perfect Friend
) by Héroët, imbued with Platonic mysticism. In a
curious book introducing Saint-Simonian doctrine, Postel announces
the coming of a new Eve, the regenerating mother of humankind: he
thinks he has even met her; she is dead, and she is perhaps
reincarnated in him. With more moderation, Marguerite de Valois, in
her
Docte et subtil discours (Learned and Subtle Discourse
)
proclaims that there is something divine in woman. But the writer
who best served the cause of her sex was Margaret of Navarre, who
proposed an ideal of sentimental mysticism and chastity without
prudery to counter licentiousness, attempting to reconcile marriage
and love for women’s honor with happiness. Women’s opponents do
not, of course, give up. Among others,
Les controverses des sexes
masculine
et féminin
(Controversies over the Masculine and Feminine
Sexes), in response to Agrippa, puts forward the old medieval
arguments. Rabelais has a good time in
The Third Book
satirizing
marriage in the tradition of Matthew and Deschamps: however, it is
women who lay down the law in the privileged abbey of Thélème.
Antifeminism becomes virulent once again in 1617, with the
Alphabet
de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (A Discourse of Women,
Shewing Their Imperfections Alphabetically
), by Jacques Olivier; the
cover pictures an engraving of a woman with a harpy’s hands,
covered with the feathers of lust and perched on her feet, because, like
a hen, she is a bad housewife: under every letter of the alphabet is one
of her defects. Once more it was a man of the Church who rekindled
the old quarrel; Mlle de Gournay answered back with
Egalité des
hommes et des femmes (Equality of Men and Women
). This is
followed by a quantity of libertine literature, including
Parnasse et
cabinets satyriques
(Parnassus and Satyrical Cabinets),
*
that attacks
153

women’s moral behavior, while the holier-than-thous quoting Paul,
the Church Fathers, and Ecclesiastes drag them down. Woman
provided an inexhaustible theme for the satires of Mathurin Régnier
and his friends. In the other camp, the apologists outdo themselves in
taking up and commenting on Agrippa’s arguments. Father du Boscq
in
L’honneste femme (The Compleat Woman
) calls for women to be
allowed to be educated. The
Astrée
and a great quantity of courtly
literature praise their merits in rondeaux, sonnets, elegies, and such.
Even the successes women achieved were cause for new attacks;
Les précieuses ridicules
(
The Pretentious Young Ladies
) set public
opinion against them; and a bit later
Les femmes savants
(
The
Learned Ladies
) are applauded. Molière is not, however, woman’s
enemy: he vigorously attacks arranged marriages, he demands
freedom for young girls in their love lives and respect and
independence for the wife. On the other hand, Bossuet does not spare
them in his sermons. The first woman, he preaches, is “only a part of
Adam and a kind of diminutive. Her mind is about the same size.”
Boileau’s satire against women is not much more than an exercise in
rhetoric, but it raises an outcry: Pradon, Regnard, and Perrault
counterattack violently. La Bruyère and Saint-Evremond take the part
of women. The period’s most determined feminist is Poulain de la
Barre who in 1673 publishes a Cartesian-inspired work,
De l’égalité
des deux sexes (The Equality of the Two Sexes
). He thinks that since
men are stronger, they favor their sex and women accept this
dependence out of custom. They never had their
chances: in either
freedom or education. Thus they cannot be judged by what they did in
the past. Nothing indicates their inferiority to men. Anatomy reveals
differences, but none of them constitutes a privilege for the male. And
Poulain de la Barre concludes with a demand for a solid education for
women. Fontenelle writes
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
(Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
) for women. And while
Fénelon, following Mme de Maintenon and Abbot Fleury, puts
forward a very limited educational program, the Jansenist academic
Rollin wants women to undertake serious studies.
The eighteenth century is also divided. In 1744, the author of the
Controverse sur l’âme de la femme (Controversy over Woman’s
Soul
) declares that “woman created uniquely for man will cease to be
at the end of the world because she will cease to be useful for the
154

object for which she had been created, from which follows
necessarily that her soul is not immortal.” In a slightly less radical
way, Rousseau is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie and dooms
woman to her husband and motherhood. “All the education of women
should be relative to men … Woman is made to yield to man and to
bear his injustices,” he asserts. However, the democratic and
individualist ideal of the eighteenth century is favorable to women; for
most philosophers they are human beings equal to those of the strong
sex. Voltaire denounces the injustice of their lot. Diderot considers
their inferiority largely
made
by society. “Women, I pity thee!” he
writes. He thinks that “in all customs the cruelty of civil laws makes
common cause with the cruelty of nature against women. They have
been treated as idiot beings.” Montesquieu, paradoxically, believes
that women should be subordinate to man in the home but that
everything predisposes them to political action. “It is against reason
and against nature for women to be mistresses in the house … but not
for them to govern an empire.” Helvétius shows that woman’s
inferiority is created by the absurdity of her education; d’Alembert is
of the same opinion. Economic feminism timidly makes its appearance
through a woman, Mme de Ciray.
*
But it is Mercier almost alone in
his
Tableau de Paris
who rises up against the destitution of women
workers and tackles the fundamental question of women’s work.
Condorcet wants women to enter political life. He considers them
man’s equals and defends them against classic attacks: “Women are
said … not to have their own
feeling of justice, that they listen to their
feelings more than to their conscience… [But] it is not nature, it is
education, it is the social existence that causes this difference.” And
elsewhere: “The more women have been enslaved by laws, the more
dangerous their empire has been … It would lessen if women had less
interest in keeping it, if it ceased being for them the sole means of
defending themselves and escaping oppression.”
*

Mundium:
almost total legal guardianship over women by father and husband.—
T
RANS
.
*
The
Songe du verger
is a treatise of political doctrine, written first in Latin (1370)
and then in French (1378). Title usually kept in French.—T
RANS
.
*
Lettre de cachet: letter with a seal. It carries an official seal, usually signed by the
155

king of France, authorizing the imprisonment without trial of a named person.—
T
RANS
.
†
“The wife is not exactly a partner, but it is hoped she will become one.”—T
RANS
.
1.
“Those coming to Sisteron by the Peipin passage, like the Jews, owed a toll of five
sols to the ladies of Sainte-Claire” (Bahutaud).
2.
De Reiffenberg,
Dictionnaire de la conversation
, “Femmes et filles de folles vie”
(
Dictionary of Conversation
, “Women and Girls of the Low Life”). [Translation of Old
French by Gabrielle Spiegel.—T
RANS.]
*

Querelle des femmes:
a literary quarrel traced to Christine de Pizan’s objection to the
portrayal of women in the
Roman de la Rose
, voiced in her
Epître au dieu d’amours
(1399;
Epistle to the God of Love
), a debate that helped nurture literary production
throughout the early modern period.—T
RANS
.
3.
“Woman is superior to man, namely:
Materially:
because Adam was made of clay,
Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.
In terms of place:
because Adam was created outside of
paradise, Eve in paradise.
In terms of conception:
because woman conceived God,
something man couldn’t do.
In terms of appearance:
because Christ after his death
appeared to a woman, namely Magdalene.
In terms of glorification:
because a woman
was glorified above the choir of angels, namely blessed Mary.”
*
The correct title is
Le champion des dames
(c. 1441; The Ladies’ Champion).—
T
RANS
.
*
Beauvoir shortened and paraphrased this quatrain in the French text.—T
RANS
.
†
Discrepancy: In fact, Mrs. Aphra Behn, dramatist and novelist, lived from 1640 to
1689. —T
RANS
.
*
This title might be a confusion and combination of
Le cabinet satyrique
(1618) and
Le parnasse des poètes satyriques
(1622).—T
RANS
.
*
The name Ciray is untraceable. Emilie Du Châtelet and Voltaire lived and worked in
the Château de Cirey from 1734 to 1749, giving rise to some speculation about the
possibility of a misspelling or an erroneous transcription from the original
manuscript of the name Ciray. But there is no conclusive evidence of this.—T
RANS
.
156

|
CHAPTER 5
|
The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of
woman. It did nothing of the kind. This bourgeois revolution
respected bourgeois institutions and values; and it was waged almost
exclusively by men. It must be pointed out that during the entire
ancien régime working-class women as a sex enjoyed the most
independence. A woman had the right to run a business, and she
possessed all the necessary capacities to exercise her trade
autonomously. She shared in production as linen maid, laundress,
burnisher, shopgirl, and so on; she worked either at home or in small
businesses; her material independence allowed her great freedom of
behavior: a woman of modest means could go out, go to taverns, and
control her own body almost like a man; she is her husband’s partner
and his equal. She is oppressed on an economic and not on a sexual
level. In the countryside, the peasant woman plays a considerable role
in rural labor; she is treated like a servant; often she does not eat at the
same table as her husband and sons; she toils harder and the burdens
of maternity add to her fatigue. But as in old farming societies, since
she is necessary to man, he respects her for it; their goods, interests,
and concerns are shared; she enjoys great authority in the home. From
within their difficult lives, these women could have asserted
themselves as individuals and demanded their rights; but a tradition of
timidity and submission weighed on them: the Estates-General cahiers
record an insignificant number of feminine claims, limited to “Men
should not engage in trades that are the prerogative of women.” And it
is true that women are found alongside their men in demonstrations
and riots: they are the ones who go to Versailles to find “the baker,
the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy.”
*
But it is not the people
who led the Revolution and
reaped its fruits. As for bourgeois
women, a few rallied ardently to the cause of freedom: Mme Roland,
Lucile Desmoulins, and Théroigne de Méricourt; one of them,
Charlotte Corday, significantly influenced the outcome when she
assassinated Marat. There were a few feminist movements. In 1791,
157

Olympe de Gouges proposed a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman
and the Female Citizen” equivalent to the “Declaration of the Rights of
Man,” demanding that all masculine privileges be abolished. In 1790
the same ideas are found in
Motion de la pauvre Javotte
(Poor
Javotte’s Motion) and in other similar lampoons; but in spite of
Condorcet’s support, these efforts are abortive, and Olympe perishes
on the scaffold. In addition to
L’Impatient
, the newspaper she
founded, a few other short-lived papers appear. Women’s clubs
merge for the most part with men’s and are taken over by them. On
Brumaire 28, 1793, when the actress Rose Lacombe, president of the
Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, along with a
delegation of women, forces the doors of the Conseil Général, the
prosecutor Chaumette pronounces words in the assembly that could
be inspired by Saint Paul and Saint Thomas: “Since when are women
allowed to renounce their sex and become men?… [Nature] has told
woman: Be a woman. Child care, household tasks, sundry
motherhood cares, those are your tasks.” Women are banned from
entering the Conseil and soon even from the clubs where they had
learned their politics. In 1790, the right of the firstborn and masculine
privilege were eliminated; girls and boys became equals regarding
succession; in 1792 divorce law was established, relaxing strict
marital ties; but these were feeble conquests. Bourgeois women were
too integrated into the family to find concrete grounds for solidarity
with each other; they did not constitute a separate caste capable of
forcing their demands: on an economic level, they existed as parasites.
Thus, while women could have participated in events in spite of their
sex, they were prevented by their class, and those from the agitating
class were condemned to stand aside because they were women.
When economic power falls into the hands of the workers, it will then
be possible for the working woman to gain the capacities that the
parasitic woman, noble or bourgeois, never obtained.
During the liquidation of the Revolution woman enjoys an anarchic
freedom. But when society is reorganized, she is rigidly enslaved
again. From the feminist point of view, France was ahead of other
countries; but for the unfortunate modern French woman, her status
was determined during a military dictatorship; the Napoleonic Code,
which sealed her fate for a century, greatly held back her
emancipation. Like all military leaders, Napoleon wants to see woman
158

solely as a mother; but, heir to a bourgeois revolution, he does not
intend to demolish the social structure by giving
the mother priority
over the wife: he prohibits the querying of paternity; he sets down
harsh conditions for the unwed mother and the illegitimate child. Yet
the married woman herself does not find recourse in her dignity as
mother; the feudal paradox is perpetuated. Girls and wives are
deprived of citizens’ rights, prohibiting them from functions such as
the practice of law or wardship. But the unmarried woman enjoys her
civil role fully while marriage preserves the
mundium
. Woman owes
obedience
to her husband; he can have her confined in cases of
adultery and obtain a divorce from her; if he kills the guilty wife when
caught in the act, he is excusable in the eyes of the law; the husband,
on the other hand, receives an infraction only if he brings a concubine
into the home, and this is the only ground that would allow his wife to
divorce him. Man decides where they will live, and he has many more
rights over the children than the mother; and—except in cases where
the woman manages a business—his authorization is necessary for
her contracts. Marital power is rigorously exercised, both over the
wife herself as a person and over her possessions.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the legal system continues to
reinforce the code’s severity, depriving, among other things, the
woman of all rights of alienation. In 1826 the Restoration abolishes
divorce,
*
and the 1848 Constitutional Assembly refuses to reestablish
it; it does not reappear until 1884, and then it is still difficult to obtain.
The bourgeoisie was never more powerful, yet they recognize the
dangers implicit in the Industrial Revolution; they assert themselves
with nervous authority. The freedom of ideas inherited from the
eighteenth century never makes inroads into family moral principles;
these remain as they are defined by the early-nineteenth-century
reactionary thinkers Joseph de Maistre and Bonald. They base the
value of order on divine will and demand a strictly hierarchical
society; the family, the indissoluble social cell, will be the microcosm
of society. “Man is to woman what woman is to the child”; or “power
is to the minister what the minister is to the people,” says Bonald.
Thus the husband governs, the wife administers, and the children
obey. Divorce is, of course, forbidden; and woman is confined to the
home. “Women belong to the family and not to politics, and nature
made them for housework and not for public service,” adds Bonald.
159

These hierarchies were respected in the family as described by Le
Play in the middle of the century.
In a slightly different way, Auguste Comte also demands a
hierarchy of the sexes; between men and women there are “radical
differences, both physical and moral, profoundly separating one from
the other, in every
species of animal and
especially in the human
race
.” Femininity is a kind of “prolonged childhood” that sets women
apart from the “ideal type of the race.” This biological infantilism
expresses an intellectual weakness; the role of this purely affective
being is that of spouse and housewife, no match for man: “Neither
instruction nor education is suitable for her.” As with Bonald, woman
is confined to the family, and within this micro society the father
governs because woman is “inept in all government even domestic”;
she only administers and advises. Her instruction has to be limited.
“Women and the proletariat cannot and must not become originators,
nor do they wish to.” And Comte foresees society’s evolution as
totally eliminating woman’s work outside the family. In the second
part of his work, Comte, swayed by his love for Clotilde de Vaux,
exalts woman to the point of almost making her a divinity, the
emanation of the Great Being; in the temple of Humanity, positivist
religion will propose her for the adoration of the people, but only for
her morality; man acts, while she loves: she is more deeply altruistic
than he. But according to the positivist system, she is still no less
confined to the family; divorce is still forbidden for her, and it would
even be preferable for her widowhood to last forever; she has no
economic or political rights; she is only a wife and an educator.
Balzac expresses the same ideal in more cynical ways: woman’s
destiny, and her only glory, is to make the hearts of men beat, he
writes in
La physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage
).
“Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal
property, and the possession of her is as good as a security—indeed,
properly speaking, woman is only man’s annexe.” Here he is
speaking for the bourgeoisie, which intensified its antifeminism in
reaction to eighteenth-century license and threatening progressive
ideas. Having brilliantly presented the idea at the beginning of
The
Physiology of Marriage
that this loveless institution forcibly leads the
wife to adultery, Balzac exhorts husbands to rein in wives to total
subjugation if they want to avoid the ridicule of dishonor. They must
160

be denied training and culture, forbidden to develop their
individuality, forced to wear uncomfortable clothing, and encouraged
to follow a debilitating dietary regime. The bourgeoisie follows this
program exactly, confining women to the kitchen and to housework,
jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed in daily life rituals
that hindered all attempts at independence. In return, they are honored
and endowed with the most exquisite respect. “The married woman is
a slave who must be seated on a throne,” says Balzac; of course men
must give in to women in all irrelevant circumstances, yielding them
first place; women must not carry heavy burdens as in primitive
societies; they are readily spared all painful tasks and worries: at the
same time this relieves them of all responsibility. It is hoped
that, thus
duped, seduced by the ease of their condition, they will accept the role
of mother and housewife to which they are being confined. And in
fact, most bourgeois women capitulate. As their education and their
parasitic situation make them dependent on men, they never dare to
voice their claims: those who do are hardly heard. It is easier to put
people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said
George Bernard Shaw. The bourgeois woman clings to the chains
because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she
believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society;
liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she
might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her
husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property
abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she
feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She
makes his interests her own.
Yet these obstinate examples of resistance cannot stop the march of
history; the advent of the machine ruins landed property and brings
about working-class emancipation and concomitantly that of woman.
All forms of socialism, wresting woman from the family, favor her
liberation: Plato, aspiring to a communal regime, promised women a
similar autonomy to that enjoyed in Sparta. With the utopian socialism
of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Cabet is born the utopia of the “free
woman.” The Saint-Simonian idea of universal association demands
the abolition of all slavery: that of the worker and that of the woman;
and it is because women like men are human beings that Saint-Simon,
and Leroux, Pecqueur, and Carnot after him, demand their freedom.
161

Unfortunately, this reasonable theory has no credibility in the Saint-
Simonian school. Instead, woman is exalted in the name of femininity,
the surest way to disserve her. Under the pretext of considering the
couple as the basis of social unity, Père Enfantin tries to introduce a
woman into each “director-couple” called the priest-couple; he awaits
a better world from a woman messiah, and the Compagnons de la
Femme embark for the East in search of this female savior. He is
influenced by Fourier, who confuses the liberation of woman with the
restoration of the flesh; Fourier demands the right of all individuals to
follow their passionate attractions; he wants to replace marriage with
love; he considers the woman not as a person but only in her amorous
functions. And Cabet promises that Icarian communism will bring
about complete equality of the sexes, though he accords women a
limited participation in politics. In fact, women hold second place in
the Saint-Simonian movement: only Claire Bazard, founder and main
support for a brief period of the magazine
La Femme Nouvelle
(The
New Woman), plays a relatively important role. Many other minor
publications appear later, but their claims are timid; they demand
education
rather than emancipation for women; Carnot, and later
Legouvé, is committed to raising the level of education for women.
The idea of the woman partner or the woman as a regenerating force
persists throughout the nineteenth century in Victor Hugo. But
woman’s cause is discredited by these doctrines that, instead of
assimilating her, oppose her to man, emphasizing intuition and
emotion instead of reason. The cause is also discredited by some of its
partisans’ mistakes. In 1848 women founded clubs and journals;
Eugénie Niboyet published
La Voix des Femmes
(Women’s Voice), a
magazine that Cabet worked on. A female delegation went to the city
hall to demand “women’s rights” but obtained nothing. In 1849,
Jeanne Deroin ran for deputy, and her campaign foundered in ridicule.
Ridicule also killed the “Vesuvians” movement and the Bloomerists,
who paraded in extravagant costumes. The most intelligent women of
the period took no part in these movements: Mme de Staël fought for
her own cause rather than her sisters’; George Sand demanded the
right for free love but refused to collaborate on
La Voix des Femmes;
her claims are primarily sentimental. Flora Tristan believed in the
people’s redemption through woman; but she is more interested in the
emancipation of the working class than that of her own sex. Daniel
162

Stern and Mme de Girardin, however, joined the feminist movement.
On the whole, the reform movement that develops in the nineteenth
century seeks justice in equality, and is thus generally favorable to
feminism. There is one notable exception: Proudhon. Undoubtedly
because of his peasant roots, he reacts violently against Saint-
Simonian mysticism; he supports small property owners and at the
same time believes in confining woman to the home. “Housewife or
courtesan” is the dilemma he locks her in. Until then, attacks against
women had been led by conservatives, bitterly combating socialism as
well:
Le Charivari
was one of the inexhaustible sources of jokes; it is
Proudhon who breaks the alliance between feminism and socialism;
he protests against the socialist women’s banquet presided over by
Leroux, and he fulminates against Jeanne Deroin. In his work
Justice
,
he posits that woman should be dependent on man; man alone counts
as a social individual; a couple is not a partnership, which would
suppose equality, but a union; woman is inferior to man first because
her physical force is only two-thirds that of the male, then because she
is intellectually and morally inferior to the same degree: she is worth 2
× 2 × 2 against 3 × 3 × 3 or
8
/
27
of the stronger sex. When two
women, Mme Adam and Mme d’Héricourt, respond to him—one
quite firmly, the other less effusively—Proudhon retorts with
La
pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes
(Pornocracy,
or Women in Modern Times). But, like all antifeminists, he addresses
ardent litanies to the “real woman,” slave and mirror to the male;
in
spite of this devotion, he has to recognize himself that the life he gave
his own wife never made her happy: Mme Proudhon’s letters are one
long lament.
But it is not these theoretical debates that influenced the course of
events; they only timidly reflected them. Woman regains the economic
importance lost since prehistoric times because she escapes the home
and plays a new role in industrial production. The machine makes this
upheaval possible because the difference in physical force between
male and female workers is canceled out in a great number of cases.
As this abrupt industrial expansion demands a bigger labor market
than male workers can provide, women’s collaboration is necessary.
This is the great nineteenth-century revolution that transforms the lot
of woman and opens a new era to her. Marx and Engels understand
the full impact this will have on women, promising them a liberation
163

brought about by that of the proletariat. In fact, “women and workers
both have oppression in common,” says Bebel. And both will escape
oppression thanks to the importance their productive work will take
on through technological development. Engels shows that woman’s
lot is closely linked to the history of private property; a catastrophe
substituted patriarchy for matriarchy and enslaved woman to the
patrimony; but the Industrial Revolution is the counterpart of that loss
and will lead to feminine emancipation. He writes: “Woman cannot be
emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale
and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has
become possible only within a large modern industry that not only
accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, woman was more
shamefully exploited than workers of the opposite sex. Domestic
labor constituted what the English termed the “sweating system”; in
spite of constant work, the worker did not earn enough to make ends
meet. Jules Simon, in
L’ouvrière
(The Woman Worker), and even the
conservative Leroy-Beaulieu, in
Le travail des femmes au XIXe siècle
(Women’s Work in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1873,
denounce loathsome abuses; the latter declares that more than 200,000
French workers earn less than fifty centimes a day. It is clear why
they hasten to migrate to the factories; in fact, it is not long before
nothing is left outside workshops except needlework, laundering, and
housework, all slave labor paying famine wages; even lace making,
millinery, and such are taken over by the factories; in return, job
offers are massive in the cotton, wool, and silk industries; women are
mainly used in spinning and weaving mills. Employers often prefer
them to men. “They do better work for less pay.” This cynical formula
clearly shows the drama of feminine labor. It is through labor that
woman won her dignity as a human being; but it was a singularly
difficult and slow conquest. Spinning and weaving are done under
lamentable hygienic conditions. “In Lyon,” writes Blanqui, “in the
trimmings workshops, some women are obliged to work almost
hanging in a kind of harness in order to use both their feet and
hands.” In 1831, silk workers work in the summer from as early as
three o’clock in the morning to eleven at night, or seventeen hours a
day,
*
“in often unhealthy workshops where sunlight never enters,”
says Norbert Truquin. “Half of the young girls develop consumption
164

before the end of their apprenticeship. When they complain they are
accused of dissimulating.”
1
In addition, the male assistants take
advantage of the young women workers. “To get what they wanted
they used the most revolting means, hunger and want,” says the
anonymous author of
La verité sur les événements de Lyon
(The
Truth About the Events of Lyon). Some of the women work on farms
as well as in factories. They are cynically exploited. Marx relates in a
footnote of
Das Kapital:
“Mr. E., manufacturer, let me know that he
employed only women on his mechanical weaving looms, and that he
gave preference to married women, and among them, women who
had a family to care for at home, because they were far more docile
and attentive than unmarried women, and had to work until ready to
drop from exhaustion to provide indispensable means of subsistence
to support their families. This is how,” adds Marx, “the qualities
proper to woman are misrepresented to her disadvantage, and all the
delicate and moral elements of her nature become means to enslave
her and make her suffer.” Summarizing
Das Kapital
and commenting
on Bebel, G. Deville writes: “Beast of luxury or beast of burden, such
is woman almost exclusively today. Kept by man when she does not
work, she is still kept by him when she works herself to death.” The
situation of the woman worker was so lamentable that Sismondi and
Blanqui called for women to be denied access to workshops. The
reason is in part that women did not at first know how to defend
themselves and organize unions. Feminine “associations” date from
1848 and are originally production associations. The movement
progressed extremely slowly, as the following figures show:
in 1905, out of 781,392 union members, 69,405 are women;
in 1908, out of 957,120 union members, 88,906 are women;
in 1912, out of 1,1064,413 union members, 92,336 are women.
In 1920, out of 1,580,967 workers, 239,016 are women and
unionized female employees, and among 1,083,957 farmworkers,
only 36,193 women are unionized; in all, 292,000 women are
unionized out of a total of 3,076,585 union workers. A tradition of
resignation and submission as well as a lack of solidarity and
collective consciousness leaves them disarmed in front of the new
possibilities available to them.
165

The result of this attitude is that women’s work was regulated
slowly and late. Legislation does not intervene until 1874, and in spite
of the campaigns waged under the empire, only two provisions affect
women: one banning minors from night work, requiring a day off on
Sundays and holidays, and limiting the workday to twelve hours; as
for women over twenty-one, all that is done is to prohibit
underground mine and quarry work. The first feminine work charter,
dated November 2, 1892, bans night work and limits the workday in
factories; it leaves the door open for all kinds of fraud. In 1900 the
workday is limited to ten hours; in 1905 a weekly day of rest becomes
obligatory; in 1907 the woman worker is granted free disposal of her
income; in 1909 maternity leave is granted; in 1911 the 1892
provisions are reinforced; in 1913 laws are passed for rest periods
before and after childbirth, and dangerous and excessive work is
prohibited. Little by little, social legislation takes shape, and health
guarantees are set up for women’s work; seats are required for
salesgirls, long shifts at outdoor display counters are prohibited, and
so on. The International Labor Office succeeded in getting
international agreements on sanitary conditions for women’s work,
maternity leave, and such.
A second consequence of the resigned inertia of women workers
was the salaries they were forced to accept. Various explanations with
multiple factors have been given for the phenomenon of low female
salaries. It is insufficient to say that women have fewer needs than
men: that is only a subsequent justification. Rather, women, as we
have seen, did not know how to defend themselves against
exploitation; they had to compete with prisons that dumped products
without labor costs on the market; they competed with each other.
Besides, in a society based on the marital community, woman seeks
emancipation through work: bound to her father’s or husband’s
household, she is most often satisfied just to bring home some extra
money; she works outside the family, but for it; and since the working
woman does not have to support herself completely, she ends up
accepting remuneration far inferior to that of which a man demands.
With a significant number of women accepting bargain wages, the
whole female salary scale is, of course, set up to the advantage of the
employer.
In France, according to an 1889–93 survey, for a day of work
166

equal to
a man’s, a woman worker received only half the male’s
wages. A 1908 survey showed that the highest hourly rates for
women working from home never rose above twenty centimes an
hour and dropped as low as five centimes: it was impossible for a
woman so exploited to live without charity or a protector. In America
in 1918, women earned half men’s salary. Around this period, for the
same amount of coal mined in Germany, a woman earned
approximately 25 percent less than a man. Between 1911 and 1943
women’s salaries in France rose a bit more rapidly than men’s, but
they nonetheless remained clearly inferior.
While employers warmly welcomed women because of the low
wages they accepted, this provoked resistance on the part of male
workers. Between the cause of the proletariat and that of women there
was no such direct solidarity as Bebel and Engels claimed. The
problem was similar to that of the black labor force in the United
States. The most oppressed minorities in a society are readily used by
the oppressors as a weapon against the class they belong to; thus they
at first become enemies, and a deeper consciousness of the situation is
necessary so that blacks and whites, women and male workers, form
coalitions rather than opposition. It is understandable that male
workers at first viewed this cheap competition as an alarming threat
and became hostile. It is only when women were integrated into
unions that they could defend their own interests and cease
endangering those of the working class as a whole.
In spite of all these difficulties, progress in women’s work
continued. In 1900, in France, 900,000 women worked from home
making clothes, leather goods, funeral wreaths, purses, beadwork,
and Paris souvenirs, but this number diminished considerably. In
1906, 42 percent of working-age women (between eighteen and sixty)
worked in farming, industry, business, banks, insurance, offices, and
liberal professions. This movement spread to the whole world
because of the 1914–18 labor crisis and the world war. The lower
middle class and the middle class were determined to follow this
movement, and women also invaded the liberal professions.
According to one of the last prewar censuses, in France 42 percent of
all women between eighteen and sixty worked; in Finland, 37 percent;
in Germany, 34.2 percent; in India, 27.7 percent; in England, 26.9
percent; in the Netherlands, 19.2 percent; and in the United States,
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17.7 percent. But in France and in India, the high figures reflect the
extent of rural labor. Excluding the peasantry, France had in 1940
approximately 500,000 heads of establishments, 1 million female
employees, 2 million women workers, and 1.5 million women
working alone or unemployed. Among women workers, 650,000
were domestic workers; 1.2 million worked in light industry,
including 440,000 in textiles, 315,000 in clothing, and 380,000 at
home in dressmaking. For commerce, liberal professions, and public
service, France, England, and the United States ranked about the
same.
One of the basic problems for women, as has been seen, is
reconciling the reproductive role and productive work. The
fundamental reason that woman, since the beginning of history, has
been consigned to domestic labor and prohibited from taking part in
shaping the world is her enslavement to the generative function. In
female animals there is a rhythm of heat and seasons that ensures the
economy of their energies; nature, on the contrary, between puberty
and menopause, places no limits on women’s gestation. Some
civilizations prohibit early marriage; Indian tribes are cited where
women are guaranteed a two-year rest period between births; but in
general over the centuries, women’s fertility has not been regulated.
Contraceptives have existed since antiquity, generally for women’s
use—potions, suppositories, or vaginal tampons—but they remained
the secrets of prostitutes and doctors; maybe the secret was available
to women of the Roman decadence whose sterility satirists
reproached.
2
But the Middle Ages knew nothing of them; no trace is
found until the eighteenth century. For many women in these times,
life was an uninterrupted series of pregnancies; even women of easy
virtue paid for their licentious love lives with frequent births. At
certain periods, humanity felt the need to reduce the size of the
population; but at the same time, nations worried about becoming
weak; in periods of crisis and great poverty, postponing marriage
lowered the birthrates. The general rule was to marry young and have
as many children as the woman could carry, infant mortality alone
reducing the number of living children. Already in the seventeenth
century, the abbé de Pure protests against the “amorous dropsy” to
which women are condemned; and Mme de Sévigné urges her
daughter to avoid frequent pregnancies.
3
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But it is in the eighteenth century that the Malthusian movement
develops in France. First the well-to-do class and then the population
in general deem it reasonable to limit the number of children according
to parents’
resources, and anticonception procedures begin to enter
into social practices. In 1778, Moreau, the demographer, writes, “Rich
women are not the only ones who considered the propagation of the
species the greatest old-fashioned dupe; these dark secrets, unknown
to all animals except man, have already made their way into the
countryside; nature is confounded even in the villages.” The practice
of coitus interruptus spreads first among the bourgeoisie, then among
rural populations and workers; the prophylactic, which already existed
as an antivenereal device, becomes a contraceptive device, widespread
after the discovery of vulcanization, toward 1840.
4
In Anglo-Saxon countries, birth control is official, and numerous
methods have been discovered to dissociate these two formerly
inseparable functions: the sexual and the reproductive. Viennese
medical research, precisely establishing the mechanism of conception
and the conditions favorable to it, has also suggested methods for
avoiding it. In France contraception propaganda and the sale of
pessaries, vaginal tampons, and such are prohibited; but birth control
is no less widespread.
As for abortion, it is nowhere officially authorized by law. Roman
law granted no special protection to embryonic life; the
nasciturus
was not considered a human being, but part of the woman’s body.
“Partus antequam edatur mulieris portio est vel viscerum.”
5
In the era of decadence, abortion seems to have been a normal
practice, and even a legislator who wanted to encourage birthrates
would never dare to prohibit it. If the woman refused a child against
her husband’s will, he could have her punished; but her crime was her
disobedience. Generally, in Oriental and Greco-Roman civilization,
abortion was allowed by law.
It was Christianity that overturned moral ideas on this point by
endowing the embryo with a soul; so abortion became a crime against
the fetus itself. “Any woman who does what she can so as not to give
birth to as many children as she is capable of is guilty of that many
homicides, just as is a woman who tries to injure herself after
conception,” says Saint Augustine. In Byzantium, abortion led only to
a temporary relegation; for the barbarians who practiced infanticide, it
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was punishable only if it was carried out by violence, against the
mother’s will: it was redeemed by paying blood money. But the first
councils issued edicts for the severest penalties against this
“homicide,” whatever the presumed age of the fetus. Nonetheless, one
question arises that has been the object of infinite discussion: At
what
moment does the soul enter the body? Saint Thomas and most other
writers settled on life beginning toward the fortieth day for males and
the eightieth for females; thus was established a distinction between
the animated and the non-animated fetus. A Middle Ages penitential
book declares: “If a pregnant woman destroys her fruit before forty-
five days, she is subject to a penitence of one year. For sixty days,
three years. And finally, if the infant is already animated, she should
be tried for homicide.” The book, however, adds: “There is a great
difference between a poor woman who destroys her infant for the
pain she has to feed it and the one who has no other reason but to hide
a crime of fornication.” In 1556, Henry II published a well-known
edict on concealing pregnancy; since the death penalty was applied for
simple concealment, it followed that the penalty should also apply to
abortion maneuvers; in fact, the edict was aimed at infanticide, but it
was used to authorize the death penalty for practitioners and
accomplices of abortion. The distinction between the quickened and
the non-quickened fetus disappeared around the eighteenth century.
At the end of the century, Beccaria, a man of considerable influence in
France, pleaded in favor of the woman who refuses to have a child.
The 1791 code excuses the woman but punishes her accomplices with
“twenty years of irons.” The idea that abortion is homicide
disappeared in the nineteenth century: it is considered rather to be a
crime against the state. The law of 1810 prohibits it absolutely under
pain of imprisonment and forced labor for the woman who aborts and
her accomplices; but doctors practice abortion whenever it is a
question of saving the mother’s life. Because the law is so strict,
juries at the end of the century stopped applying it, and few arrests
were made, with four-fifths of the accused acquitted. In 1923 a new
law is passed, again with forced labor for the accomplices and the
practitioner of the operation, but punishing the woman having the
abortion with only prison or a fine; in 1939 a new decree specifically
targets the technicians: no reprieve would be granted. In 1941
abortion was decreed a crime against state security. In other countries,
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it is a misdemeanor punishable by a short prison sentence; in England,
it is a crime—a felony—punishable by prison or forced labor.
Overall, codes and courts are more lenient with the woman having the
abortion than with her accomplices. The Church, however, has never
relaxed its severity. The March 27, 1917, code of canon law declares:
“Those who procure abortions, the mother not excepted, incur
excommunication
latae sententiae
, once the result has been obtained,
reserved to the Ordinary.” No reason can be invoked, even the danger
of the mother’s death. The pope again declared recently that between
the mother’s life and the child’s the former must be
sacrificed: the fact
is, the mother, being baptized, can enter heaven—curiously, hell never
enters into these calculations—while the fetus is condemned to
perpetual limbo.
6
Abortion was officially recognized, but only for a short time, in
Germany before Nazism and in the Soviet Union before 1936. But in
spite of religion and laws, it has been practiced in all countries to a
large extent. In France, every year 800,000 to 1 million abortions are
performed—as many as births—and two-thirds of the women are
married, many already having one or two children. In spite of the
prejudices, resistance, and an outdated morality, unregulated fertility
has given way to fertility controlled by the state or individuals.
Progress in obstetrics has considerably decreased the dangers of
childbirth; childbirth pain is disappearing; at this time—March 1949
—legislation has been passed in England requiring the use of certain
anesthetic methods; they are already generally applied in the United
States and are beginning to spread in France. With artificial
insemination, the evolution that will permit humanity to master the
reproductive function comes to completion. These changes have
tremendous importance for woman in particular; she can reduce the
number of pregnancies and rationally integrate them into her life,
instead of being their slave. During the nineteenth century, woman in
her turn is freed from nature; she wins control of her body. Relieved
of a great number of reproductive servitudes, she can take on the
economic roles open to her, roles that would ensure her control over
her own person.
The convergence of these two factors—participation in production
and freedom from reproductive slavery—explains the evolution of
woman’s condition. As Engels predicted, her social and political
171

status necessarily had to change. The feminist movement begun in
France by Condorcet and in England by Mary Wollstonecraft in
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, and followed up at the beginning
of the century by the Saint-Simonians, never succeeded for lack of a
concrete base. But now women’s claims would have ample weight.
They would be heard even
within the heart of the bourgeoisie. With
the rapid development of industrial civilization, landed property is
falling behind in relation to personal property: the principle of family
group unity is losing force. The mobility of capital allows its holder to
own and dispose of his wealth without reciprocity instead of being
held by it. Through patrimony, woman was substantially attached to
her husband: with patrimony abolished, they are only juxtaposed, and
even children do not constitute as strong a bond as interest. Thus, the
individual will assert himself against the group; this evolution is
particularly striking in America, where modern capitalism has
triumphed: divorce is going to flourish, and husbands and wives are
no more than provisional associates. In France, where the rural
population is large and where the Napoleonic Code placed the married
woman under guardianship, evolution will be slow. In 1884, divorce
was restored, and a wife could obtain it if the husband committed
adultery; nonetheless, in the penal area, sexual difference was
maintained: adultery was an offense only when perpetrated by the
wife. The right of guardianship, granted with restrictions in 1907, was
fully granted only in 1917. In 1912, the right to determine natural
paternity was authorized. It was not until 1938 and 1942 that the
married woman’s status was modified: the duty of obedience was
then abrogated, although the father remains the family head; he
determines the place of residence, but the wife can oppose his choice
if she advances valid arguments; her powers are increasing; but the
formula is still confused: “The married woman has full legal powers.
These powers are only limited by the marriage contract and law”; the
last part of the article contradicts the first. The equality of spouses has
not yet been achieved.
As for political rights, they have not easily been won in France,
England, or the United States. In 1867, John Stuart Mill pleaded the
first case ever officially pronounced before Parliament in favor of the
vote for women. In his writings he imperiously demanded equality of
men and women in the family and society: “The principle which
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regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the
legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and
now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and … it
ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality.”
*
After that,
English women organized politically under Mrs. Fawcett’s leadership;
French women rallied behind Maria Deraismes, who between 1868
and 1871 dealt with women’s issues in a series of public lectures; she
joined in the lively controversy against Alexandre Dumas fils,
who
advised the husband of an unfaithful wife, “Kill her.” Léon Richer
was the true founder of feminism; in 1869 he launched
Le Droit des
Femmes (The Rights of Women
) and organized the International
Congress of Women’s Rights, held in 1878. The question of the right
to vote was not yet dealt with; women limited themselves to claiming
civil rights; for thirty years the movement remained timid in France
and in England. Nonetheless, a woman, Hubertine Auclert, started a
suffragette campaign; she created a group called Women’s Suffrage
and a newspaper,
La Citoyenne
. Many groups were organized under
her influence, but they accomplished little. This weakness of feminism
stemmed from its internal division; as already pointed out, women as
a sex lack solidarity: they are linked to their classes first; bourgeois
and proletarian interests do not intersect. Revolutionary feminism
adhered to the Saint-Simonian and Marxist tradition; it is noteworthy,
moreover, that a certain Louise Michel spoke against feminism
because it diverted the energy that should be used entirely for class
struggle; with the abolition of capital the lot of woman will be
resolved.
The Socialist Congress of 1879 proclaimed the equality of the
sexes, and as of that time the feminist-socialist alliance would no
longer be denounced, but since women hope for their liberty through
the emancipation of workers in general, their attachment to their own
cause is secondary. The bourgeoisie, on the contrary, claim new rights
within existing society, and they refuse to be revolutionary; they want
to introduce virtuous reforms into rules of behavior: elimination of
alcohol, pornographic literature, and prostitution. In 1892, the
Feminist Congress convenes and gives its name to the movement, but
nothing comes of it. However, in 1897 a law is passed permitting
women to testify in court, but the request of a woman doctor of law to
become a member of the bar is denied. In 1898, women are allowed to
173

vote for the Commercial Court, to vote and be eligible for the National
Council on Labor and Employment, to be admitted to the National
Council for Public Health Services, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In
1900, feminists hold a new congress, again without significant
results. But in 1901, for the first time, Viviani presents the question of
the woman’s vote to the French parliament; he proposes limiting
suffrage to unmarried and divorced women. The feminist movement
gains importance at this time. In 1909 the French Union for Women’s
Suffrage is formed, headed by Mme Brunschvicg; she organizes
lectures, meetings, congresses, and demonstrations. In 1909, Buisson
presents a report on Dussaussoy’s bill allowing women to vote in
local assemblies. In 1910, Thomas presents a bill in favor of women’s
suffrage; presented again in 1918, it passes the Chamber in 1919; but
it fails to pass the Senate in 1922. The situation is
quite complex.
Christian feminism joins forces with revolutionary feminism and
Mme Brunschvicg’s so-called independent feminism: in 1919,
Benedict XV declares himself in favor of the women’s vote, and
Monsignor Baudrillart and Père Sertillanges follow his lead with
ardent propaganda; Catholics believe in fact that women in France
constitute a conservative and religious element; this is just what the
radicals fear: the real reason for their opposition is their fear of the
swing votes that women represented. In the Senate, numerous
Catholics, the Union Republican group, and extreme left parties are
for the women’s vote: but the majority of the assembly is against it.
Until 1932 delaying procedures are used by the majority, which
refuses to discuss bills concerning women’s suffrage; nevertheless, in
1932, the Chamber having voted the women’s voting and eligibility
amendment, 319 votes to 1, the Senate opens a debate extending over
several sessions: the amendment is voted down. The record in
L’officiel
is of great importance; all the antifeminist arguments
developed over half a century are found in the report, which
fastidiously lists all the works in which they are mentioned. First of
all come these types of gallantry arguments: we love women too much
to let them vote; the “real woman” who accepts the “housewife or
courtesan” dilemma is exalted in true Proudhon fashion; woman
would lose her charm by voting; she is on a pedestal and should not
step down from it; she has everything to lose and nothing to gain in
becoming a voter; she governs men without needing a ballot; and so
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on. More serious objections concern the family’s interest: woman’s
place is in the home; political discussions would bring about
disagreement between spouses. Some admit to moderate
antifeminism. Women are different from men. They do not serve in
the military. Will prostitutes vote? And others arrogantly affirm male
superiority: voting is a duty and not a right; women are not worthy of
it. They are less intelligent and educated than men. If women voted,
men would become effeminate. Women lacked political education.
They would vote according to their husbands’ wishes. If they want to
be free, they should first free themselves from their dressmakers.
Also proposed is that superbly naive argument: there are more women
in France than men. In spite of the flimsiness of all these objections,
French women would have to wait until 1945 to acquire political
power.
New Zealand gave woman full rights in 1893. Australia followed
in 1908. But in England and America victory was difficult. Victorian
England imperiously isolated woman in her home; Jane Austen wrote
in secret; it took great courage or an exceptional destiny to become
George Eliot or Emily Brontë; in 1888 an English scholar wrote:
“Women are not only not part of the race, they are not even half of the
race but a sub-species destined
uniquely for reproduction.” Mrs.
Fawcett founded a suffragist movement toward the end of the century,
but as in France the movement was hesitant. Around 1903, feminist
claims took a singular turn. In London, the Pankhurst family created
the Women’s Social and Political Union, which joined with the
Labour Party and embarked on resolutely militant activities. It was the
first time in history that women took on a cause as women: this is
what gave particular interest to the suffragettes in England and
America. For fifteen years, they carried out a policy recalling in some
respects a Gandhi-like attitude: refusing violence, they invented more
or less ingenious symbolic actions. They marched on the Albert Hall
during Liberal Party meetings, carrying banners with the words “Vote
for Women”; they forced their way into Lord Asquith’s office, held
meetings in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square, marched in the streets
carrying signs, and held lectures; during demonstrations they insulted
the police or threw stones at them, provoking their arrest; in prison
they adopted the hunger strike tactic; they raised money and rallied
millions of women and men; they influenced opinion so well that in
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1907 two hundred members of Parliament made up a committee for
women’s suffrage; every year from then on some of them would
propose a law in favor of women’s suffrage, a law that would be
rejected every year with the same arguments. In 1907 the WSPU
organized the first march on Parliament with workers covered in
shawls, and a few aristocratic women; the police pushed them back;
but the following year, as married women were threatened with a ban
on work in certain mines, the Lancashire women workers were called
by the WSPU to hold a grand meeting. There were new arrests, and
the imprisoned suffragettes responded with a long hunger strike.
Released, they organized new parades: one of the women rode a horse
painted with the head of Queen Elizabeth. On July 18, 1910, the day
the women’s suffrage law went to the Chamber, a nine-kilometer-long
column paraded through London; the law rejected, there were more
meetings and new arrests. In 1912, they adopted a more violent tactic:
they burned empty houses, slashed pictures, trampled flower beds,
threw stones at the police; at the same time, they sent delegation upon
delegation to Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey; they hid in the
Albert Hall and noisily disrupted Lloyd George’s speeches. The war
interrupted their activities. It is difficult to know how much these
actions hastened events. The vote was granted to English women first
in 1918 in a restricted form, and then in 1928 without restriction: their
success was in large part due to the services they had rendered during
the war.
The American woman found herself at first more emancipated than
the European. Early in the nineteenth century, pioneer women had to
share
the hard work done by men, and they fought by their sides; they
were far fewer than men, and thus a high value was placed on them.
But little by little, their condition came to resemble that of women in
the Old World; gallantry toward them was maintained; they kept their
cultural privileges and a dominant position within the family; laws
granted them a religious and moral role; but the command of society
resided in the males’ hands. Some women began to claim their
political rights around 1830. They undertook a campaign in favor of
blacks. As the antislavery congress held in 1840 in London was
closed to them, the Quaker Lucretia Mott founded a feminist
association. On July 18, 1840,
*
at the Seneca Falls Convention, they
drafted a Quaker-inspired declaration, which set the tone for all of
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American feminism: “that all men and women are created equal; that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights … that to secure these rights governments are instituted … He
[Man] has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly
dead … He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming
it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to
her conscience and her God.” Three years later, Harriet Beecher
Stowe wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, arousing the public in favor of
blacks. Emerson and Lincoln supported the feminist movement. When
the Civil War broke out, women ardently participated; but in vain they
demanded that the amendment giving blacks the right to vote be
drafted as follows: “The right … to vote shall not be denied or
abridged … on account of race, color,
sex
.” Seizing on the ambiguity
of one of the articles to the amendment, the great feminist leader
Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester with fourteen comrades; she
was fined a hundred dollars. In 1869, she founded what later came to
be called the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and
that same year the state of Wyoming gave women the right to vote.
But it was only in 1893 that Colorado, then in 1896 Idaho and Utah,
followed this example. Progress was slow afterward. But women
succeeded better economically than in Europe. In 1900, 5 million
women worked, 1.3 million in industry, 500,000 in business; a large
number worked in business, industry, and liberal professions. There
were lawyers, doctors, and 3,373 women pastors. The famous Mary
Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science Church. Women formed
clubs; in 1900, they totaled about 2 million members.
Nonetheless, only nine states had given women the vote. In 1913,
the
suffrage movement was organized on the militant English model.
Two women led it: Doris Stevens and a young Quaker, Alice Paul.
From Wilson they obtained the right to march with banners and
signs;
*
they then organized a campaign of lectures, meetings,
marches, and manifestations of all sorts. From the nine states where
women voted, women voters went with great pomp and circumstance
to the Capitol, demanding the feminine vote for the whole nation. In
Chicago, the first group of women assembled in a party to liberate
their sex; this assembly became the Women’s Party. In 1917,
suffragettes invented a new tactic: they stationed themselves at the
doors of the White House, banners in hand, and often chained to the
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gates so they could not be driven away. After six months, they were
stopped and sent to the Occoquan penitentiary; they went on a hunger
strike and were finally released. New demonstrations led to the
beginning of riots. The government finally consented to naming a
House Committee on Woman Suffrage. The executive committee of
the Women’s Party held a conference in Washington, and an
amendment favoring the woman’s vote went to the House and was
voted on January 10, 1918. The vote still had to go to the Senate.
Wilson would not promise to exert enough pressure, so the
suffragettes began to demonstrate again. They held a rally at the White
House doors. The president decided to address an appeal to the
Senate, but the amendment was rejected by two votes. A Republican
Congress voted for the amendment in June 1919. The battle for
complete equality of the sexes went on for the next ten years. At the
sixth International Conference of American States held in Havana in
1928, women obtained the creation of the Inter-American
Commission of Women. In 1933, the Montevideo treaties elevated
women’s status by international convention. Nineteen American
republics signed the convention giving women equality in all rights.
Sweden also had a very sizable feminist movement. Invoking old
traditions, Swedish women demanded the right “to education, work,
and liberty.” It was largely women writers who led the fight, and it
was the moral aspect of the problem that interested them at first; then,
grouped in powerful associations, they won over the liberals but ran
up against the hostility of the conservatives. Norwegian women in
1907 and Finnish women in 1906 obtained the suffrage that Swedish
women would have to wait years to attain.
In Latin and Eastern countries woman was oppressed by customs
more
than by laws. In Italy, fascism systematically hindered
feminism’s progress. Seeking the alliance of the Church, which
continued to uphold family tradition and a tradition of feminine
slavery, Fascist Italy held woman in double bondage: to public
authority and to her husband. The situation was very different in
Germany. In 1790, Hippel, a student, launched the first German
feminist manifesto. Sentimental feminism analogous to that of George
Sand flourished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1848,
the first German woman feminist, Louise Otto, demanded the right for
women to assist in the transformation of their country: her feminism
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was largely nationalistic. She founded the General German Women’s
Association in 1865. German socialists, along with Bebel, advocated
the abolition of the inequality of the sexes. In 1892, Clara Zetkin
joined the party’s council. Women workers and women socialists
grouped together in a federation. German women failed in 1914 to
establish a women’s national army, but they took an active part in the
war. After the German defeat, they obtained the right to vote and
participated in political life: Rosa Luxemburg fought next to
Liebknecht in the Spartacus group and was assassinated in 1919. The
majority of German women chose the party of order; several took
seats in the Reichstag. It was thus upon emancipated women that
Hitler imposed the new Napoleonic ideal:
“Kinder, Küche, Kirche.”
“Woman’s presence dishonors the Reichstag,” he declared. As
Nazism was anti-Catholic and antibourgeois, he gave the mother a
privileged place; protection granted to unmarried mothers and
illegitimate children greatly freed woman from marriage; as in Sparta,
she was more dependent on the state than on any individual, giving
her both more and less autonomy than a bourgeois woman living
under a capitalist regime.
In Soviet Russia the feminist movement made the greatest
advances. It began at the end of the nineteenth century among women
students of the intelligentsia; they were less attached to their personal
cause than to revolutionary action in general; they “went to the
people” and used nihilistic methods against the Okhrana: in 1878
Vera Zasulich shot the police chief Trepov. During the Russo-
Japanese War, women replaced men in many areas of work; their
consciousness raised, the Russian Union for Women’s rights
demanded political equality of the sexes; in the first Duma, a
parliamentary women’s rights group was created, but it was
powerless. Women workers’ emancipation would come from the
revolution. Already in 1905, they were actively participating in the
mass political strikes that broke out in the country, and they mounted
the barricades. On March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day and a
few days before the revolution, they massively demonstrated in the
streets of St. Petersburg demanding bread,
peace, and their husbands’
return. They took part in the October insurrection; between 1918 and
1920, they played an important economic and even military role in the
U.S.S.R.’s fight against the invaders. True to Marxist tradition, Lenin
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linked women’s liberation to that of the workers; he gave them
political and economic equality.
Article 122 of the 1936 constitution stipulates: “In the U.S.S.R.,
woman enjoys the same rights as man in all aspects of economic,
official, cultural, public, and political life.” And these principles were
spelled out by the Communist International. It demands “social
equality of man and woman before the law and in daily life. Radical
transformation in conjugal rights and in the family code. Recognition
of maternity as a social function. Entrusting society with the care and
education of children and adolescents. Organization of a civil effort
against ideology and traditions that make woman a slave.” In the
economic area, woman’s conquests were stunning. She obtained
equal wages with male workers, and she took on a highly active role
in production; thereby gaining considerable political and social
importance. The brochure recently published by the Association
France-U.S.S.R. reports that in the 1939 general elections there were
457,000 women deputies in the regional, district, town, and village
soviets; 1,480 in the socialist republics of higher soviets, and 227
seated in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Close to 10 million are
members of unions. They constitute 40 percent of the population of
U.S.S.R. workers and employees, and a great number of workers
among the Stakhanovites are women. The role of Russian women in
the last war is well-known; they provided an enormous labor force
even in production branches where masculine professions are
dominant: metallurgy and mining, timber rafting and railways, and so
forth. They distinguished themselves as pilots and parachutists, and
they formed partisan armies.
This participation of woman in public life has raised a difficult
problem: her role in family life. For a long while, means were sought
to free her from her domestic constraints: on November 16, 1942, the
plenary assembly of the Comintern proclaimed, “The revolution is
impotent as long as the notion of family and family relations
subsists.” Respect for free unions, liberalization of divorce, and
legalization of abortion ensured woman’s liberty relative to men; laws
for maternity leave, child-care centers, kindergartens, and so on
lightened the burdens of motherhood. From passionate and
contradictory witness reports, it is difficult to discern what woman’s
concrete situation really was; what is sure is that today the demands of
180

repopulation have given rise to a different family policy: the family
has become the elementary social cell, and woman is both worker and
housekeeper.
7

Sexual morality is at its strictest; since the law of June
1936, reinforced by that of June 7, 1941, abortion has been banned
and divorce almost suppressed; adultery is condemned by moral
standards. Strictly subordinated to the state like all workers, strictly
bound to the home, but with access to political life and the dignity that
productive work gives, the Russian woman is in a singular situation
that would be worth studying in its singularity; circumstances
unfortunately prevent me from doing this.
The recent session of the United Nations Commission on the Status
of Women demanded that equal rights for both sexes be recognized in
all nations, and several motions were passed to make this legal status
a concrete reality. It would seem, then, that the match is won. The
future can only bring greater and greater assimilation of women in a
hitherto masculine society.
Several conclusions come to the fore when taking a look at this
history as a whole. And first of all this one: women’s entire history
has been written by men. Just as in America there is no black problem
but a white one,
8
just as “anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it’s
our problem,”
9
so the problem of woman has always been a problem
of men. Why they had moral prestige at the outset along with physical
strength has been discussed; they created the values, customs, and
religions; never did women attempt to vie for that empire. A few
isolated women—Sappho, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Olympe de Gouges—protested against their harsh destiny; and there
were some collective demonstrations: but Roman matrons in league
against the Oppian Law or Anglo-Saxon suffragettes only managed to
wield pressure because men were willing to submit to it. Men always
held woman’s lot in their hands; and they did not decide on it based
on her interest; it is their own projects, fears, and needs that counted.
When they revered the Mother Goddess, it is because Nature
frightened them, and as soon as the bronze tool enabled them to assert
themselves against Nature, they instituted patriarchy; henceforth it
was the family-state conflict that has defined woman’s status; it is the
attitude of the Christian before God, the world, and his own flesh that
181

is reflected in the condition he
assigned to her; what was called the
querelle des femmes
in the Middle Ages was a quarrel between clergy
and laity about marriage and celibacy; it is the social regime founded
on private property that brought about the married woman’s
wardship, and it is the technical revolution realized by men that
enfranchised today’s women. It is an evolution of the masculine ethic
that led to the decrease in family size by birth control and partially
freed woman from the servitude of motherhood. Feminism itself has
never been an autonomous movement: it was partially an instrument
in the hands of politicians and partially an epiphenomenon reflecting a
deeper social drama. Never did women form a separate caste: and in
reality they never sought to play a role in history as a sex. The
doctrines that call for the advent of woman as flesh, life, immanence,
or the Other are masculine ideologies that do not in any way express
feminine claims. For the most part, women resign themselves to their
lot without attempting any action; those who did try to change
attempted to overcome their singularity and not to confine themselves
in it triumphantly. When they intervened in world affairs, it was in
concert with men and from a masculine point of view.
This intervention, in general, was secondary and occasional. The
women who enjoyed a certain economic autonomy and took part in
production were the oppressed classes, and as workers they were
even more enslaved than male workers. In the ruling classes woman
was a parasite and as such was subjugated to masculine laws: in both
cases, it was almost impossible for her to act. Law and custom did not
always coincide: and a balance was set up between them so that
woman was never concretely free. In the ancient Roman Republic,
economic conditions give the matron concrete powers: but she has no
legal independence; the same is often true in peasant civilizations and
among lower-middle-class tradesmen; mistress-servant inside the
home, woman is socially a minor. Inversely, in periods when society
fragments, woman becomes freer, but she loses her fief when she
ceases to be man’s vassal; she has nothing but a negative freedom that
is expressed only in license and dissipation, as for example, during
the Roman decadence, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and
the Directoire. Either she finds work but is enslaved, or she is
enfranchised but can do nothing else with herself. It is worth noting
among other points that the married woman had her place in society
182

but without benefiting from any rights, while the single woman,
honest girl or prostitute, had all man’s capacities; but until this century
she was more or less excluded from social life. The opposition
between law and custom produced this among other curious
paradoxes: free love is not prohibited by law, but adultery is a crime;
the girl that “falls,” however, is often dishonored, while the wife’s
shocking behavior is treated indulgently: from the eighteenth century
to today many young girls got married so that they could freely have
lovers. This ingenious system kept the great mass of women under
guardianship: it takes exceptional circumstances for a feminine
personality to be able to affirm itself between these two series of
constraints, abstract or concrete. Women who have accomplished
works comparable to men’s are those whom the force of social
institutions had exalted beyond any sexual differentiation. Isabella the
Catholic, Elizabeth of England, and Catherine of Russia were neither
male nor female: they were sovereigns. It is remarkable that once
socially abolished, their femininity no longer constituted inferiority:
there were infinitely more queens with great reigns than kings.
Religion undergoes the same transformation: Catherine of Siena and
Saint Teresa are saintly souls, beyond any physiological condition;
their lay life and their mystical life, their actions and their writings,
rise to heights that few men ever attain. It is legitimate to think that if
other women failed to mark the world deeply, it is because they were
trapped by their conditions. They were only able to intervene in a
negative or indirect way. Judith, Charlotte Corday, and Vera Zasulich
assassinate; the Frondeuses conspire; during the Revolution and the
Commune, women fight alongside men against the established order;
intransigent refusal and revolt against a freedom without rights and
power are permitted, whereas it is forbidden for a woman to
participate in positive construction; at best she will manage to
insinuate herself into masculine enterprises by indirect means.
Aspasia, Mme de Maintenon, and the princesse des Ursins were
precious advisers: but someone still had to consent to listen to them.
Men tend to exaggerate the scope of this influence when trying to
convince woman she has the greater role; but in fact feminine voices
are silenced when concrete action begins; they might foment wars, not
suggest battle tactics; they oriented politics only inasmuch as politics
was limited to intrigue: the real reins of the world have never been in
183

women’s hands; they had no role either in technology or in economy,
they neither made nor unmade states, they did not discover worlds.
They did set off some events: but they were pretexts more than
agents. Lucretia’s suicide had no more than a symbolic value.
Martyrdom remains allowed for the oppressed; during Christian
persecutions and in the aftermath of social or national defeats, women
played this role of witness; but a martyr has never changed the face of
the world. Even feminine demonstrations and initiatives were only
worth something if a masculine decision positively prolonged them.
The American women united around Harriet Beecher Stowe aroused
public opinion to fever pitch against slavery; but the real reasons for
the Civil War were not sentimental.
The March 8, 1917, “woman’s
day” might have triggered the Russian Revolution: but it was
nonetheless merely a signal. Most feminine heroines are extravagant:
adventurers or eccentrics notable less for their actions than for their
unique destinies; take Joan of Arc, Mme Roland, and Flora Tristan: if
they are compared with Richelieu, Danton, or Lenin, it is clear their
greatness is mainly subjective; they are exemplary figures more than
historical agents. A great man springs from the mass and is carried by
circumstances: the mass of women is at the fringes of history, and for
each of them circumstances are an obstacle and not a springboard. To
change the face of the world, one has first to be firmly anchored to it;
but women firmly rooted in society are those subjugated by it; unless
they are designated for action by divine right—and in this case they
are shown to be as capable as men—the ambitious woman and the
heroine are strange monsters. Only since women have begun to feel at
home on this earth has a Rosa Luxemburg or a Mme Curie emerged.
They brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women’s inferiority that has
determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical
insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.
10
This fact is striking in the cultural field, the area in which they have
been the most successful in asserting themselves. Their lot has been
closely linked to literature and the arts; among the ancient Germans,
the roles of prophetess and priestess fell to women; because they are
marginal to the world, men will look to them when they strive,
through culture, to bridge the limits of their universe and reach what is
other. Courtly mysticism, humanist curiosity, and the taste for beauty
that thrive in the Italian Renaissance, the preciousness of the
184

seventeenth century, and the progressive ideal of the eighteenth
century bring about an exaltation of femininity in diverse forms.
Woman is thus the main pole of poetry and the substance of works of
art; her leisure allows her to devote herself to the pleasures of the
mind: inspiration, critic, writer’s audience, she emulates the writer;
she can often impose a type of sensitivity, an ethic that feeds men’s
hearts, which is how she intervenes in her own destiny: women’s
education is mainly a feminine conquest. And yet as important as this
collective role played by intellectual women is, their individual
contributions are, on the whole, of a lesser order. Woman holds a
privileged place in the fields of the mind and
art because she is not
involved in action; but art and thinking derive their impetus in action.
Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone
who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one
must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost
impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior
situation. “Where can one go in skirts?” asked Marie Bashkirtseff.
And Stendhal: “All the geniuses who are born
women
are lost for the
public good.” If truth be told, one is not born, but becomes, a genius;
and the feminine condition has, until now, rendered this becoming
impossible.
Antifeminists draw two contradictory arguments from examining
history: (1) women have never created anything grand; (2) woman’s
situation has never prevented great women personalities from
blossoming. There is bad faith in both of these assertions; the
successes of some few privileged women neither compensate for nor
excuse the systematic degrading of the collective level; and the very
fact that these successes are so rare and limited is proof of their
unfavorable circumstances. As Christine de Pizan, Poulain de la
Barre, Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, and Stendhal stated, women have
never been given their chances in any area. This explains why many
of them today demand a new status; and once again, their demand is
not to be exalted in their femininity: they want transcendence to
prevail over immanence in themselves as in all of humanity; they want
abstract rights and concrete possibilities to be granted to them, without
which freedom is merely mystification.
11
This will is being fulfilled. But this is a period of transition; this
world that has always belonged to men is still in their hands;
185

patriarchal civilization’s institutions and values are still, to a great
extent, alive. Abstract rights are far from being wholly granted to
women: in Switzerland, women still cannot vote; in France, the 1942
law upholds the husband’s prerogatives in a weaker form. And
abstract rights, as has just been said, have never been sufficient to
guarantee woman a concrete hold on the world: there is not yet real
equality today between the two sexes.
First, the burdens of marriage are still much heavier for woman
than for man. We have seen that the constraints of pregnancy have
been limited by the overt or clandestine use of birth control, but the
practice is neither
universally disseminated nor rigorously applied; as
abortion is officially forbidden, many women either jeopardize their
health by resorting to unregulated abortion methods or are
overwhelmed by the number of their pregnancies. Child care, like
housekeeping, is still almost exclusively the woman’s burden. In
France in particular, the antifeminist tradition is so tenacious that a
man would think it demeaning to participate in chores previously
reserved for women. The result is that woman has a harder time
reconciling her family and work life. In cases where society demands
this effort from her, her existence is much more difficult than her
spouse’s.
Take, for example, the lot of peasant women. In France they make
up the majority of the women involved in productive labor, and they
are generally married. The single woman most often remains a servant
in the father’s, brother’s, or sister’s household; she only becomes
mistress of a home by accepting a husband’s domination; depending
on the region, customs and traditions impose various roles on her: the
Norman peasant woman presides over the meal, while the Corsican
woman does not sit at the same table as the men; but in any case, as
she plays one of the most important roles in the domestic economy,
she shares the man’s responsibilities, his interests, and his property;
she is respected, and it is often she who really governs: her situation
is reminiscent of the place she held in ancient agricultural
communities. She often has as much moral prestige as her husband,
and sometimes even more; but her concrete condition is much harsher.
The care of the garden, barnyard, sheepfold, and pigpen falls on her
alone; she takes part in the heavy work: cleaning the cowshed,
spreading the manure, sowing, plowing, hoeing, and hay making; she
186

digs, weeds, harvests, picks grapes, and sometimes helps load and
unload wagons of straw, hay, wood and sticks, litter, and so on. In
addition, she prepares the meals and manages the household:
washing, mending, and such. She assumes the heavy burdens of
pregnancies and child care. She rises at dawn, feeds the barnyard and
small animals, serves the first meal to the men, takes care of the
children, and goes out to the fields or the woods or the kitchen
garden; she draws water from the well, serves the second meal,
washes the dishes, works in the fields again until dinner, and after the
last meal occupies her evening by mending, cleaning, husking the
corn, and so forth. As she has no time to take care of her health, even
during her pregnancies, she loses her shape quickly and is
prematurely withered and worn out, sapped by illnesses. She is
denied the few occasional compensations man finds in his social life:
he goes to the city on Sundays and fair days, meets other men, goes to
the café, drinks, plays cards, hunts, and fishes. She stays on the farm
and has no leisure. Only the rich peasant women helped
by servants
or dispensed from field work lead a pleasantly balanced life: they are
socially honored and enjoy greater authority in the home without
being crushed by labor. But most of the time rural work reduces
woman to the condition of a beast of burden.
The woman shopkeeper, the small-business owner, have always
been privileged; they are the only ones since the Middle Ages whose
civil capacities have been recognized by the code; women grocers,
hoteliers, or tobacconists and dairy women have positions equal to
man’s; single or widowed, they have a legal identity of their own;
married, they possess the same autonomy as their husbands. They are
fortunate in working and living in the same place, and the work is not
generally too consuming.
The situation of the woman worker, employee, secretary, or
saleswoman working outside the home is totally different. It is much
more difficult to reconcile her job with managing the household
(errands, preparation of meals, cleaning, and upkeep of her wardrobe
take at least three and a half hours of work a day and six on Sunday;
this adds a lot of time to factory or office hours). As for the learned
professions, even if women lawyers, doctors, and teachers manage to
have some help in their households, the home and children still entail
responsibilities and cares that are a serious handicap for them. In
187

America, ingenious technology has simplified housework; but the
appearance and elegance demanded of the working woman impose
another constraint on her; and she maintains responsibility for the
house and children. In addition, the woman who seeks her
independence through work has far fewer possibilities than her
masculine competitors. Her salary is inferior to man’s in many fields;
her job is less specialized and hence doesn’t pay as well as that of a
skilled worker; and for the same job, the woman is paid less. Because
she is new to the world of males, she has fewer chances of success
than they. Men and women alike are loath to work under a woman’s
orders; they always give more confidence to a man; if being a woman
is not a defect, it is at least a pecularity. If she wants to “get ahead,” it
is useful for a woman to make sure she has a man’s support. Men are
the ones who take the best places, who hold the most important jobs.
It must be emphasized that in economic terms men and women
constitute two castes.
12
What determines women’s present situation is the stubborn
survival of the most ancient traditions in the new emerging
civilization. Hasty observers are wrong to think woman is not up to
the possibilities offered her today or even to see only dangerous
temptations in these possibilities. The truth is that her situation is
tenuous, which makes it very difficult for her to adapt. Factories,
offices, and universities are open to women, but marriage is still
considered a more honorable career, exempting her from any other
participation in collective life. As in primitive civilizations, the
amorous act is a service she has the right to be paid for more or less
directly. Everywhere but in the U.S.S.R.,
13
the modern woman is
allowed to use her body as capital. Prostitution is tolerated,
14
seduction encouraged. And the married woman can legally make her
husband support her; in addition, she is cloaked in much greater social
dignity than the unmarried woman. Social customs are far from
granting her sexual possibilities on a par with those of the single male,
in particular, the unwed mother is an object of scandal, as motherhood
is more or less forbidden to her. How could the Cinderella myth not
retain its validity? Everything still encourages the girl to expect
fortune and happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of
attempting the difficult and uncertain conquest alone. For example,
she can hope to attain a higher caste through him, a miracle her whole
188

life’s work will not bring her. But such a hope is harmful because it
divides her strength and interests;
15
this split is perhaps the most
serious handicap for woman. Parents still raise their daughters for
marriage rather than promoting their personal development; and the
daughter sees so many advantages that she desires it herself; the result
is that she is often less specialized, less solidly trained than her
brothers, she is less totally committed to her profession; as such, she
is doomed to remain inferior in it; and the vicious circle is knotted:
this inferiority reinforces her desire to find a husband. Every benefit
always has a burden; but if the burden is too heavy, the benefit is no
more
than a servitude; for most workers today, work is a thankless
task: for woman, the chore is not offset by a concrete conquest of her
social dignity, freedom of behavior, and economic autonomy; it is
understandable that many women workers and employees see no
more than an obligation in the right to work from which marriage
would deliver them. However, because she has become conscious of
self and can emancipate herself from marriage through work, a
woman no longer accepts her subjection docilely. What she would
hope for is to reconcile family life and profession, something that
does not require exhausting acrobatics. Even then, as long as the
temptations of facility remain—from the economic inequality that
favors certain individuals and the woman’s right to sell herself to one
of these privileged people—she needs to expend a greater moral effort
than the male to choose the path of independence. It has not been well
enough understood that temptation is also an obstacle, and even one
of the most dangerous. It is amplified here by a mystification since
there will be one winner out of the thousands in the lucky marriage
lottery. Today’s period invites, even obliges women to work; but it
lures them with an idyllic and delightful paradise: it raises up the
happy few far above those still riveted to this earthly world.
Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of
marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage
women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in
a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself
not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be
described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of
the essential factors of her concrete condition.
189

*
The “baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy” refer to King Louis XVI, the
queen, and the dauphin, forced by the starving people to leave Versailles for Paris in
October 1789.—T
RANS
.
*
The correct date is 1816.—T
RANS
.
*
Beauvoir’s calculation.—T
RANS
.
1.
Truquin,
Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaire
(Memoirs and Adventures of a
Proletarian in Times of Revolution). Cited from E. Dolléans,
Histoire du mouvement
ouvrier
(History of the Working-Class Movement), Volume 1.
2.
“The earliest known reference to birth-control methods appears to be an Egyptian
papyrus from the second millennium
B.C.
, recommending the vaginal application of a
bizarre mixture composed of crocodile excrement, honey, natron, and a rubbery
substance” (P. Ariès,
Histoire des populations françaises
[History of French
Populations]). Medieval Persian physicians knew of thirty-one recipes, of which only
nine were intended for men. Soranus, in the Hadrian era, explains that at the moment of
ejaculation, if the woman does not want a child, she should “hold her breath, pull back
her body a little so that the sperm cannot penetrate the
os uteri
, get up immediately,
squat down, and make herself sneeze.”
3.
In
La précieuse
(1656) (The Precious Woman).
4.
“Around 1930 an American firm sold twenty million prophylactics in one year.
Fifteen American factories produced a million and a half of them per day” (P. Ariès,
Histoire
).
5.
“The infant, before being born, is a part of the woman, a kind of organ.”
6.
In
Volume II
, we will return to the discussion of this view. Let it just be said here
that Catholics are far from keeping to the letter of Saint Augustine’s doctrine. The
confessor whispers to the young fiancée, on the eve of her wedding, that she can do
anything with her husband, as long as “proper” coitus is achieved; positive birth-
control practices—including coitus interruptus—are forbidden; but the calendar
established by Viennese sexologists can be used, where the act whose only recognized
aim is reproduction is carried out on the days conception is impossible for the woman.
There are spiritual advisers who even indicate this calendar to their flocks. In fact,
there are ample “Christian mothers” who only have two or three children and have
nonetheless not interrupted their conjugal relations after the last delivery.
*
From John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” as reprinted in
Philosophy of
Woman
, edited by Mary Briody Mahowald.
*
The convention actually took place July 19–20, 1848.—T
RANS
.
*
That is, President Woodrow Wilson.—T
RANS
.
190

7.
Olga Michakova, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth
Organization, stated in 1944 in an interview: “Soviet women should try to make
themselves as attractive as nature and good taste permit. After the war, they should
dress like women and act feminine … Girls will be told to act and walk like girls, and
that is why they will wear skirts that will probably be very tight, making them carry
themselves gracefully.”
8.
Cf. Myrdal,
An American Dilemma
.
9.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew
).
10.
It is worth noting that out of one thousand statues in Paris (not counting the
queens that compose the corbel of the Luxembourg and fulfill a purely architectural
role) there are only ten raised to women. Three are devoted to Joan of Arc. The others
are Mme de Ségur, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Mme Boucicaut and the baronne de
Hirsch, Maria Deraismes, and Rosa Bonheur.
11.
Here too the antifeminists are equivocal. At times, holding abstract liberty to be
nothing, they glorify the great concrete role the enslaved woman can play in this
world: What more does she want? And other times, they underestimate the fact that
negative license does not open any concrete possibilities, and they blame abstractly
enfranchised women for not having proven themselves.
12.
In America, great business fortunes often end up in women’s hands: younger than
their husbands, women outlive and inherit from them; but they are then older and
rarely take the initiative of new investments; they act as usufructuaries rather than
owners. It is men who
dispose
of the capital. In any case, these rich privileged women
make up a small minority. In America more than in Europe, it is almost impossible for
a woman to reach a top position as a lawyer or doctor.
13.
At least according to official doctrine.
14.
In Anglo-Saxon countries prostitution has never been controlled. Until 1900,
American and English common law did not deem it a crime unless it was scandalous
and disturbed the peace. Since then, there has been more or less repression, applied
with varying degrees of harshness and of success in England and America, whose
legislation on this point varies a great deal from one state to the other. In France after a
long abolitionist campaign, the April 13, 1946, law ordered brothels to be closed and
the fight against procuremat to be reinforced: “Considering that the existence of these
brothels is incompatible with the essential principles of human dignity and the role
granted to woman in modern society …” Prostitution nevertheless continues to be
practiced. Negative and hypocritical measures are obviously not the way the situation
can be modified.
15.
Cf. Philip Wylie,
Generation of Vipers
.
191

|
PART THREE
|
MYTHS
192

|
CHAPTER 1
|
History has shown that men have always held all the concrete powers;
from patriarchy’s earliest times they have deemed it useful to keep
woman in a state of dependence; their codes were set up against her;
she was thus concretely established as the Other. This condition
served males’ economic interests; but it also suited their ontological
and moral ambitions. Once the subject attempts to assert himself, the
Other, who limits and denies him, is nonetheless necessary for him:
he attains himself only through the reality that he is not. That is why
man’s life is never plenitude and rest, it is lack and movement, it is
combat. Facing himself, man encounters Nature; he has a hold on it,
he tries to appropriate it for himself. But it cannot satisfy him. Either it
realizes itself as a purely abstract opposition—it is an obstacle and
remains foreign—or it passively submits to man’s desire and allows
itself to be assimilated by him; he possesses it only in consuming it,
that is, in destroying it. In both cases, he remains alone; he is alone
when touching a stone, alone when digesting a piece of fruit. The
other is present only if the other is himself present to himself: that is,
true alterity is a consciousness separated from my own and identical
to it. It is the existence of other men that wrests each man from his
immanence and enables him to accomplish the truth of his being, to
accomplish himself as transcendence, as flight toward the object, as a
project. But this foreign freedom, which confirms my freedom, also
enters into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy
consciousness; each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as
sovereign subject. Each one tries to accomplish itself by reducing the
other to slavery. But in work and fear the slave experiences himself as
essential, and by a dialectical reversal the master appears the
inessential one. The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition
of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the
other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But
friendship and generosity, which accomplish this recognition of
freedoms concretely, are not easy virtues; they are
undoubtedly man’s
193

highest accomplishment; this is where he is in his truth: but this truth
is a struggle endlessly begun, endlessly abolished; it demands that
man surpass himself at each instant. Put into other words, man attains
an authentically moral attitude when he renounces
being
in order to
assume his existence; through this conversion he also renounces all
possession, because possession is a way of searching for being; but
the conversion by which he attains true wisdom is never finished, it
has to be made ceaselessly, it demands constant effort. So much so
that, unable to accomplish himself in solitude, man is ceaselessly in
jeopardy in his relations with his peers: his life is a difficult enterprise
whose success is never assured.
But he does not like difficulty; he is afraid of danger. He has
contradictory aspirations to both life and rest, existence and being; he
knows very well that “a restless spirit” is the ransom for his
development, that his distance from the object is the ransom for his
being present to himself; but he dreams of restfulness in restlessness
and of an opaque plenitude that his consciousness would nevertheless
still inhabit. This embodied dream is, precisely, woman; she is the
perfect intermediary between nature that is foreign to man and the peer
who is too identical to him.
1
She pits neither the hostile silence of
nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition against him; by
a unique privilege she is a consciousness, and yet it seems possible to
possess her in the flesh. Thanks to her, there is a way to escape the
inexorable dialectic of the master and the slave that springs from the
reciprocity of freedoms.
It has been pointed out that there were not at first free women
whom the males then enslaved and that the sexual division has never
founded a division into castes. Assimilating the woman to the slave is
a mistake; among slaves there were women, but free women have
always existed, that is, women invested with religious and social
dignity: they accepted man’s sovereignty, and he did not feel
threatened by a revolt that could transform him in turn into an object.
Woman thus emerged as the inessential who never returned to the
essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. All the creation
myths express this conviction that is precious to the male, for
example, the Genesis legend, which, through Christianity, has
spanned Western civilization. Eve was not formed at the same time as
man; she was not made either from a different substance or from the
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same clay that
Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first
male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous; God did not
spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly
worshipped in turn: he destined her for man; he gave her to Adam to
save him from loneliness, her spouse is her origin and her finality; she
is his complement in the inessential mode. Thus, she appears a
privileged prey. She is nature raised to the transparency of
consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And
therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman:
he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing
a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom.
No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be
women. “Thank God for creating woman.” “Nature is good because it
gave men woman.” In these and other similar phrases, man once more
asserts arrogantly and naively that his presence in this world is an
inevitable fact and a right, that of woman is a simple accident—but a
fortunate one. Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same
time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of
existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in
the subject’s eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman
embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man
hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her.
But she has not represented for him the only incarnation of the
Other, and she has not always had the same importance throughout
history. In various periods, she has been eclipsed by other idols.
When the city or the state devours the citizen, he is no longer in any
position to deal with his personal destiny. Dedicated to the state, the
Spartan woman has a higher station than that of other Greek women.
But she is not transfigured by any masculine dream. The cult of the
chief, be it Napoleon, Mussolini, or Hitler, excludes any other. In
military dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, woman is no longer a
privileged object. It is understandable that woman is divinized in a
country that is rich and where the citizens are uncertain about what
meaning to give to their lives: this is what is happening in America. In
contrast, socialist ideologies, which call for the assimilation of all
human beings, reject the notion that any human category be object or
idol, now and for the future: in the authentically democratic society
that Marx heralded, there is no place for the Other. Few men,
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however, correspond exactly to the soldier or the militant that they
have chosen to be; as long as these men remain individuals, woman
retains a singular value in their eyes. I have seen letters written by
German soldiers to French prostitutes in which, in spite of Nazism,
the tradition of sentimentality proved to be naively alive. Communist
writers like Aragon in France and Vittorini
in Italy give a front-row
place in their works to woman as lover and mother. Perhaps the myth
of woman will be phased out one day: the more women assert
themselves as human beings, the more the marvelous quality of Other
dies in them. But today it still exists in the hearts of all men.
Any myth implies a Subject who projects its hopes and fears of a
transcendent heaven. Not positing themselves as Subject, women
have not created the virile myth that would reflect their projects; they
have neither religion nor poetry that belongs to them alone: they still
dream through men’s dreams. They worship the gods made by males.
And males have shaped the great virile figures for their own
exaltation: Hercules, Prometheus, Parsifal; in the destiny of these
heroes, woman has merely a secondary role. Undoubtedly, there are
stylized images of man as he is in his relations with woman: father,
seducer, husband, the jealous one, the good son, the bad son; but men
are the ones who have established them, and they have not attained the
dignity of myth; they are barely more than clichés, while woman is
exclusively defined in her relation to man. The asymmetry of the two
categories, male and female, can be seen in the unilateral constitution
of sexual myths. Woman is sometimes designated as “sex”; it is she
who is the flesh, its delights and its dangers. That for woman it is man
who is sexed and carnal is a truth that has never been proclaimed
because there is no one to proclaim it. The representation of the world
as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of
view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth.
It is always difficult to describe a myth; it does not lend itself to
being grasped or defined; it haunts consciousnesses without ever
being posited opposite them as a fixed object. The object fluctuates so
much and is so contradictory that its unity is not at first discerned:
Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena,
woman is both Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant,
source of life, power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of
truth, she is artifice, gossip, and lies; she is the medicine woman and
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witch; she is man’s prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is
not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d’être.
“To be a woman,” says Kierkegaard, “is something so strange, so
confused, and so complicated that no one predicate can express it, and
the multiple predicates that might be used contradict each other in such
a way that only a woman could put up with it.”
2
This comes from
being considered not positively, as she is for herself, but negatively,
such as she appears to man. Because if there are other
Others
than the
woman, she is still always defined as Other. And her ambiguity is that
of the very idea of Other: it is
that of the human condition as defined
in its relation with the Other. It has already been said that the Other is
Evil; but as it is necessary for the Good, it reverts to the Good;
through the Other, I accede to the Whole, but it separates me from the
Whole; it is the door to infinity and the measure of my finitude. And
this is why woman embodies no set concept; through her the passage
from hope to failure, hatred to love, good to bad, bad to good takes
place ceaselessly. However she is considered, it is this ambivalence
that is the most striking.
Man seeks the Other in woman as Nature and as his peer. But Nature
inspires ambivalent feelings in man, as has been seen. He exploits it,
but it crushes him; he is born from and he dies in it; it is the source of
his being and the kingdom he bends to his will; it is a material
envelope in which the soul is held prisoner, and it is the supreme
reality; it is contingency and Idea, finitude and totality; it is that which
opposes Spirit and himself. Both ally and enemy, it appears as the
dark chaos from which life springs forth, as this very life, and as the
beyond it reaches for: woman embodies nature as Mother, Spouse,
and Idea; these figures are sometimes confounded and sometimes in
opposition, and each has a double face.
Man sinks his roots in Nature; he was engendered, like animals and
plants; he is well aware that he exists only inasmuch as he lives. But
since the coming of patriarchy, life in man’s eyes has taken on a dual
aspect: it is consciousness, will, transcendence, it is intellect; and it is
matter, passivity, immanence, it is flesh. Aeschylus, Aristotle, and
Hippocrates proclaimed that on earth as on Mount Olympus it is the
male principle that is the true creator: form, number, and movement
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come from him; Demeter makes corn multiply, but the origin of corn
and its truth are in Zeus; woman’s fertility is considered merely a
passive virtue. She is earth and man seed; she is water, and he is fire.
Creation has often been imagined as a marriage of fire and water; hot
humidity gives birth to living beings; the Sun is the spouse of the Sea;
Sun and Fire are male divinities; and the Sea is one of the most
universally widespread maternal symbols. Inert, water submits to the
flamboyant rays that fertilize it. Likewise, the still earth, furrowed by
the laborer’s toil, receives the seeds in its rows. But its role is
necessary: it is the soil that nourishes the seed, shelters it, and
provides its substance. Man thus continued to worship fertility
goddesses, even once the Great Mother was dethroned;
3
he owes his
harvests, herds, and prosperity to
Cybele. He owes her his very life.
He exalts water and fire equally. “Glory to the sea! Glory to its waves
encircled by sacred fire! Glory to the wave! Glory to the fire! Glory to
the strange adventure,” wrote Goethe in
Faust, Part Two
. He
venerated earth: “the Matron Clay,” as Blake called it. An Indian
prophet advised his disciples not to dig up the earth because “it is a
sin to hurt or cut, to tear our common mother in agricultural
works … Do I take a knife to drive into my mother’s breast?… Do I
mutilate her flesh so as to reach her bones?… How could I dare to cut
my mother’s hair?” In central India the Baidya also thought that it was
a sin to “rip the breast of their earth mother with the plow.” Inversely,
Aeschylus says of Oedipus that he “dared to sow the sacred furrow
where he was formed.” Sophocles spoke of “paternal furrows” and of
the “laborer, master of a remote field that he visited only once during
the sowing.” The beloved in an Egyptian song declares: “I am the
earth!” In Islamic texts, woman is called “field … grapevine.” In one
of his hymns, Saint Francis of Assisi speaks of “our sister, the earth,
our mother, who preserves and cares for us, who produces the most
varied fruits with many-colored flowers and with grass.” Michelet,
taking mud baths in Acqui, exclaims: “Dear common mother! We are
one. I come from you, I return to you!” And there are even periods of
vitalistic romanticism that affirm the triumph of Life over Spirit: so the
earth’s and woman’s magic fertility appear to be even more marvelous
than the male’s concerted works; so the man dreams of once again
losing himself in maternal darkness to find the true sources of his
being. The mother is the root driven into the depths of the cosmos that
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taps its vital juices; she is the fountain from which springs forth sweet
water that is also mother’s milk, a warm spring, a mud formed of
earth and water, rich in regenerating forces.
4
But man’s revolt against his carnal condition is more general; he
considers himself a fallen god: his curse is to have fallen from a
luminous and orderly heaven into the chaotic obscurity of the
mother’s womb. He desires to see himself in this fire, this active and
pure breath, and it is woman who imprisons him in the mud of the
earth. He would like himself to be as necessary as pure Idea, as One,
All, absolute Spirit; and he finds himself enclosed in a limited body,
in a place and time he did not choose, to which he was not called,
useless, awkward, absurd. His very being is carnal contingence
to
which he is subjected in his isolation, in his unjustifiable
gratuitousness. It also dooms him to death. This quivering gelatin that
forms in the womb (the womb, secret and sealed like a tomb) is too
reminiscent of the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn away
from it with a shudder. Wherever life is in the process of being made
—germination and fermentation—it provokes disgust because it is
being made only when it is being unmade; the viscous glandular
embryo opens the cycle that ends in the rotting of death. Horrified by
death’s gratuitousness, man is horrified at having been engendered; he
would like to rescind his animal attachments; because of his birth,
murderous Nature has a grip on him. For the primitives, childbirth is
surrounded by strict taboos; in particular, the placenta must be
carefully burned or thrown into the sea, because whoever might get
hold of it would hold the newborn’s fate in his hands; this envelope in
which the fetus is formed is the sign of its dependence; in annihilating
it, the individual is able to detach himself from the living magma and
to realize himself as an autonomous being. The stain of childbirth falls
back on the mother. Leviticus and all the ancient codes impose
purification rites on the new mother; and often in the countryside the
postpartum ceremony maintains that tradition. Everyone knows that
young boys and girls and men feel a spontaneous embarrassment, one
often camouflaged by sneering, at seeing a pregnant woman’s
stomach or the swollen breasts of the wet nurse. In Dupuytren’s
museums, the curious contemplate the wax embryos and the
preserved fetuses with the morbid interest they would show in a
defiled grave. Notwithstanding all the respect that society surrounds it
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with, the function of gestation inspires spontaneous repulsion. And
while the little boy in early childhood remains sensually attached to
the mother’s flesh, when he grows up, when he is socialized and
becomes aware of his individual existence, this flesh frightens him; he
wants to ignore it and to see his mother as institution only; if he wants
to think of her as pure and chaste, it is less from amorous jealousy
than from the refusal to acknowledge her as a body. An adolescent
boy becomes embarrassed, blushes if he meets his mother, sisters, or
women in his family when he is out with his friends: their presence
recalls the regions of immanence from which he wants to escape; she
reveals the roots that he wants to pull himself away from. The boy’s
irritation when his mother kisses and caresses him has the same
significance; he gives up his family, mother, and mother’s breast. He
would like to have emerged, like Athena, into the adult world, armed
from head to toe, invulnerable.
5
Being conceived and born is
the curse
weighing on his destiny, the blemish on his being. And it is the
warning of his death. The cult of germination has always been
associated with the cult of the dead. Mother Earth engulfs the bones
of its children within it. Women—the Parcae and Moirai—weave
human destiny; but they also cut the threads. In most folk
representations, Death is woman, and women mourn the dead because
death is their work.
6
Thus, Mother Earth has a face of darkness: she is chaos, where
everything comes from and must return to one day; she is
Nothingness. The many aspects of the world that the day uncovers
commingle in the night: night of spirit locked up in the generality and
opacity of matter, night of sleep and nothing. At the heart of the sea, it
is night: woman is the
Mare tenebrarum
dreaded by ancient
navigators; it is night in the bowels of the earth. Man is threatened
with being engulfed in this night, the reverse of fertility, and it
horrifies him. He aspires to the sky, to light, to sunny heights, to the
pure and crystal clear cold of blue; and underfoot is a moist, hot, and
dark gulf ready to swallow him; many legends have the hero falling
and forever lost in maternal darkness: a cave, an abyss, hell.
But once again ambivalence is at work here: while germination is
always associated with death, death is also associated with fertility.
Detested death is like a new birth, and so it is blessed. The dead hero
like Osiris is resurrected every springtime, and he is regenerated by a
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new birth. Man’s supreme hope, says Jung, “is that the dark waters of
death become the waters of life, that death and its cold embrace are the
mother’s lap, just as the sea, while engulfing the sun, re-births in the
depths.”
7
The theme of the burial of the sun god within the sea and its
dazzling reemergence is common to many mythologies. And man
wants to live, but he also hopes for rest, sleep, for nothingness. He
does not wish for immortality for himself, and thus he can learn to
love death. “Inorganic matter is the mother’s breast,” Nietzsche wrote.
“Being delivered from life means becoming real again, completing
oneself. Anyone who understands that would consider returning to
unfeeling dust as a holiday.” Chaucer puts this prayer into the mouth
of an old man who cannot die:
Thus restless I my wretched way must make
And on the ground, which is my mother’s gate
,
I knock with my staff early, aye, and late
And cry: “O my dear mother, let me in!”
Man wants to assert his individual existence and proudly rest on
his “essential difference,” but he also wants to break the barriers of
the self and commingle with water, earth, night, Nothingness, with the
Whole. Woman who condemns man to finitude also enables him to
surpass his own limits: that is where the equivocal magic surrounding
her comes from.
In all civilizations and still today, she inspires horror in man: the
horror of his own carnal contingence that he projects on her. The girl
who has not yet gone through puberty does not pose a threat; she is
not the object of any taboo and has no sacred characteristics. In many
primitive societies her sex even seems innocent: erotic games between
boys and girls are allowed in childhood. Woman becomes impure the
day she might be able to procreate. In primitive societies the strict
taboos concerning girls on the day of their first period have often been
described; even in Egypt, where the woman is treated with particular
respect, she remains confined during her whole menstrual period.
8
She is often put on a rooftop or relegated to a shack on the outskirts
of the town; she can be neither seen nor touched: what’s more, she
must not even touch herself with her own hand; for peoples that
practice daily flea removal, she is given a stick with which she is able
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to scratch herself; she must not touch food with her fingers;
sometimes she is strictly forbidden to eat; in other cases, her mother
and sister are permitted to feed her with an instrument; but all objects
that come in contact with her during this period must be burned. After
this first test, the menstrual taboos are a little less strict, but they
remain harsh. In particular, in Leviticus: “And if a woman have an
issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven
days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even.
And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean:
every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And
whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself
in water, and be unclean until the even.” This text is perfectly
symmetrical
with one concerning gonorrhea-provoked impurity in
man. And the purifying sacrifice is identical in the two cases. Seven
days after she has been purified of her flow, two turtledoves or two
young pigeons have to be brought to the sacrificer, who offers them
to the Eternal. Even in matriarchal societies, the virtues connected to
menstruation are ambivalent. On the one hand, it brings social
activities to a halt, destroys the vital force, withers flowers, causes
fruit to fall; but it also has beneficial effects: menses are used in love
philters, in remedies, and in particular in healing cuts and bruises. Still
today, when some Indians go off to fight spectral monsters haunting
their rivers, they place a fiber wad filled with menstrual blood on the
bow of their boat: its emanations are harmful to their supernatural
enemies. In some Greek cities, young girls pay homage to the temple
of Astarte by wearing linens stained by their first menstrual blood.
But since patriarchy, only harmful powers have been attributed to the
bizarre liquor flowing from the feminine sex. Pliny in his
Natural
History
says: “The menstruating woman spoils harvests, devastates
gardens, kills seeds, makes fruit fall, kills bees; if she touches the
wine, it turns to vinegar; milk sours …”
An old English poet expresses the same thought:
Oh! Menstruating woman, thou’rt a fiend
From whom all nature should be closely screened!
These beliefs have been vigorously perpetuated right up to today.
In 1878, a member of the British Medical Association wrote in the
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British Medical Journal:
“It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad
when touched by menstruating women.” He said that he personally
knew of two cases of hams spoiling in such circumstances. In the
refineries of the North at the beginning of this century, women were
prohibited by law from going into the factory when they were
afflicted by what the Anglo-Saxons call the “curse” because the sugar
turned black. And in Saigon, women are not employed in opium
factories: because of their periods, the opium goes bad and becomes
bitter. These beliefs survive in many areas of the French countryside.
Any cook knows how impossible it is to make mayonnaise if she is
indisposed or simply in the presence of another woman who is
indisposed. In Anjou, recently, an old gardener who had stocked that
year’s cider harvest in the cellar wrote to the master of the house:
“Don’t let the young women of the household and their female guests
go through the cellar on certain days of the month: they would prevent
the cider from fermenting.” When the cook heard about this letter, she
shrugged her shoulders. “
That
never prevented cider from
fermenting,” she said, “it is
only bad for bacon fat: it cannot be salted
in the presence of an indisposed woman; it would rot.”
9
Putting this repulsion in the same category as that provoked by
blood is most inadequate: more imbued with the mysterious mana that
is both life and death than anything else, blood, of course, is in itself a
sacred element. But menstrual blood’s baleful powers are more
particular. Menstrual blood embodies the essence of femininity, which
is why its flow endangers woman herself, whose mana is thus
materialized. During the Chaga’s initiation rites, girls are urged to
carefully conceal their menstrual blood. “Do not show it to your
mother, for she would die! Do not show it to your age-mates, for
there may be a wicked one among them, who will take away the cloth
with which you have cleaned yourself, and you will be barren in your
marriage. Do not show it to a bad woman, who will take the cloth to
place it in the top of her hut … with the result that you cannot bear
children. Do not throw the cloth on the path or in the bush. A wicked
person might do evil things with it. Bury it in the ground. Protect the
blood from the gaze of your father, brothers and sisters. It is a sin to
let them see it.”
10
For the Aleuts, if the father sees his daughter during her first
menstruation, she could go blind or deaf. It is thought that during this
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period woman is possessed by a spirit and invested with a dangerous
power. Some primitives believe that the flow is provoked by
snakebite, as woman has suspicious affinities with snakes and lizards;
it is supposed to be similar to crawling animals’ venom. Leviticus
compares it to gonorrhea; the bleeding feminine sex is not only a
wound but a suspicious sore. And Vigny associates the notion of
soiling with illness: “Woman, sick child, and impure twelve times.”
The result of interior alchemic troubles, the periodic hemorrhage
woman suffers from is bizarrely aligned with the moon’s cycle: the
moon also has dangerous whims.
11
Woman is part of the formidable
workings
that order the course of planets and the sun; she is prey to
the cosmic forces that determine the destiny of stars and tides, while
men are subjected to their worrisome radiation. But it is especially
striking that menstrual blood’s effects are linked to the ideas of cream
going sour, mayonnaise that does not take, fermentation, and
decomposition; it is also claimed that it is apt to cause fragile objects
to break; to spring violin and harp strings; but above all it influences
organic substances that are midway between matter and life; this is
less because it is blood than because it emanates from genital organs;
even without knowing its exact function, people understood it to be
linked to the germination of life: ignorant of the existence of the
ovary, the ancients saw in menstruation the complement of the sperm.
In fact, it is not this blood that makes woman impure, but rather, this
blood is a manifestation of her impurity; it appears when the woman
can be fertile; when it disappears, she becomes sterile again; it pours
forth from this womb where the fetus is made. The horror of feminine
fertility that man experiences is expressed through it.
The strictest taboo of all concerning woman in her impure state is
the prohibition of sexual intercourse with her. Leviticus condemns
man to seven days of impurity if he transgresses this rule. The Laws
of Manu are even harsher: “The wisdom, energy, strength, and vitality
of a man coming near a woman stained by menstrual excretions perish
definitively.” Priests ordered fifty days of penance for men who had
sexual relations during menstruation. Since the feminine principle is
then considered as reaching its highest power, it is feared that it would
triumph over the male principle in intimate contact. Less specifically,
man shies away from finding the mother’s feared essence in the
woman he possesses; he works at dissociating these two aspects of
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femininity: that explains why incest is prohibited by exogamy or more
modern forms and is a universal law; that explains why man distances
himself from woman sexually when she is particularly destined for
her reproductive role: during her period, when she is pregnant, or
when she is nursing. Not only does the Oedipus complex—whose
description, incidentally, has to be revised—not contradict this
attitude: on the contrary, it even implies it. Man guards himself against
woman to the extent that she is the confused source of the world and
disorder become organic.
However, this representation of woman also allows the society that
has been separated from the cosmos and the gods to remain in
communication with them. She still assures the fertility of the fields
for the bedouins and the Iroquois; in ancient Greece, she heard
subterranean voices; she understood the language of the wind and the
trees: she was the Pythia, Sibyl, and prophetess. The dead and the
gods spoke through her mouth. Still today,
she has these powers of
divination: she is medium, palmist, card reader, clairvoyant, inspired;
she hears voices and has visions. When men feel the need to delve
into vegetable and animal life—like Antaeus, who touched earth to
recoup his strength—they call upon woman. Throughout the Greek
and Roman rationalist civilizations, chthonian cults subsisted. They
could usually be found on the periphery of official religious life; they
even ended up, as in Eleusis, taking the form of mysteries: they had
the opposite meaning of sun cults, where man asserted his will for
separation and spirituality; but they complemented them; man sought
to overcome his solitude by ecstasy: that is the goal of mysteries,
orgies, and bacchanals. In the world reconquered by males, the male
god Dionysus usurped Ishtar’s and Astarte’s magic and wild virtues;
but it was women who went wild over his image: the maenads,
thyades, and bacchantes led men to religious drunkenness and sacred
madness. The role of sacred prostitution is similar: both to unleash
and to channel the powers of fertility. Even today, popular holidays
are exemplified by outbreaks of eroticism; woman is not just an object
of pleasure but a means of reaching this hubris in which the individual
surpasses himself. “What a being possesses in the deepest part of
himself, what is lost and tragic, the ‘blinding wonder’ can no longer
be found anywhere but on a bed,” wrote Georges Bataille.
In sexual release, man in his lover’s embrace seeks to lose himself
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in the infinite mystery of the flesh. But it has already been seen that
his normal sexuality, on the contrary, dissociates Mother from Wife.
He finds the mysterious alchemies of life repugnant, while his own
life is nourished and enchanted by the tasty fruits of the earth; he
desires to appropriate them for himself; he covets Venus freshly
emerging from the waters. Woman first discovers herself in patriarchy
as wife since the supreme creator is male. Before being the mother of
humankind, Eve is Adam’s companion; she was given to man for him
to possess and fertilize as he possesses and fertilizes the soil; and
through her, he makes his kingdom out of all nature. Man does not
merely seek in the sexual act subjective and ephemeral pleasure. He
wants to conquer, take, and possess; to have a woman is to conquer
her; he penetrates her as the plowshare in the furrows; he makes her
his as he makes his the earth he is working: he plows, he plants, he
sows: these images are as old as writing; from antiquity to today a
thousand examples can be mentioned. “Woman is like the field and
man like the seeds,” say the Laws of Manu. In an André Masson
drawing there is a man, shovel in hand, tilling the garden of a
feminine sex.
12
Woman is her husband’s prey, his property.
Man’s hesitation between fear and desire, between the terror of
being possessed by uncontrollable forces and the will to overcome
them, is grippingly reflected in the virginity myths. Dreaded or
desired or even demanded by the male, virginity is the highest form of
the feminine mystery; this aspect is simultaneously the most troubling
and the most fascinating. Depending on whether man feels crushed by
the powers encircling him or arrogantly believes he is able to make
them his, he refuses or demands that his wife be delivered to him as a
virgin. In the most primitive societies, where woman’s power is
exalted, it is fear that dominates; woman has to be deflowered the
night before the wedding. Marco Polo asserted that for the Tibetans,
“none of them wanted to take a virgin girl as wife.” A rational
explanation has sometimes been given for this refusal: man does not
want a wife who has not yet aroused masculine desires. Al-Bakri, the
Arab geographer, speaking of the Slavic peoples, notes that “if a man
gets married and finds that his wife is a virgin, he says: ‘If you were
worth something, men would have loved you and one of them would
have taken your virginity.’ ” He then chases her out and repudiates
her. It is also claimed that some primitives refuse to marry a woman
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unless she has already given birth, thus proving her fertility. But the
real reasons for the very widespread deflowering customs are
mystical. Certain peoples imagine the presence of a serpent in the
vagina that would bite the spouse during the breaking of the hymen;
terrifying virtues are given to virginal blood, linked to menstrual
blood, and capable of ruining the male’s vigor. These images express
the idea that the feminine principle is so powerful and threatening
because it is intact.
13
Sometimes the deflowering issue is not raised;
for example, Malinowski describes an indigenous population in
which, because sexual games are allowed from childhood on, girls are
never virgins. Sometimes, the mother, older sister, or some other
matron systematically deflowers the girl and throughout her childhood
widens the vaginal opening. Deflowering can also be carried out by
women during puberty using a stick, a bone, or a stone, and this is not
considered a surgical operation. In other tribes, the girl at puberty is
subjected to savage initiation rites: men drag her out of the village and
deflower her with instruments or by raping her. Giving over virgins
to passersby is one of the most common rites; either these strangers
are not thought to be sensitive to this mana dangerous only for the
tribes’ males, or it does not matter what evils befall them. Even more
often, the priest, medicine man, boss, or head
of the tribe deflowers
the fiancée the night before the wedding; on the Malabar Coast, the
Brahmans have to carry out this act, apparently without joy, for which
they demand high wages. All holy objects are known to be dangerous
for the outsider, but consecrated individuals can handle them without
risk; that explains why priests and chiefs are able to tame the malefic
forces against which the spouse has to protect himself. In Rome all
that was left of these customs was a symbolic ceremony: the fiancée
was seated on a stone Priapus phallus, with the double aim of
increasing her fertility and absorbing the overpowerful and therefore
harmful fluids within her. The husband defends himself in yet another
way: he himself deflowers the virgin but during ceremonies that
render him invulnerable at this critical juncture; for example, he does it
in front of the whole village with a stick or bone. In Samoa, he uses
his finger covered in a white cloth and distributes bloodstained shreds
to the spectators. There is also the case of the man allowed to
deflower his wife normally but he has to wait three days to ejaculate
in her so that the generating seed is not soiled by hymen blood.
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In a classic reversal in the area of sacred things, virginal blood in
less primitive societies is a propitious symbol. There are still villages
in France where the bloody sheet is displayed to parents and friends
the morning after the wedding. In the patriarchal regime, man became
woman’s master; and the same characteristics that are frightening in
animals or untamed elements become precious qualities for the owner
who knows how to subdue them. Man took the ardor of the wild
horse and the violence of lightning and waterfalls as the instruments
of his prosperity. Therefore, he wants to annex woman to him with all
her riches intact. The order of virtue imposed on the girl certainly
obeys rational motives: like chastity for the wife, the fiancée’s
innocence is necessary to protect the father from incurring any risk of
bequeathing his goods to a foreign child. But woman’s virginity is
demanded more imperiously when man considers the wife as his
personal property. First of all, the idea of possession is always
impossible to realize positively; the truth is that one never has
anything or anyone; one attempts to accomplish it in a negative way;
the surest way to assert that a good is mine is to prevent another from
using it. And then nothing seems as desirable to man as what has
never belonged to any other human: thus conquest is a unique and
absolute event. Virgin land has always fascinated explorers; alpinists
kill themselves every year attempting to assault an untouched
mountain or even trying to open up a new trail; and the curious risk
their lives to descend underground to the bottom of unprobed caves.
An object that men have already mastered has become a tool; cut off
from its natural
bonds, it loses its deepest attributes; there is more
promise in the wild water of torrents than in that of public fountains.
A virgin body has the freshness of secret springs, the morning bloom
of a closed corolla, the orient of the pearl the sun has never yet
caressed. Cave, temple, sanctuary, or secret garden: like the child, man
is fascinated by these shadowy and closed places never yet touched
by animating consciousness, waiting to be lent a soul; it seems to him
that he in fact created what he is the only one to grasp and penetrate.
Moreover, every desire pursues the aim of consuming the desired
object, entailing its destruction. By breaking the hymen, man
possesses the feminine body more intimately than by a penetration
that leaves it intact; in this irreversible operation, he unequivocally
makes it a passive object, asserting his hold on it. This exactly
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expresses the meaning in the legend of the knight who hacks his way
through thorny bushes to pick a rose never before inhaled; not only
does he uncover it, but he breaks its stem, thereby conquering it. The
image is so clear that in popular language, “taking a woman’s flower”
means destroying her virginity, giving the origin of the word
“deflowering.”
But virginity only has this sexual attraction when allied with youth;
otherwise, its mystery reverts to disquiet. Many men today are
sexually repulsed by older virgins; psychological reasons alone do not
explain why “old maids” are regarded as bitter and mean matrons. The
curse is in their very flesh, this flesh that is object for no subject, that
no desire has made desirable, that has bloomed and wilted without
finding a place in the world of men; turned away from her destination,
the old maid becomes an eccentric object, as troubling as the
incommunicable thinking of a madman. Of a forty-year-old, still
beautiful, woman presumed to be a virgin, I heard a man say with
great vulgarity: “It’s full of cobwebs in there.” It is true that deserted
and unused cellars and attics are full of unsavory mystery; they fill up
with ghosts; abandoned by humanity, houses become the dwellings of
spirits. If feminine virginity has not been consecrated to a god, it is
easily then thought to imply marriage with the devil. Virgins that men
have not subjugated, old women who have escaped their power, are
more easily looked upon as witches than other women; as woman’s
destiny is to be doomed to another, if she does not submit to a man’s
yoke, she is available for the devil’s.
Exorcised by deflowering rites or on the contrary purified by her
virginity, the wife could thus be desirable prey. Taking her gives the
lover all the riches of life he desires to possess. She is all the fauna, all
the earthly flora: gazelle, doe, lilies and roses, downy peaches,
fragrant raspberries; she is precious stones, mother-of-pearl, agate,
pearls, silk, the blue of the
sky, the freshness of springs, air, flame,
earth, and water. All the poets of East and West have metamorphosed
woman’s body into flowers, fruits, and birds. Here again, throughout
antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period, it would be
necessary to quote a thick anthology. The Song of Songs is well-
known, in which the male loved one says to the female loved one:
Thou hast doves’ eyes …
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thy hair is as a flock of goats …
Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn …
thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate …
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins …
Honey and milk are under thy tongue
.
In
Arcanum 17
, André Breton took up this eternal song: “Melusina
at the instant of her second scream: she sprang up off her globeless
haunches, her belly is the whole August harvest, her torso bursts into
fireworks from her arched back, modeled on a swallow’s two wings,
her breasts are two ermines caught in their own scream, blinding
because they are lit by scorching coals of their howling mouth. And
her arms are the soul of streams that sing and float perfumes.”
Man finds shining stars and the moody moon, sunlight, and the
darkness of caves on woman; wildflowers from hedgerows and the
garden’s proud rose are also woman. Nymphs, dryads, mermaids,
water sprites, and fairies haunt the countryside, the woods, lakes,
seas, and moors. This animism is profoundly anchored in men. For
the sailor, the sea is a dangerous woman, perfidious and difficult to
conquer but that he cherishes by dint of taming it. Proud, rebellious,
virginal, and wicked, the mountain is woman for the mountain climber
who wants to take it, even at risk of life. It is often said that these
comparisons manifest sexual sublimation; rather, they express an
affinity between woman and the elements as primal as sexuality itself.
Man expects more from possessing woman than the satisfaction of an
instinct; she is the special object through which he subjugates Nature.
Other objects can also play this role. Sometimes it is on young boys’
bodies that man seeks the sand of beaches, the velvet of nights, the
fragrance of honeysuckle. But sexual penetration is not the only way
to realize this carnal appropriation of the earth. In his novel
To a God
Unknown
, Steinbeck shows a man who chooses a mossy rock as
mediator between him and nature; in
The Cat
, Colette describes a
young husband who settles his love on his favorite female cat because
this gentle wild animal enables him to
have a grasp on the sensual
universe that his woman companion cannot give. The Other can be
embodied in the sea and the mountain just as well as in the woman;
they provide man with the same passive and unexpected resistance
that allows him to accomplish himself; they are a refusal to conquer, a
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prey to possess. If the sea and the mountain are woman, it is because
woman is also the sea and the mountain for the lover.
14
But not just any woman can play the role of mediator between man
and the world; man is not satisfied with finding sexual organs
complementary to his own in his partner. She must embody the
wondrous blossoming of life while concealing its mysterious
disturbances at the same time. First of all, she has to have youth and
health, for man cannot be enraptured in his embrace of a living thing
unless he forgets that all life is inhabited by death. And he desires still
more: that his beloved be beautiful. The ideal of feminine beauty is
variable; but some requirements remain constant; one of them is that
since woman is destined to be possessed, her body has to provide the
inert and passive qualities of an object. Virile beauty is the body’s
adaptation to active functions such as strength, agility, flexibility, and
the manifestation of a transcendence animating a flesh that must never
collapse into itself. The only symmetry to be found in the feminine
ideal is in Sparta, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, societies that
destined woman for the state and not for the individual and that
considered her exclusively as mother, with no place for eroticism. But
when woman is delivered to the male as his property, he claims that
her flesh be presented in its pure facticity. Her body is grasped not as
the emanation of a subjectivity but as a thing weighted in its
immanence; this body must not radiate to the rest of
the world, it must
not promise anything but itself: its desire has to be stopped. The most
naive form of this requirement is the Hottentot ideal of the
steatopygous Venus, as the buttocks are the part of the body with the
fewest nerve endings, where the flesh appears as a given without
purpose. The taste of people from the East for fleshy women is
similar; they love the absurd luxury of this fatty proliferation that is
not enlivened by any project, that has no other meaning than to be
there.
15
Even in civilizations of a more subtle sensibility, where
notions of form and harmony come into play, breasts and buttocks
were prized objects because of the gratuitousness and contingency of
their development. Customs and fashions were often applied to cut the
feminine body from its transcendence: the Chinese woman with
bound feet could barely walk, the Hollywood star’s painted nails
deprived her of her hands; high heels, corsets, hoops, farthingales,
and crinolines were meant less to accentuate the woman’s body’s
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curves than to increase the body’s powerlessness. Weighted down by
fat or on the contrary so diaphanous that any effort is forbidden to it,
paralyzed by uncomfortable clothes and rites of propriety, the body
thus appeared to man as his thing. Makeup and jewels were also used
for this petrification of the body and face. The function of dress and
ornaments is highly complex; for some primitives, it had a sacred
character; but its most usual role was to complete woman’s
metamorphosis into an idol. An equivocal idol: man wanted her erotic,
for her beauty to be part of that of flowers and fruits; but she also had
to be smooth, hard, eternal like a stone. The role of dress is both to
link the body more closely to and to wrest it away from nature, to give
a necessarily set artifice to palpitating life. Woman was turned into
plant, panther, diamond, or mother-of-pearl by mingling flowers, furs,
precious stones, shells, and feathers on her body; she perfumed
herself so as to smell of roses and lilies: but feathers, silk, pearls, and
perfumes also worked to hide the animal rawness from its flesh and
odor. She painted her mouth and her cheeks to acquire a mask’s
immobile solidity; her gaze was imprisoned in the thickness of kohl
and mascara, it was no longer anything but her eyes’ shimmering
ornamentation; braided, curled, or sculpted, her hair lost its
troublesome vegetal mystery. In the embellished woman,
Nature was
present but captive, shaped by a human will in accordance with man’s
desire. Woman was even more desirable when nature was shown off
to full advantage and more rigorously subjugated: the sophisticated
woman has always been the ideal erotic object. And the taste for a
more natural beauty is often a specious form of sophistication. Rémy
de Gourmont wanted women’s hair to be loose, free as the streams
and prairie grass: but it is on Veronica Lake’s hair that the waves of
water and wheat could be caressed, not on a mop of hair totally left to
nature. The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new
and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful
is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its
ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him. It is also
because he fears contingent destiny, because he dreams her immutable
and necessary, that man looks for the idea’s exactitude on woman’s
face, body, and legs. In primitive people, this idea is the perfection of
the popular type: a thick-lipped race with a flat nose forged a thick-
lipped Venus with a flat nose; later, the canons of a more complex
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aesthetics would be applied to women. But in any case, the more the
traits and proportions of a woman seemed contrived, the more she
delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the
metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox
that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man
destines her to artifice. She is not only physis but just as much anti-
physis; and not only in the civilization of electric permanents, hair
waxing, latex girdles, but also in the country of African lip-disk
women, in China, and everywhere on earth. Swift denounced this
mystification in his famous ode to Celia; he railed against the
coquette’s paraphernalia, pointing out with disgust her body’s animal
servitudes; he was doubly wrong to become indignant; because man
wants woman at the same time to be animal and plant and that she
hide behind a fabricated armature; he loves her emerging from the
waves and from a high-fashion house, naked and dressed, naked
beneath her clothes, exactly as he finds her in the human universe.
The city dweller seeks animality in woman; but for the young peasant
doing his military service, the brothel embodies the magic of the city.
Woman is field and pasture but also Babylonia.
However, here is the first lie, the first betrayal of woman: of life
itself, which, even clothed in the most attractive forms, is still
inhabited by the ferments of old age and death. The very use man
makes of her destroys her most precious qualities; weighed down by
childbirth, she loses her sexual attraction; even sterile, the passage of
time is enough to alter her charms. Disabled, ugly, or old, woman
repels. She is said to be withered, faded, like a plant. Man’s
decrepitude is obviously also frightful; but normal man does
not
experience other men as flesh; he has only an abstract solidarity with
these autonomous and foreign bodies. It is on woman’s body, this
body meant for him, that man significantly feels the flesh’s
deterioration. It is through the male’s hostile eyes that Villon’s “once
beautiful courtesan” contemplates her body’s degradation. Old and
ugly women not only are objects without assets but also provoke
hatred mixed with fear. They embody the disturbing figure of Mother,
while the charms of the Wife have faded away.
But even the Wife was a dangerous prey. Demeter survives in
Venus emerging from the waters, fresh foam, the blond harvest;
appropriating woman for himself through the pleasure he derives
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from her, man awakens in her the suspicious powers of fertility; it is
the same organ he penetrates that produces the child. This explains
why man in all societies is protected against the feminine sex’s threats
by so many taboos. There is no reciprocity as woman has nothing to
fear from the male; his sex is considered secular, profane. The phallus
can be raised to the dignity of a god: there is no element of terror in
worshipping it, and in daily life woman does not have to be defended
against it mystically; it is simply propitious for her. It also has to be
pointed out that in many matriarchies, sexuality is very free; but this is
only during woman’s childhood, in her early youth, when coitus is
not linked to the idea of generation. Malinowski is surprised that
young people who sleep together freely in the “house of the
unmarried” show off their love lives so readily; the explanation is that
an unmarried daughter is considered unable to bear a child and the
sexual act is merely a quiet and ordinary pleasure. On the contrary,
once married, her spouse cannot give her any public sign of affection,
nor touch her, and any allusion to their intimate relations is
sacrilegious; she then has to be part of the formidable essence of
mother, and coitus becomes a sacred act. From then on it is
surrounded by taboos and precautions. Intercourse is forbidden when
cultivating the earth, sowing, and planting: in this case fertilizing
forces necessary for the harvests’ prosperity cannot be wasted in
inter-individual relations; respect for powers associated with fertility
enjoins such relations to be economized. But on most occasions,
chastity protects the spouse’s virility; it is demanded when man goes
off fishing or hunting and above all when he is preparing for war; in
the union with woman, the male principle weakens, and he has to
avoid intercourse whenever he needs the totality of his forces. It has
been wondered if the horror man feels for woman comes from that
inspired by sexuality in general, or vice versa. We have seen that in
Leviticus, in particular, wet dreams are considered a stain even though
woman has nothing to do with them. And in our modern societies,
masturbation is considered a danger and a sin; many children and
young boys who
indulge in it suffer terrible anxieties because of it.
Society and parents above all make solitary pleasure a vice; but more
than one young boy has been spontaneously frightened by his first
ejaculations: blood or sperm, any flow of one’s own substance seems
worrying; it is one’s life, one’s mana, that is running out. However,
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even if subjectively man can go through erotic experiences where
woman is not present, she is objectively involved in his sexuality: as
Plato said in the myth of the androgynes, the male organism
presupposes the woman’s. He discovers woman in discovering his
own sex, even if she is not given to him in flesh and blood, nor in
image; and inversely, woman is fearsome inasmuch as she embodies
sexuality. The immanent and transcendent aspects of living experience
can never be separated: what I fear or desire is always an avatar of my
own existence, but nothing comes to me except through what is not
my self. The nonself is involved in wet dreams, in erection, and if not
in the precise figure of woman, at least in Nature and Life: the
individual feels possessed by a foreign magic. Likewise, his
ambivalence toward women is seen in his attitude toward his own sex
organ; he is proud, he laughs about it, he is embarrassed by it. The
little boy defiantly compares his penis with his friends’; his first
erection fills him with pride and frightens him at the same time. The
adult man looks upon his sex organ as a symbol of transcendence and
power; he is as proud of it as a muscle and at the same time as a
magical grace: it is a freedom rich with the whole contingence of the
given, a given freely desired; this is the contradictory aspect that
enchants him; but he suspects the trap in it; this sex organ by which
he claims to assert himself does not obey him; full of unassuaged
desires, arising unexpectedly, sometimes relieving itself in dreams, it
manifests a suspicious and capricious vitality. Man claims to make
Spirit triumph over Life, activity over passivity; his consciousness
keeps nature at a distance, his will shapes it, but in the figure of his
sex organ he rediscovers life, nature, and passivity in himself. “The
sexual parts are the real center of the will and the opposite pole is the
brain,” wrote Schopenhauer. What he called will is attachment to life,
which is suffering and death, while the brain is thought that separates
itself from life while representing it: sexual shame according to him is
what we feel about our stupid carnal stubbornness. Even if the
pessimism of his theories is rejected, he is right to see the expression
of man’s duality in the sex-brain opposition. As a subject he posits
the world, and, remaining outside the universe he posits, he makes
himself the lord of it; if he grasps himself as flesh, as sex, he is no
longer autonomous consciousness, transparent freedom: he is
engaged in the world, a limited and perishable object; and it is
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undoubtedly true that the generative act goes beyond the body’s
limits: but he constitutes them at the very same instant. The penis,
father of generations,
is symmetrical to the maternal womb; grown
from a fattened germ in woman’s womb, man is the bearer of germs
himself, and by this seed that gives life, it is also his own life that is
disavowed. “The birth of children is the death of parents,” said Hegel.
Ejaculation is the promise of death, it affirms the species over the
individual; the existence of the sex organ and its activity negate the
subject’s proud singularity. The sex organ is a focus of scandal
because of this contestation of spirit over life. Man exalts the phallus
in that he grasps it as transcendence and activity, as a means of
appropriation of the other; but he is ashamed when he sees in it only
passive flesh through which he is the plaything of Life’s obscure
forces. This shame is often disguised as irony. The sex organ of
others draws laughter easily; but because the erection looks like a
planned movement and yet is undergone, it often looks ridiculous; and
the simple mention of genital organs provokes glee. Malinowski says
that for the wild people among whom he lived, just mentioning the
word for these “shameful parts” made them laugh uncontrollably;
many crude or saucy jokes are not much more than rudimentary puns
on these words. For some primitive peoples, during the days devoted
to weeding out gardens, women had the right to brutally rape any
stranger that dared to come into the village; attacking him all together,
they often left him half-dead: the tribesmen laughed at this exploit; by
this rape, the victim was constituted as passive and dependent flesh;
he was possessed by the women and through them by their husbands,
while in normal coitus man wants to affirm himself as possessor.
But this is where he will experience the ambiguity of his carnal
condition most obviously. He takes pride in his sexuality only to the
extent that it is a means of appropriation of the Other: and this dream
of possession only ends in failure. In authentic possession, the other
as such is abolished, it is consumed and destroyed: only the sultan of
The Thousand and One Nights
has the power to cut off his
mistresses’ heads when dawn withdraws them from his bed; woman
survives man’s embraces, and she is thus able to escape from him; as
soon as he opens his arms, his prey once again becomes foreign to
him; here she is new, intact, completely ready to be possessed by a
new lover in just as ephemeral a way. One of the male’s dreams is to
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“brand” woman so that she remains his forever; but even the most
arrogant male knows only too well that he will never leave her
anything more than memories, and the most passionate images are
cold compared with real sensation. A whole literature has denounced
this failure. It is made objective in the woman, who is called fickle and
treacherous because her body destines her to man in general and not
to a particular man. Her betrayal is even more perfidious: it is she who
turns the lover into a prey. Only a body
can touch another body; the
male masters the desired flesh only by becoming flesh himself; Eve is
given to Adam for him to accomplish his transcendence in her, and
she draws him into the night of immanence; the mother forges the
obscure wrapping for her son from which he now wants to escape,
while the mistress encloses him in this opaque clay through the
vertigo of pleasure. He wanted to possess: but here he is, possessed
himself. Odor, damp, fatigue, boredom: a whole literature describes
this dreary passion of a consciousness become flesh. Desire often
contains an element of disgust and returns to disgust when it is
assuaged.
“Post coïtum homo animal triste
.”
*
“The flesh is sad.” And yet man has not even found definitive
reassurance in his lover’s arms. Soon his desire is reborn; and often it
is the desire not only for woman in general but for this specific
woman. She wields a singularly troubling power. Because in his own
body man does not feel the sexual need except as a general one similar
to hunger or thirst without a particular object, the bond that links him
to this specific feminine body is forged by the Other. The link is
mysterious like the foul and fertile womb of his roots, a sort of
passive force: it is magic. The hackneyed vocabulary of serialized
novels where the woman is described as an enchantress or a mermaid
who fascinates man and bewitches him reflects the oldest and most
universal of myths. Woman is devoted to magic. Magic, said Alain, is
the spirit lurking in things; an action is magic when it emanates from a
passivity instead of being produced by an agent; men have always
considered woman precisely as the immanence of the given; if she
produces harvests and children, it is not because she wills it; she is
not subject, transcendence, or creative power, but an object charged
with fluids. In societies where man worships such mysteries, woman,
because of these qualities, is associated with religion and venerated as
a priestess; but when he struggles to make society triumph over
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nature, reason over life, will over inert fact, woman is regarded as a
sorceress. The difference between the priest and the magician is well-
known: the former dominates and directs the forces he has mastered
in keeping with the gods and laws, for the good of the community, on
behalf of all its members, while the magician operates outside society,
against the gods and laws, according to his own passions. But woman
is not fully integrated into the world of men; as other, she counters
them; it is natural for her to use the strengths she possesses, not to
spread the hold of transcendence across the community of men and
into the future, but, being separate and opposed, to draw males into
the solitude of separation, into the darkness of immanence. She is the
mermaid
whose songs dashed the sailors against the rocks; she is
Circe, who turned her lovers into animals, the water sprite that
attracted the fisherman to the depths of the pools. The man captivated
by her spell loses his will, his project, his future; he is no longer a
citizen but flesh, slave to his desires, he is crossed out of the
community, enclosed in the instant, thrown passively from torture to
pleasure; the perverse magician pits passion against duty, the present
against the unity of time, she keeps the traveler far from home, she
spreads forgetfulness. In attempting to appropriate the Other, man
must remain himself; but with the failure of impossible possession, he
tries to become this other with whom he fails to unite; so he alienates
himself, he loses himself, he drinks the potion that turns him into a
stranger to himself, he falls to the bottom of deadly and roiling waters.
The Mother dooms her son to death in giving him life; the woman
lover draws her lover into relinquishing life and giving himself up to
the supreme sleep. This link between Love and Death was pathetically
illuminated in the Tristan legend, but it has a more primary truth. Born
of flesh, man accomplishes himself in love as flesh, and flesh is
destined to the grave. The alliance between Woman and Death is thus
confirmed; the great reaper is the inverted figure of corn-growing
fertility. But it is also the frightening wife whose skeleton appears
under deceitful and tender flesh.
16
What man thus cherishes and detests first in woman, lover as well
as mother, is the fixed image of her animal destiny, the life essential to
her existence, but that condemns her to finitude and death. From the
day of birth, man begins to die: this is the truth that the mother
embodies. In procreating, he guarantees the species against himself:
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this is what he learns in his wife’s arms; in arousal and in pleasure,
even before engendering, he forgets his singular self. Should he try to
differentiate them, he still finds in both one fact alone, that of his
carnal condition. He wants to accomplish it: he venerates his mother;
he desires his mistress. But at the same time, he rebels against them in
disgust, in fear.
An important text where we will find a synthesis of almost all these
myths is Jean-Richard Bloch’s
La nuit kurde
(
A Night in Kurdistan
),
in which he describes young Saad’s embraces of a much older but
still beautiful woman during the plundering of a city:
The night abolished the contours of things and feelings alike. He
was no longer clasping a woman to him. He was at last nearing
the end of an interminable voyage that had been pursued since
the
beginning of the world. Little by little he dissolved into an
immensity that cradled him round without shape or end. All
women were confused into one giant land, folded upon him,
suave as desire burning in summer …
He, meanwhile, recognised with a fearful admiration the
power that is enclosed within woman, the long, stretched, satin
thighs, the knees like two ivory hills. When he traced the
polished arch of the back, from the waist to the shoulders, he
seemed to be feeling the vault that supports the world. But the
belly ceaselessly drew him, a tender and elastic ocean, whence all
life is born, and whither it returns, asylum of asylums, with its
tides, horizons, illimitable surfaces.
Then he was seized with a rage to pierce that delightful
envelope, and at last win to the very source of all this beauty. A
simultaneous urge wrapped them one within the other. The
woman now only lived to be cleaved by the share, to open to him
her vitals, to gorge herself with the humours of the beloved.
Their ecstasy was murderous. They came together as if with
stabbing daggers …
He, man, the isolated, the separated, the cut off, was going to
gush forth from out of his own substance, he, the first, would
come forth from his fleshly prison and at last go free, matter and
soul, into the universal matrix. To him was reserved the unheard
of happiness of overpassing the limits of the creature, of
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dissolving into the one exaltation object and subject, question
and answer, of annexing to being all that is not being, and of
embracing, in an unextinguishable river, the empire of the
unattainable …
But each coming and going of the bow awoke, in the precious
instrument it held at its mercy, vibrations more and more
piercing. Suddenly, a last spasm unloosed him from the zenith,
and cast him down again to earth, to the mire.
As the woman’s desire is not quenched, she imprisons her lover
between her legs, and he feels in spite of himself his desire returning:
she is thus an enemy power who grabs his virility, and while
possessing her again, he bites her throat so deeply that he kills her.
The cycle from mother to woman-lover to death meanders to a
complex close.
There are many possible attitudes here for man depending on which
aspect of the carnal drama he stresses. If a man does not think life is
unique, if he is not concerned with his singular destiny, if he does not
fear death, he will joyously accept his animality. For Muslims,
woman is
reduced to a state of abjection because of the feudal
structure of society that does not allow recourse to the state against the
family and because of religion, expressing this civilization’s warrior
ideal, that has destined man to death and stripped woman of her
magic: What would anyone on earth, ready to dive without any
hesitation into the voluptuous orgies of the Muhammadan paradise,
fear? Man can thus enjoy woman without worrying or having to
defend himself against himself or her.
The Thousand and One Nights
looks on her as a source of creamy delights much like fruits, jams,
rich desserts, and perfumed oils. This sensual benevolence can be
found today among many Mediterranean peoples: replete, not seeking
immortality, the man from the Midi grasps Nature in its luxurious
aspect, relishes women; by tradition he scorns them sufficiently so as
not to grasp them as individuals: between the enjoyment of their
bodies and that of sand and water there is not much difference for
him; he does not experience the horror of the flesh either in them or in
himself. In
Conversations in Sicily
, Vittorini recounts, with quiet
amazement, having discovered the naked body of woman at the age of
seven. Greek and Roman rationalist thought confirms this
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spontaneous attitude. Greek optimist philosophy went beyond
Pythagorean Manichaeism; the inferior is subordinate to the superior
and as such is useful to him: these harmonious ideologies show no
hostility whatsoever to the flesh. Turned toward the heaven of Ideas
or in toward the City or State, the individual thinking himself as nous
or as a citizen thinks he has overcome his animal condition: whether
he gives himself up to voluptuousness or practices asceticism, a
woman firmly integrated into male society is only of secondary
importance. It is true that rationalism has never triumphed totally and
erotic experience remains ambivalent in these civilizations: rites,
mythologies, and literature are testimony to that. But femininity’s
attractions and dangers manifest themselves there only in attenuated
form. Christianity is what drapes woman anew with frightening
prestige: one of the fears the rending of the unhappy consciousness
takes for man is fear of the other sex. The Christian is separated from
himself; the division of body and soul, of life and spirit, is consumed:
original sin turns the body into the soul’s enemy; all carnal links
appear bad.
17
Man can be saved by being redeemed by Christ and
turning toward the celestial kingdom; but at the beginning, he is no
more than rottenness; his birth dooms him not only to death but to
damnation; divine grace can open heaven to him, but all avatars of his
natural existence are cursed. Evil is an absolute reality; and flesh is
sin. Since woman never stopped being Other, of course, male and
female are never reciprocally considered flesh: the flesh for the
Christian male is the enemy Other and is not distinguished from
woman. The temptations of the earth, sex, and the devil are incarnated
in her. All the Church Fathers emphasize the fact that she led Adam to
sin. Once again, Tertullian has to be quoted: “Woman! You are the
devil’s gateway. You have convinced the one the devil did not dare to
confront directly. It is your fault that God’s Son had to die. You
should always dress in mourning and rags.” All Christian literature
endeavors to exacerbate man’s disgust for woman. Tertullian defines
her as “
Templum aedificatum super cloacam
.”
*
Saint Augustine points out in horror the proximity of the sexual
and excretory organs:
“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.”
†
Christianity’s repugnance for the feminine body is such that it
consents to doom its God to an ignominious death but saves him the
stain of birth: the Council of Ephesus in the Eastern Church and the
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Lateran Council in the West affirm the virgin birth of Christ. The first
Church Fathers—Origen, Tertullian, and Jerome—thought that Mary
had given birth in blood and filth like other women; but the opinions
of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine prevail. The Virgin’s womb
remained closed. Since the Middle Ages, the fact of having a body
was considered an ignominy for woman. Science itself was paralyzed
for a long time by this disgust. Linnaeus, in his treatise on nature,
dismissed the study of woman’s genital organs as “abominable.” Des
Laurens, the French doctor, dared to ask how “this divine animal full
of reason and judgment that is called man can be attracted by these
obscene parts of the woman, tainted by humors and placed shamefully
at the lowest part of the trunk.” Many other influences come into play
along with Christian thought; and even this has more than one side;
but in the puritan world, for example, hatred of the flesh still obtains;
it is expressed in
Light in August
, by Faulkner; the hero’s first sexual
experiences are highly traumatic. In all literature, a young man’s first
sexual intercourse is often upsetting to the point of inducing vomiting;
and if, in truth, such a reaction is very rare, it is not by chance that it is
so often described. In puritan Anglo-Saxon countries in particular,
woman stirs up more or less avowed terror in most adolescents and
many men. This is quite true in France. Michel Leiris wrote in
L’âge
d’homme (Manhood):
“I have a tendency to consider the feminine
organ as
a dirty thing or a wound, not less attractive though for that,
but dangerous in itself, as everything that is bloody, viscous, and
contaminated.” The idea of venereal maladies expresses these frights;
woman is feared not because she gives these illnesses; it is the
illnesses that seem abominable because they come from woman: I
have been told about young men who thought that too frequent sexual
relations caused gonorrhea. People also readily think that sexual
intercourse makes man lose his muscular strength and mental lucidity,
consumes his phosphorus, and coarsens his sensitivity. The same
dangers threaten in masturbation; and for moral reasons society
considers it even more harmful than the normal sexual function.
Legitimate marriage and the desire to have children guard against the
evil spells of eroticism. I have already said that the Other is implied in
all sexual acts; and its face is usually woman’s. Man experiences his
own flesh’s passivity the most strongly in front of her. Woman is
vampire, ghoul, eater, drinker; her sex organ feeds gluttonously on the
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male sex organ. Some psychoanalysts have tried to give these
imaginings scientific foundations: the pleasure woman derives from
coitus is supposed to come from the fact that she symbolically
castrates the male and appropriates his sex organ. But it would seem
that these theories themselves need to be psychoanalyzed and that the
doctors who invented them have projected onto them ancestral
terrors.
18
The source of these terrors is that in the Other, beyond any
annexation, alterity remains. In patriarchal societies, woman kept
many of the disquieting virtues she held in primitive societies. That
explains why she is never left to Nature, why she is surrounded by
taboos, purified by rites, and placed under the control of priests; man
is taught never to approach her in her original nudity, but through
ceremonies and sacraments that wrest her from the earth and flesh and
metamorphose her into a human creature: thus the magic she
possesses is channeled as lightning has been since the invention of
lightning rods and electric power plants. It is even possible to use her
in the group’s interests: this is another phase of the oscillatory
movement defining man’s relationship to his female. He loves her
because she is his, he fears her because she remains other; but it is as
the feared other that he seeks to make her most deeply his: this is what
will lead him to raise her to the dignity of a person and to recognize
her as his peer.
Feminine magic was profoundly domesticated in the patriarchal
family. Woman gave society the opportunity to integrate cosmic
forces into it. In his work
Mitra-Varuna
, Dumézil points out that in
India as in Rome, virile
power asserts itself in two ways: in Varuna
and Romulus, and in the Gan-dharvas and the Luperci, it is
aggression, abduction, disorder, and hubris; thus, woman is the being
to be ravished and violated; if the ravished Sabine women are sterile,
they are whipped with goatskin straps, compensating for violence
with more violence. But on the contrary, Mitra, Numa, the Brahman
women, and the Flamen wives represent reasonable law and order in
the city: so the woman is bound to her husband by a ritualistic
marriage, and she collaborates with him to ensure his domination over
all female forces of nature; in Rome, the
flamen dialis
resigns from
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his position if his wife dies. In Egypt as well, Isis, having lost her
supreme power as Mother Goddess, remains nonetheless generous,
smiling, benevolent, and obedient, Osiris’s magnificent spouse. But
when woman is thus man’s partner, his complement, his other half,
she is necessarily endowed with a consciousness and a soul; he could
not so deeply depend on a being who would not participate in the
human essence. It has already been seen that the Laws of Manu
promised a legal wife the same paradise as her spouse. The more the
male becomes individualized and claims his individuality, the more he
will recognize an individual and a freedom in his companion. The
Oriental man who is unconcerned with his own destiny is satisfied
with a female who is his pleasure object; but Western man’s dream,
once elevated to consciousness of the singularity of his being, is to be
recognized by a foreign and docile freedom. The Greek man cannot
find the peer he wants in a woman who was prisoner of the
gynaeceum: so he confers his love on male companions, whose flesh,
like his own, is endowed with a consciousness and a freedom, or else
he gives his love to hetaeras, whose independence, culture, and spirit
made them near equals. But when circumstances permit, the wife best
satisfies man’s demands. The Roman citizen recognizes a person in
the matron; in Cornelia or in Arria, he possesses his double.
Paradoxically, it was Christianity that was to proclaim the equality of
man and woman on a certain level. Christianity detests the flesh in
her; if she rejects the flesh, she is, like him, a creature of God,
redeemed by the Savior: here she can take her place beside males,
among those souls guaranteed celestial happiness. Men and women
are God’s servants, almost as asexual as the angels, who, together
with the help of grace, reject earth’s temptations. If she agrees to
renounce her animality, woman, from the very fact that she incarnated
sin, will also be the most radiant incarnation of the triumph of the elect
who have conquered sin.
19
Of course, the divine Savior who brings
about Redemption is male; but humanity must cooperate in its own
salvation, and perversely it will be called upon to manifest its
submissive goodwill in its most humiliated
figure. Christ is God; but
it is a woman, the Virgin Mother, who reigns over all human
creatures. Yet only marginal sects restore the great goddesses’ ancient
privileges to the woman. The Church expresses and serves a
patriarchal civilization where it is befitting for woman to remain
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annexed to man. As his docile servant, she will also be a blessed
saint. Thus the image of the most perfected woman, propitious to
men, lies at the heart of the Middle Ages: the face of the Mother of
Christ is encircled in glory. She is the inverse figure of the sinner Eve;
she crushes the serpent under her foot; she is the mediator of
salvation, as Eve was of damnation.
It is as Mother that the woman was held in awe; through
motherhood she has to be transfigured and subjugated. Mary’s
virginity has above all a negative value: she by whom the flesh has
been redeemed is not carnal; she has been neither touched nor
possessed. Neither was the Asiatic Great Mother assumed to have a
husband: she had engendered the world and reigned over it alone; she
could be lascivious by impulse, but her greatness as Mother was not
diminished by imposed wifely servitudes. Likewise, Mary never
experienced the stain connected with sexuality. Related to the woman
warrior Minerva, she is an ivory tower, a citadel, an impregnable
fortress. Like most Christian saints, the priestesses of antiquity were
virgins: the woman devoted to good should be devoted with the
splendor of her strength intact; she must conserve the principle of her
femininity in its unbroken wholeness. One rejects in Mary her
character as wife in order to more fully exalt in her the Woman-
Mother. But she will be glorified only by accepting the subservient
role assigned to her. “I am the handmaiden of the Lord.” For the first
time in the history of humanity, the mother kneels before her son; she
freely recognizes her inferiority. The supreme masculine victory is
consummated in the cult of Mary: it is the rehabilitation of woman by
the achievement of her defeat. Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele were cruel,
capricious, and lustful; they were powerful; the source of death as
well as life, in giving birth to men, they made them their slaves. With
Christianity, life and death now depended on God alone, so man, born
of the maternal breast, escaped it forever, and the earth gets only his
bones; his soul’s destiny is played out in regions where the mother’s
powers are abolished; the sacrament of baptism makes ceremonies
that burned or drowned the placenta insignificant. There is no longer
any place on earth for magic: God alone is king. Nature is originally
bad, but powerless when countered with grace. Motherhood as a
natural phenomenon confers no power. If woman wishes to overcome
the original stain in herself, her only alternative is to bow before God,
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whose will subordinates her to man. And by this submission she can
assume a new role in masculine mythology. As a vassal, she will be
honored, whereas she was beaten and trampled underfoot when she
saw herself as dominator or as long as she did not explicitly abdicate.
She loses none of her primitive attributes; but their meanings change;
from calamitous they become auspicious; black magic turns to white
magic. As a servant, woman is entitled to the most splendid
apotheosis.
And since she was subjugated as Mother, she will, as Mother first,
be cherished and respected. Of the two ancient faces of maternity,
modern man recognizes only the benevolent one. Limited in time and
space, possessing only one body and one finite life, man is but one
individual in the middle of a foreign Nature and History. Limited like
him, similarly inhabited by the spirit, woman belongs to Nature, she is
traversed by the infinite current of Life, she thus appears as the
mediator between the individual and the cosmos. When the mother
image became reassuring and holy, it is understandable that the man
turned to her with love. Lost in nature, he seeks escape, but separated
from her, he aspires to return to her. Solidly settled in the family and
society, in accord with laws and customs, the mother is the very
incarnation of the Good: the nature in which she participates becomes
Good; she is no longer the spirit’s enemy; and though she remains
mysterious, it is a smiling mystery, like Leonardo da Vinci’s
Madonnas. Man does not wish to be woman, but he longs to wrap
himself in everything that is, including this woman he is not: in
worshipping his mother, he tries to appropriate her riches so foreign
to him. To recognize himself as his mother’s son, he recognizes the
mother in him, integrating femininity insofar as it is a connection to
the earth, to life, and to the past. In Vittorini’s
Conversations in Sicily
,
that is what the hero goes to find from his mother: his native land, its
scents and its fruits, his childhood, his ancestors’ past, traditions, and
the roots from which his individual existence separated him. It is this
very rootedness that exalts man’s pride in going beyond; he likes to
admire himself breaking away from his mother’s arms to leave for
adventure, the future, and war; this departure would be less moving if
there were no one to try to hold him back: it would look like an
accident, not a hard-won victory. And he also likes to know that these
arms are ready to welcome him back. After the tension of action, the
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hero likes to taste the restfulness of immanence again, by his mother’s
side: she is refuge, slumber; by her hand’s caress he sinks into the
bosom of nature, lets himself be lulled by the vast flow of life as
peacefully as in the womb or in the tomb. And if tradition has him die
calling on his mother, it is because under the maternal gaze death
itself, like birth, is tamed, symmetrical with birth, indissolubly linked
with his whole carnal life. The mother remains connected to death as
in ancient Parcae mythology; it is she who buries the dead, who
mourns. But her role is precisely to integrate death with life, with
society, with the good. And so the cult of “heroic mothers” is
systematically encouraged: if society
persuades mothers to surrender
their sons to death, then it thinks it can claim the right to assassinate
them. Because of the mother’s hold on her sons, it is useful for
society to make her part of it: this is why the mother is showered with
signs of respect, why she is endowed with all virtues, why a religion
is created around her from which it is forbidden to stray under severe
risk of sacrilege and blasphemy; she is made the guardian of morality;
servant of man, servant of the powers that be, she fondly guides her
children along fixed paths. The more resolutely optimistic the
collectivity and the more docilely it accepts this loving authority, the
more transfigured the mother will be. The American “Mom” has
become the idol described by Philip Wylie in
Generation of Vipers
,
because the official American ideology is the most stubbornly
optimistic. To glorify the mother is to accept birth, life, and death in
both their animal and their social forms and to proclaim the harmony
of nature and society. Auguste Comte makes the woman the divinity
of future Humanity because he dreams of achieving this synthesis.
But this is also why all rebels assail the figure of the mother; in
holding her up to ridicule, they reject the given claims supposedly
imposed on them through the female guardian of morals and laws.
20
The aura of respect around the Mother and the taboos that surround
her repress the hostile disgust that mingles spontaneously with the
carnal tenderness she inspires. However, lurking below the surface,
the latent horror of motherhood survives. In particular, it is interesting
that in France since the Middle Ages, a secondary myth has been
forged, freely expressing this repugnance: that of the Mother-in-Law.
From fabliau to vaudeville, there are no taboos on man’s ridicule of
motherhood in general through his wife’s mother. He hates the idea
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that the woman he loves was conceived: the mother-in-law is the clear
image of the decrepitude that she doomed her daughter to by giving
her life, and her obesity and her wrinkles forecast the obesity and
wrinkles that the future so sadly prefigures for the young bride; at her
mother’s side she is no longer an individual but an example of a
species; she is no longer the desired prey or the cherished companion,
because her individual existence dissolves into universality. Her
individuality is mockingly contested by generalities, her spirit’s
autonomy by her being rooted in the past and in the flesh: this is the
derision man objectifies as a grotesque character; but through the
rancor of his laughter, he knows that the fate of his wife is the same
for all human beings; it is his own. In every country, legends and tales
have also personified the cruel side of motherhood in the stepmother.
She is the cruel mother who tries to kill Snow White. The ancient Kali
with the necklace of severed heads lives on in the mean stepmother—
Mme Fichini whipping Sophie throughout Mme de Ségur’s books.
Yet behind the sainted Mother crowds the coterie of white witches
who provide man with herbal juices and stars’ rays: grandmothers,
old women with kind eyes, good-hearted servants, sisters of charity,
nurses with magical hands, the sort of mistress Verlaine dreamed of:
Sweet, pensive and dark and surprised at nothing
And who will at times kiss you on the forehead like a child
.
They are ascribed the pure mystery of knotted vines, of freshwater;
they dress and heal wounds; their wisdom is life’s silent wisdom,
they understand without words. In their presence man forgets his
pride; he understands the sweetness of yielding and becoming a child,
because between him and her there is no struggle for prestige: he
could not resent the inhuman virtues of nature; and in their devotion,
the wise initiates who care for him recognize they are his servants; he
submits to their benevolent powers because he knows that while
submitting to them, he remains their master. Sisters, childhood
girlfriends, pure young girls, and all future mothers
belong to this
blessed troupe. And the wife herself, when her erotic magic fades, is
regarded by many men less as a lover than as the mother of their
children. Once the mother is sanctified and servile, she can safely be
with a woman friend, she being also sanctified and submissive. To
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redeem the mother is to redeem the flesh, and thus carnal union and
the wife.
Deprived of her magic weapons by nuptial rites, economically and
socially dependent on her husband, the “good wife” is man’s most
precious treasure. She belongs to him so profoundly that she shares
the same nature with him:
“Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia”;
she has his
name and his gods, and she is his responsibility: he calls her his other
half. He takes pride in his wife as in his home, his land, his flocks,
and his wealth, and sometimes even more; through her he displays his
power to the rest of the world: she is his yardstick and his earthly
share. For Orientals, a wife should be fat: everyone sees that she is
well fed and brings respect to her master.
21
A Muslim is all the more
respected if he possesses a large number of flourishing wives. In
bourgeois society, one of woman’s assigned roles is
to represent:
her
beauty, her charm, her intelligence, and her elegance are outward
signs of her husband’s fortune, as is the body of his car. If he is rich,
he covers her with furs and jewels. If he is poorer, he boasts of her
moral qualities and her housekeeping talents; most deprived, he feels
he owns something earthly if he has a wife to serve him; the hero of
The Taming of the Shrew
summons all his neighbors to show them
his authority in taming his wife. A sort of King Candaules resides in
all men: he exhibits his wife because he believes she displays his own
worth.
But woman does more than flatter man’s social vanity; she allows
him a more intimate pride; he delights in his domination over her;
superimposed on the naturalistic images of the plowshare cutting
furrows are more spiritual symbols concerning the wife as a person;
the husband “forms” his wife not only erotically but also spiritually
and intellectually; he educates her, impresses her, puts his imprint on
her. One of the daydreams he enjoys is the impregnation of things by
his will, shaping their form, penetrating their substance: the woman is
par excellence the “clay in his hands” that passively lets itself be
worked and shaped, resistant while yielding, permitting masculine
activity to go on. A too-plastic material wears out by its softness;
what is precious in woman is that something in her always escapes all
embraces; so man is master of a reality that is all the more worthy of
being mastered as it surpasses him. She awakens in him a being
heretofore ignored whom he recognizes with pride as himself; in their
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safe marital
orgies he discovers the splendor of his animality: he is the
Male; and woman, correlatively, the female, but this word sometimes
takes on the most flattering implications: the female who broods, who
nurses, who licks her young, who defends them, and who risks her
life to save them is an example for humans; with emotion, man
demands this patience and devotion from his companion; again it is
Nature, but imbued with all of the virtues useful to society, family,
and the head of the family, virtues he knows how to keep locked in
his home. A common desire of children and men is to uncover the
secret hidden inside things; but in this, the matter can be deceptive: a
doll ripped apart with her stomach outside has no more interiority; the
interior of living things is more impenetrable; the female womb is the
symbol of immanence, of depth; it delivers its secrets in part as when,
for example, pleasure shows on a woman’s face, but it also holds
them in; man catches life’s obscure palpitations in his house without
the mystery being destroyed by possession. In the human world,
woman transposes the female animal’s functions: she maintains life,
she reigns over the zones of immanence; she transports the warmth
and the intimacy of the womb into the home; she watches over and
enlivens the dwelling where the past is kept, where the future is
presaged; she engenders the future generation, and she nourishes the
children already born; thanks to her, the existence that man expends
throughout the world by his work and his activity is re-centered by
delving into her immanence: when he comes home at night, he is
anchored to the earth; the wife assures the days’ continuity; whatever
risks he faces in the outside world, she guarantees the stability of his
meals and sleep; she repairs whatever has been damaged or worn out
by activity: she prepares the tired worker’s food, she cares for him if
he is ill, she mends and washes. And within the conjugal universe that
she sets up and perpetuates, she brings in the whole vast world: she
lights the fires, puts flowers in vases, and domesticates the
emanations of sun, water, and earth. A bourgeois writer cited by
Bebel summarizes this ideal in all seriousness as follows: “Man wants
not only someone whose heart beats for him, but whose hand wipes
his brow, who radiates peace, order, and tranquillity, a silent control
over himself and those things he finds when he comes home every
day; he wants someone who can spread over everything the
indescribable perfume of woman who is the vivifying warmth of
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home life.”
It is clear how spiritualized the figure of woman became with the
birth of Christianity; the beauty, warmth, and intimacy that man
wishes to grasp through her are no longer tangible qualities; instead of
being the summation of the pleasurable quality of things, she becomes
their soul; deeper than carnal mystery, her heart holds a secret and
pure presence that reflects
truth in the world. She is the soul of the
house, the family, and the home, as well as larger groups: the town,
province, or nation. Jung observes that cities have always been
compared to the Mother because they hold their citizens in their
bosoms: this is why Cybele was depicted crowned with towers; for
the same reason the term “mother country” is used and not only
because of the nourishing soil; rather, a more subtle reality found its
symbol in the woman. In the Old Testament and in the Apocalypse,
Jerusalem and Babylon are not only mothers: they are also wives.
There are virgin cities and prostitute cities such as Babel and Tyre.
France too has been called “the eldest daughter” of the Church; France
and Italy are Latin sisters. Woman’s function is not specified, but
femininity is, in statues that represent France, Rome, and Germany
and those on the Place de la Concorde that evoke Strasbourg and
Lyon. This assimilation is not only allegoric: it is affectively practiced
by many men.
22
Many a traveler would ask woman for the key to the
countries he visits: when he holds an Italian or Spanish woman in his
arms, he feels he possesses the fragrant essence of Italy or Spain.
“When I come to a new city, the first thing I do is to visit a brothel,”
said a journalist. If a cinnamon hot chocolate can make Gide discover
the whole of Spain, all the more reason kisses from exotic lips will
bring to a lover a country with its flora and fauna, its traditions, and
its culture. Woman is the summation neither of its political institutions
nor of its economic resources; but she is the incarnation of carnal
flesh and mystical mana. From Lamartine’s
Graziella
to Loti’s novels
and Morand’s short stories, the foreigner is seen as trying to
appropriate the soul of a region through women. Mignon, Sylvie,
Mireille, Colomba, and Carmen uncover the most intimate truth about
Italy, Valois, Provence, Corsica, or Andalusia. When the Alsatian
Frederique falls in love with Goethe, the Germans take it as a symbol
of Germany’s annexation; likewise, when Colette Baudoche refuses
to marry a German, Barrès sees it as Alsace refusing Germany. He
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personifies Aigues-Mortes and a whole refined and frivolous
civilization in the sole person of Berenice; she represents the
sensibility of the writer himself. Man recognizes his own mysterious
double in her, she who is the soul of nature, cities, and the universe;
man’s soul is Psyche, a woman.
Psyche has feminine traits in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume”:
Here once, through an alley Titanic
,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul …
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her …
And I said—“What is written, sweet sister
,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
And Mallarmé, at the theater, in a dialogue with “a soul, or else our
idea” (that is, divinity present in man’s spirit) called it “a most
exquisite abnormal lady [sic].”
23
Thing of harmony, ME, a dream
,
Firm, flexible feminine, whose silences lead
To pure acts!…
Thing of mystery, ME
.
*
Such is Valéry’s way of hailing her. The Christian world substituted
less carnal presences for nymphs and fairies; but homes, landscapes,
cities, and individuals themselves are still haunted by an impalpable
femininity.
This truth buried in the night of things also shines in the heavens;
perfect immanence, the Soul is at the same time the transcendent, the
Idea. Not only cities and nations but also entities and abstract
institutions are cloaked in feminine traits: the Church, the Synagogue,
the Republic, and Humanity are women, as well as Peace, War,
Liberty, the Revolution, Victory. Man feminizes the ideal that he
posits before him as the essential Other, because woman is the
tangible figure of alterity; this is why almost all the allegories in
language and in iconography are women.
24
Soul and Idea, woman is
also the mediator between them: she is the Grace that leads the
Christian to God, she is Beatrice guiding Dante to the beyond, Laura
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beckoning Petrarch to the highest peaks of poetry. She appears in all
doctrines assimilating Nature to Spirit as Harmony, Reason, and
Truth. Gnostic sects made Wisdom a woman, Sophia; they attributed
the world’s redemption to her, and even its creation. So woman is no
longer flesh, she is glorious
body; rather than trying to possess her,
men venerate her for her untouched splendor; the pale dead of Edgar
Allan Poe are as fluid as water, wind, or memory; for courtly love, for
les précieux
, and in all of the gallant tradition, woman is no longer an
animal creature but rather an ethereal being, a breath, a radiance. Thus
it is that the feminine Night’s opacity is converted into transparence,
and obscurity into purity, as in Novalis’s texts:
Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me
—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my
unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—
and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved.
Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night?… Precious
balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou
upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and
inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that,
tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold
entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the
Mother … More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the
eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us.
The downward attraction exercised by woman is inverted; she
beckons man no longer earthward, but toward heaven.
The Eternal Feminine
Leads us upward
,
proclaimed Goethe at the end of
Faust, Part Two
.
As the Virgin Mary is the most perfected image, the most widely
venerated image of the regenerated woman devoted to the Good, it is
interesting to see how she appears through literature and iconography.
Here are passages from medieval litanies showing how fervent
Christians addressed her:
Most high Virgin, thou art the fertile Dew, the Fountain of Joy,
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the Channel of mercy, the Well of living waters that cools our
passions.
Thou art the Breast from which God nurses orphans.
Thou art the Marrow, the Inside, the Core of all good.
Thou art the guileless Woman whose love never changes.
Thou art the Probatic Pool, the Remedy of lepers, the subtle
Physician whose like is found neither in Salerno nor in
Montpellier.
Thou art the Lady of healing hands, whose fingers so
beautiful, so white, so long, restore noses and mouths, give new
eyes and ears. Thou calmest passions, givest life to the
paralyzed, givest strength to the weak, risest the dead.
Most of the feminine attributes we have referred to are found in
these invocations. The Virgin is fertility, dew, and the source of life;
many of the images show her at the well, the spring, or the fountain;
the expression “Fountain of Life” was one of the most common; she
was not a creator, but she nourishes, she brings to the light of day
what was hidden in the earth. She is the deep reality hidden under the
appearance of things: the Core, the Marrow. Through her, passions
are tempered; she is what is given to man to satiate him. Wherever life
is threatened, she saves and restores it: she heals and strengthens.
And because life emanates from God, she as the intermediary between
man and life is likewise the intermediary between humanity and God.
“The devil’s gateway,” said Tertullian. But transfigured, she is
heaven’s portal; paintings represent her opening the gate or the
window onto paradise or raising a ladder from earth to the heavens.
More straightforward, she becomes an advocate, pleading beside her
Son for the salvation of men: many tableaux of the Last Judgment
have her baring her breast in supplication to Christ in the name of her
glorious motherhood. She protects men’s children in the folds of her
cloak; her merciful love follows them through dangers over oceans
and battlefields. She moves Divine Justice in the name of charity: the
“Virgins of the Scales” are seen, smiling, tilting the balance where
souls are weighed to the side of the Good.
This merciful and tender role is one of the most important of all
those granted to woman. Even integrated into society, the woman
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subtly exceeds its boundaries because she possesses the insidious
generosity of Life. This distance between the males’ intended
constructions and nature’s contingency seems troubling in some
cases; but it becomes beneficial when the woman, too docile to
threaten men’s work, limits herself to enriching and softening their
too sharp edges. Male gods represent Destiny; on the goddesses’ side
are found arbitrary benevolence and capricious favor. The Christian
God has the rigors of Justice; the Virgin has gentleness and charity.
On earth, men are the defenders of laws, reason, and necessity;
woman knows the original contingency of man himself and of the
necessity he believes in; from this comes her supple generosity and
the mysterious irony that touches her lips. She gives birth in pain, she
heals males’ wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of
man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will.
While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains
on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she
contests the sharpness of
hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces
free luxury and unforeseen grace. Her power over men comes from
her tenderly recalling a modest consciousness of their authentic
condition; it is the secret of her illusionless, painful, ironic, and loving
wisdom. Even frivolity, whimsy, and ignorance are charming virtues
in her because they thrive beneath and beyond the world where man
chooses to live but where he does not want to feel confined.
Confronted with arrested meaning and utilitarian instruments, she
upholds the mystery of intact things; she brings the breath of poetry
into city streets and plowed fields. Poetry attempts to capture that
which exists above everyday prose: woman is an eminently poetic
reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
She incarnates the Dream; for man, the dream is the most intimate and
the most foreign presence, what he does not want, what he does not
do, which he aspires to but cannot attain; the mysterious Other who is
profound immanence and far-off transcendence will lend him her
traits. Thus it is that Aurélia visits Nerval in a dream and gives him
the whole world in a dream. “She began to grow in a bright ray of
light so that little by little the garden took on her form, and the flower
beds and the trees became the rosettes and festoons of her dress;
while her face and her arms impressed their shape upon the reddened
clouds in the sky. I was losing sight of her as she was being
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transfigured, for she seemed to be vanishing into her own grandeur.
‘Oh flee not from me!’ I cried; ‘for nature dies with you.’ ”
Being the very substance of man’s poetic activities, woman is
understandably his inspiration: the Muses are women. The Muse is
the conduit between the creator and the natural springs he draws from.
It is through woman’s spirit deeply connected to nature that man will
explore the depths of silence and the fertile night. The Muse creates
nothing on her own; she is a wise sibyl making herself the docile
servant of a master. Even in concrete and practical spheres, her
counsel will be useful. Man wishes to attain the goals he sets without
the help of his peers, and he would find another man’s opinion
inopportune; but he supposes that the woman speaks to him in the
name of other values, in the name of a wisdom that he does not claim
to have, more instinctive than his own, more immediately in accord
with the real; these are the “intuitions” that Egeria uses to counsel and
guide; he consults her without fear for his self-esteem as he consults
the stars. This “intuition” even enters into business or politics: Apasia
and Mme de Maintenon still have flourishing careers today.
25
There is another function that man willingly entrusts to woman:
being the purpose behind men’s activities and the source of their
decisions, she is also the judge of values. She is revealed as a
privileged judge. Man dreams of an Other not only to possess her but
also to be validated by her; to be validated by men who are his peers
entails constant tension on his part: that is why he wants an outside
view conferring absolute value on his life, on his undertakings, on
himself. God’s gaze is hidden, foreign, disquieting: even in periods of
faith, only a few mystics felt its intensity. This divine role often
devolved on the woman. Close to the man, dominated by him, she
does not posit values that are foreign to him: and yet, as she is other,
she remains exterior to the world of men and can thus grasp it
objectively. It is she who will denounce the presence or absence of
courage, of strength, and of beauty while confirming from the outside
their universal value. Men are too busy in their cooperative or
combative relations to be an audience for each other: they do not think
about each other. Woman is removed from their activities and does
not take part in their jousts and combats: her entire situation
predestines her to play this role of onlooker. The chevalier jousts in
tournaments for his lady; poets seek woman’s approval. When
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Rastignac sets out to conquer Paris, he thinks first of
having
women,
less about possessing their bodies than enjoying that reputation that
only they are capable of creating for a man. Balzac projected the story
of his own youth onto his young heroes: his education began with
older mistresses; and the woman played the role of educator not only
in
Le lys dans la vallée
(
The Lily in the Valley);
she was also assigned
this role in
L’Education sentimental (Sentimental Education
), in
Stendhal’s novels, and in numerous other coming-of-age novels. It
has already been observed that the woman is both physis and anti-
physis; she personifies Society as well as Nature; through her the
civilization of a period and its culture is summed up, as can be seen in
courtly poetry, in the
Decameron
, and in
L’Astrée;
she launches
fashions, presides over salons, directs and reflects opinion. Fame and
glory are women. “The crowd is woman,” said Mallarmé. In the
company of women the young man is initiated into the “world,” and
into this complex reality called life. She is one of the privileged prizes
promised to heroes, adventurers, and individualists. In ancient times,
Perseus saved Andromeda, Orpheus went to rescue Eurydice from
hades, and Troy fought to keep the beautiful Helen. Novels of
chivalry recount barely any prowess other than delivering captive
princesses. What would Prince Charming do if he did not wake up
Sleeping Beauty, or lavish gifts on Donkey Skin? The myth of the
king marrying a shepherdess flatters the man as much as the woman.
The rich man needs to give, or else his useless wealth remains an
abstract object: he needs someone to give to. The Cinderella myth,
indulgently described by Philip Wylie in
Generation of Vipers
, thrives
in prosperous countries; it is more powerful in America than
anywhere else because men are more embarrassed by their wealth:
How would they spend this money for which they work their whole
lives if they did not dedicate it to a woman? Orson Welles, among
others, personifies the imperialism of this kind of generosity in
Citizen Kane:
Kane chooses to smother an obscure singer with gifts
and impose her on the public as a great opera singer all for his own
affirmation of power; in France there are plenty of small-time Citizen
Kanes. In another film,
The Razor’s Edge
, when the hero returns
from India having acquired absolute wisdom, the only use he finds
for it is to rescue a prostitute. Clearly man wants woman’s
enslavement when fantasizing himself as a benefactor, liberator, or
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redeemer; if Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened, she must be sleeping;
to have a captive princess, there must be ogres and dragons. And the
greater man’s taste for difficult undertakings, the greater his pleasure
in granting woman independence. Conquering is more fascinating
than rescuing or giving. The average Western male’s ideal is a woman
who freely submits to his domination, who does not accept his ideas
without some discussion, but who yields to his reasoning, who
intelligently resists but yields in the end. The tougher his pride, the
more he relishes dangerous adventure; it is far better to tame
Penthesilea than to marry a consenting Cinderella. The “warrior”
loves danger and plays, says Nietzsche. “For that reason he wants
woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” The man who loves
danger and play is not displeased to see woman change into an
Amazon as long as he keeps the hope of subjugating her:
26
what he
demands in his heart of hearts is that this struggle remain a game for
him, while for woman it involves her very destiny: therein lies the true
victory for man, liberator, or conqueror—that woman freely recognize
him as her destiny.
Thus the expression “to have a woman” conceals a double
meaning: the object’s functions are not dissociated from those of the
judge. The moment woman is viewed as a person, she can only be
conquered with her consent; she must be won. Sleeping Beauty’s
smile fulfills Prince Charming: the captive princesses’ tears of
happiness and gratitude give meaning to the knights’ prowess. On the
other hand, her gaze is not a masculine,
abstract, severe one—it
allows itself to be charmed. Thus heroism and poetry are modes of
seduction: but in letting herself be seduced, the woman exalts heroism
and poetry. She holds an even more essential privilege for the
individualist: she appears to him not as the measure of universally
recognized values but as the revelation of his particular merits and of
his very being. A man is judged by his fellow men by what he does,
objectively and according to general standards. But certain of his
qualities, and among others his vital qualities, can only interest
woman; his virility, charm, seduction, tenderness, and cruelty only
pertain to her: if he sets a value on these most secret virtues, he has an
absolute need of her; through her he will experience the miracle of
appearing as an other, an other who is also his deepest self. Malraux
admirably expresses what the individualist expects from the woman
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he loves in one of his texts. Kyo wonders:
“We hear the voices of others with our ears, our own voices with
our throats.” Yes. “One hears his own life, too, with his throat,
and those of others?… To others, I am what I have done.” To
May alone, he was not what he had done; to him alone, she was
something altogether different from her biography. The embrace
by which love holds beings together against solitude did not
bring its relief to man; it brought relief only to the madman, to
the incomparable monster, dear above all things, that every being
is to himself and that he cherishes in his heart. Since his mother
had died, May was the only being for whom he was not Kyo
Gisors, but an intimate partner … Men are not my kind, they are
those who look at me and judge me; my kind are those who love
me and do not look at me, who love me in spite of everything,
degradation, baseness, treason—me, and not what I have done or
shall do—who would love me as long as I would love myself—
even to suicide.
27
What makes Kyo’s attitude human and moving is that it implies
reciprocity and that he asks May to love him in his authenticity, not to
send back an indulgent reflection of himself. For many men, this
demand is diluted: instead of a truthful revelation, they seek a glowing
image of admiration and gratitude, deified in the depths of a woman’s
two eyes. Woman has often been compared to water, in part because it
is the mirror where the male Narcissus contemplates himself: he leans
toward her, with
good or bad faith. But in any case, what he wants
from her is to be, outside of him, all that he cannot grasp in himself,
because the interiority of the existent is only nothingness, and to reach
himself, he must project himself onto an object. Woman is the
supreme reward for him since she is his own apotheosis, a foreign
form he can possess in the flesh. It is this “incomparable monster,”
himself, that he embraces when he holds in his arms this being who
sums up the World and onto whom he has imposed his values and his
laws. Uniting himself, then, with this other whom he makes his own,
he hopes to reach himself. Treasure, prey, game, and risk, muse,
guide, judge, mediator, mirror, the woman is the Other in which the
subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him
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without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to
him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary
to man’s joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have
had to invent her.
They did invent her.
28
But she also exists without their invention. This is why she is the
failure of their dream at the same time as its incarnation. There is no
image of woman that does not invoke the opposite figure as well: she
is Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Light and Night. Whatever the
point of view, the same fluctuation is always found, because the
inessential necessarily returns to the essential. In the figures of the
Virgin Mother and of Beatrice lie Eve and Circe.
“Through woman,” wrote Kierkegaard, “ideality enters into life and
what would man be without her? Many a man has become a genius
through a young girl,… but none has become a genius through the
young girl he married …
“It is only by a negative relation to her that man is rendered
productive in his ideal endeavors. Negative relations with woman can
make us infinite … positive relations with woman make the man finite
to a far greater extent.”
29
This means that woman is necessary as long
as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own
transcendence; but she is detrimental as objective reality, existing for
herself and limited to herself. In refusing to marry his fiancée,
Kierkegaard believes he has established the only valid relation with
woman. And he is right in the sense that the myth of woman posited
as infinite Other immediately entails its opposite.
Because she is faux Infinite, Ideal without truth, she is revealed as
finitude and mediocrity and thus as falsehood. That is how she
appears in
Laforgue: throughout his work he expresses rancor against
a mystification he blames on man as much as woman. Ophelia and
Salome are nothing but “little women.” Hamlet might think: “Thus
would Ophelia have loved me as her ‘possession’ and because I was
socially and morally superior to her girlish friends’ possessions. And
those little remarks about comfort and well-being that slipped out of
her at lamp-lighting time!” Woman makes man dream, yet she is
concerned with comfort and stews; one speaks to her about her soul,
but she is only a body. And the lover, believing he is pursuing the
Ideal, is the plaything of nature that uses all these mystifications for
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the ends of reproduction. She represents in reality the everydayness of
life; she is foolishness, prudence, mediocrity, and ennui. Here is an
example of how this is expressed, in a poem titled “Notre petite
compagne” (Our Little Companion):
I have the talent of every school
I have souls for all tastes
Pick the flower of my faces
Drink my mouth and not my voice
And do not look for more:
Not even I can see clearly
Our loves are not equal
For me to hold out my hand
You are merely naive males
I am the eternal feminine!
My fate loses itself in the Stars!
I am the Great Isis!
No one has lifted my veil
Dream only of my oases …
Man succeeded in enslaving woman, but in doing so, he robbed her
of what made possession desirable. Integrated into the family and
society, woman’s magic fades rather than transfigures itself; reduced
to a servant’s condition, she is no longer the wild prey incarnating all
of nature’s treasures. Since the birth of courtly love, it has been a
commonplace that marriage kills love. Either too scorned, too
respected, or too quotidian, the wife is no longer a sex object.
Marriage rites were originally intended to protect man against woman;
she becomes his property: but everything we possess in turn
possesses us; marriage is a servitude for the man as well; he is thus
caught in the trap laid by nature: to have desired a lovely young girl,
the male must spend his whole life feeding a heavy matron, a dried-
out old
woman; the delicate jewel intended to embellish his existence
becomes an odious burden: Xanthippe is one of those types of
women that men have always referred to with the greatest horror.
30
But even when the woman is young, there is mystification in marriage
because trying to socialize eroticism only succeeds in killing it.
Eroticism implies a claim of the instant against time, of the individual
241

against the collectivity; it affirms separation against communication; it
rebels against all regulation; it contains a principle hostile to society.
Social customs are never bent to fit the rigor of institutions and laws:
love has forever asserted itself against them. In its sensual form it
addresses young people and courtesans in Greece and Rome; both
carnal and platonic, courtly love is always directed at another’s wife.
Tristan
is the epic of adultery. The period around 1900 that re-creates
the myth of the woman is one where adultery becomes the theme of
all literature. Certain writers, like Bernstein, in the supreme defense of
bourgeois institutions, struggle to reintegrate eroticism and love into
marriage; but there is more truth in Porto-Riche’s
Amoureuse (A
Loving Wife
), which shows the incompatibility of these two types of
values. Adultery can disappear only with marriage itself. For the aim
of marriage is to immunize man against
his
own wife: but other
women still have a dizzying effect on him; it is to them he will turn.
Women are accomplices. For they rebel against an order that tries to
deprive them of their weapons. So as to tear woman from nature, so
as to subjugate her to man through ceremonies and contracts, she was
elevated to the dignity of a human person; she was granted freedom.
But freedom is precisely what escapes all servitude; and if it is
bestowed on a being originally possessed by malevolent forces, it
becomes dangerous. And all the more so as man stopped at half
measures; he accepted woman into the masculine world only by
making her a servant, in thwarting her transcendence; the freedom she
was granted could only have a negative use; it only manifests itself in
refusal. Woman became free only in becoming captive; she renounces
this human privilege to recover her power as natural object. By day
she treacherously plays her role of docile servant, but by night she
changes into a kitten, a doe; she slips back into a siren’s skin, or
riding on her broomstick, she makes her satanic rounds. Sometimes
she exercises her nocturnal magic on her own husband; but it is wiser
to conceal her metamorphoses from her master; she chooses strangers
as her prey; they have no rights over her, and she remains for them a
plant, wellspring, star, or sorceress. So there she is, fated to infidelity:
it is the only concrete form her freedom could assume. She is
unfaithful over and above her own desires, her thoughts, or her
consciousness; because she is seen as an object, she is given up to
any subjectivity that chooses to take her; it is still not sure that locked
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in harems, hidden behind veils, she does not arouse desire in some
person: to inspire desire in a stranger is already to fail her husband
and society. But worse, she is often an accomplice in this fate; it is
only through lies and adultery that she can prove that she is nobody’s
thing, that she refutes male claims on her. This is why man’s jealousy
is so quick to awaken, and in legends woman can be suspected
without reason, condemned on the least suspicion, as were Geneviève
de Brabant and Desdemona; even before any suspicion, Griselda is
subjected to the worst trials; this tale would be absurd if the woman
were not suspected beforehand; there is no case presented against her:
it is up to her to prove her innocence. This is also why jealousy can be
insatiable; it has already been shown that possession can never be
positively realized; even if all others are forbidden to draw from the
spring, no one possesses the thirst-quenching spring: the jealous one
knows this well. In essence, woman is inconstant, just as water is
fluid; and no human force can contradict a natural truth. Throughout
all literature, in
The Thousand and One Nights
as in the
Decameron
,
woman’s ruses triumph over man’s prudence. But it is more than
simply individualistic will that makes him a jailer: society itself, in the
form of father, brother, and husband, makes him responsible for the
woman’s behavior. Chastity is imposed upon her for economic and
religious reasons, every citizen having to be authenticated as the son
of his own father. But it is also very important to compel woman to
conform exactly to the role society devolves on her. Man’s double
demand condemns woman to duplicity: he wants the woman to be his
own and yet to remain foreign to him; he imagines her as servant and
sorceress at the same time. But he admits publicly only to the former
desire; the latter is a deceitful demand hidden in the depths of his heart
and flesh; it goes against morality and society; it is evil like the Other,
like rebel Nature, like the “bad woman.” Man is not wholly devoted to
the Good he constructs and attempts to impose; he maintains a
shameful connivance with the Bad. But whenever the Bad
imprudently dares to show its face openly, he goes to war against it.
In the darkness of night, man invites woman to sin. But in the light of
day, he rejects sin and her, the sinner. And women, sinners
themselves in the mysteries of the bed, show all the more passion for
the public worship of virtue. Just as in primitive society the male sex
is secular and woman’s is laden with religious and magic qualities,
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today’s modern societies consider man’s failings harmless
peccadilloes; they are often
lightly dismissed; even if he disobeys
community laws, the man continues to belong to it; he is merely an
enfant terrible
, not a profound threat to the collective order. If, on the
other hand, the woman deviates from society, she returns to Nature
and the devil, she triggers uncontrollable and evil forces within the
group. Fear has always been mixed with the blame for licentious
behavior. If the husband cannot keep his wife virtuous, he shares her
fault; his misfortune is, in society’s eyes, a dishonor, and there are
civilizations so strict that it is necessary to kill the criminal to
dissociate him from her crime. In others, the complaisant husband will
be punished by noisy demonstrations or led around naked on a
donkey. And the community will take it upon itself to punish the
guilty woman in his place: because she offended the group as a whole
and not only her husband. These customs were particularly brutal in
superstitious and mystical Spain, sensual and terrorized by the flesh.
Calderón, Lorca, and Valle-Inclán made it the theme of many plays. In
Lorca’s
The House of Bernarda Alba
the village gossips want to
punish the seduced young girl by burning her with live coal “in the
place where she sinned.” In Valle-Inclán’s
Divine Words
, the
adulteress appears as a witch who dances with the devil: her fault
discovered, the whole village assembles to tear off her clothes and
drown her. Many traditions reported that the sinner was stripped; then
she was stoned, as told in the Gospel, and she was buried alive,
drowned, or burned. The meaning of these tortures is that she was
thus returned to Nature after being deprived of her social dignity; by
her sin she had released bad natural emanations: the expiation was
carried out as a kind of sacred orgy where the women stripped, beat,
and massacred the guilty one, releasing in turn their mysterious but
beneficial fluids since they were acting in accordance with society.
This savage severity fades as superstitions diminish and fear
dissipates. But in the countryside, godless and homeless bohemian
women are still regarded with suspicion. The woman who freely
exercises her charms—adventuress, vamp, femme fatale—remains a
disquieting type. In Hollywood films the Circe image survives as the
bad woman. Women were burned as witches simply because they
were beautiful. And in the prudish intimidation of provincial virtues,
the old specter of dissolute women is perpetuated.
244

These very dangers make woman captivating game for an
adventurous man. Disregarding his rights as a husband, refusing to
uphold society’s laws, he will try to conquer her in single combat. He
tries to annex the woman, including her resistance; he pursues in her
the same freedom through which she escapes him. In vain. Freedom
cannot be carved up: the
free woman will often be free at the expense
of man. Sleeping Beauty might wake up with displeasure, she might
not recognize her Prince Charming in the one who awakens her, she
might not smile. This is precisely the case of Citizen Kane, whose
protégée is seen to be oppressed and whose generosity is revealed to
be a will for power and tyranny; the hero’s wife listens to his exploits
indifferently, the Muse yawns, listening to the verses of the poet who
dreams of her. Out of boredom, the Amazon can refuse combat; and
she can also emerge victorious. Roman women of the decadence, and
many American women today, impose their whims or their law on
men. Where is Cinderella? The man wanted to give, and here is the
woman taking. No longer a game, it is a question of self-defense.
From the moment the woman is free, her only destiny is one she
freely creates for herself. So the relation between the two sexes is a
relation of struggle. Having become a peer to man, she seems as
formidable as when she faced him as foreign Nature. The female
nurturer, devoted and patient, turns into an avid and devouring beast.
The bad woman also sets her roots in the earth, in Life; but the earth is
a grave, and life a bitter combat: so the myth of the industrious
honeybee or mother hen is replaced by the devouring insect, the
praying mantis, the spider; the woman is no longer the one who
nurses her young but the one who eats the male; the egg is no longer
the storehouse of abundance but a trap of inert matter drowning the
mutilated spermatozoid; the womb, that warm, peaceful, and safe
haven, becomes the rank octopus, the carnivorous plant, abyss of
convulsive darkness; within it lives a serpent that insatiably swallows
the male’s strength. Such a dialectic turns the erotic object into female
black magic, turns the female servant into a traitor, Cinderella into a
witch, and changes all women into the enemy: here is the ransom man
pays for having posited himself in bad faith as the sole essential.
But this enemy face is not woman’s definitive form either. Instead,
Manichaeism is introduced within the feminine kind. Pythagoras
linked the good principle to man and the bad principle to woman; men
245

have tried to overcome the bad by annexing woman; they have been
partially successful; but just as Christianity, by introducing the ideas
of redemption and salvation, gave its full sense to the word
“damnation,” the bad woman stands out in opposition to the sanctified
woman. In the course of this
querelle des femmes
, which has endured
from the Middle Ages to our times, some men only want to see the
blessed woman they dream of, while others want the cursed woman
who belies their dreams. But in fact, if man can find
everything
in
woman, it is because she has both faces. In a carnal and living way,
she represents all the values and anti-values that give life meaning.
Here,
clear-cut, we have the good and the Bad, in opposition to each
other in the guise of devoted Mother and perfidious Lover; in the Old
English ballad “Lord Randal,” a young knight dies in his mother’s
arms, poisoned by his mistress. Richepin’s
La glu
(The Leech) takes
up the same theme, but with more pathos and bad taste. Angelic
Michaela is contrasted with dark Carmen. The mother, the faithful
fiancée, and the patient wife provide healing to the wounds inflicted
on men’s hearts by vamps and witches. Between these clearly fixed
poles a multitude of ambiguous figures were yet to be defined, the
pitiful, the detestable, sinners, victims, coquettes, the weak, the
angelic, the devilish. A multitude of behaviors and feelings thereby
solicit man and enrich him.
The very complexity of woman enchants him: here is a wonderful
servant who can excite him at little expense. Is she angel or devil?
Uncertainty makes her a sphinx. One of the most famous brothels of
Paris was placed under its aegis. In the grand epoch of Femininity, in
the time of corsets, of Paul Bourget, of Henry Bataille, and of the
French cancan, the sphinx theme is all the rage in comedies, poems,
and songs: “Who are you, where do you come from, strange sphinx?”
And dreams and queries about the feminine mystery continue still. To
preserve this mystery, men have long implored women not to give up
their long dresses, petticoats, veils, long gloves, and high boots:
whatever accentuates difference in the Other makes them more
desirable, since it is the Other as such that man wants to possess. In
his letters, Alain-Fournier reproaches English women for their boyish
handshake: French women’s modest reserve flusters him. Woman
must remain secret, unknown, to be adored as a faraway princess;
Fournier seems not to have been terribly deferential to the women
246

who entered his life, but it is in a woman, whose main virtue was to
seem inaccessible, that he incarnates all the wonder of childhood, of
youth, the nostalgia for a lost paradise. In Yvonne de Galais he traced
a white and gold image. But men cherish even feminine defects if they
create mystery. “A woman must have her caprices,” said a man
authoritatively to a reasonable woman. Caprices are unpredictable;
they lend woman the grace of undulating water; lying embellishes her
with glittering reflections; coquetry, even perversity, is her
intoxicating perfume. Deceitful, evasive, misunderstood, duplicitous,
it is thus that she best lends herself to men’s contradictory desires; she
is Maya of the innumerable metamorphoses. It is a commonplace to
represent the Sphinx as a young woman: virginity is one of the secrets
that men—and all the more so if they are libertines—find the most
disconcerting; a young girl’s purity gives hope for all kinds of license,
and no one knows what perversities are concealed beneath her
innocence; still close to animal and
plant, already compliant with
social rites, she is neither child nor adult; her timid femininity does not
inspire fear, but mild unrest. It is understandable that she is one of the
privileged figures of the feminine mystery. But as the “real young
lady” fades, worshipping her has become a bit outdated. On the other
hand, the prostitute’s character that Gantillon, in his triumphantly
successful play, gave to Maya still has a great deal of prestige. She is
one of the most flexible of feminine types, one that best allows the
great game of vices and virtues. For the timorous puritan, she
embodies evil, shame, disease, and damnation; she inspires horror and
disgust; she belongs to no man, but gives herself to all of them and
lives on the trade; therein she regains the fearsome independence of
lewd primitive Goddess Mothers, and she embodies the Femininity
that masculine society has not sanctified, that remains rife with
malevolent powers; in the sexual act, the male cannot imagine that he
possesses her, he is only given over to demons of the flesh, a
humiliation, a stain particularly felt by Anglo-Saxons in whose eyes
the flesh is more or less reviled. On the other hand, a man who is not
frightened by the flesh will love the prostitute’s generous and
rudimentary affirmation; in her he will see exalted femininity that no
morality has diminished; he will find in her body again those magic
virtues that in the past made the woman kin to the stars and the sea: a
Henry Miller, sleeping with a prostitute, feels he has dived into the
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very depths of life, death, the cosmos; he meets God in the moist
shadows of the receptive vagina. Because she is on the margins of a
hypocritically moral world, a sort of pariah, the “lost girl” can be
regarded as the challenger of all official virtues; her indignity relates
her to authentic saints; for the oppressed shall be exalted; Christ
looked upon Mary Magdalene with favor; sin opens the gates of
heaven more easily than hypocritical virtue. Thus Raskolnikov
sacrificed, at Sonya’s feet, the arrogant masculine pride that led him to
crime; murder exacerbated this will for separation that is in all men:
resigned, abandoned by all, a humble prostitute is best suited to
receive his vow of abdication.
31
The words “lost girl” awaken
disturbing echoes;
many men dream of losing themselves: it is not so
easy, one does not easily attain Evil in a positive form; and even the
demoniac is frightened by excessive crimes; the woman enables the
celebration of the black masses, where Satan is evoked without
exactly being invited; she is on the margin of the masculine world:
acts that concern her are really without consequence; yet she is a
human being, and through her, dark revolts against human laws can
be carried out. From Musset to Georges Bataille, visiting “girls” was
hideous and fascinating debauchery. Sade and Sacher-Masoch
satisfied their haunting desires; their disciples, and most men who had
to satisfy their “vices,” commonly turned to prostitutes. Of all women,
they were the ones who were the most subjected to the male, and yet
the ones who best escaped him; this is what makes them likely to take
on numerous meanings. There is, however, no feminine figure—
virgin, mother, wife, sister, servant, lover, fierce virtue, smiling
odalisque—capable of encapsulating the inconstant yearnings of men.
It is for psychology—specifically psychoanalysis—to discover
why an individual is drawn more particularly to one aspect or another
of the multi-faceted Myth and why he incarnates it in any one
particular form. But this myth is involved in all complexes,
obsessions, and psychoses. In particular, many neuroses are rooted in
the vertigo of prohibition: and this vertigo can only emerge if taboos
have previously been established; external social pressure is not
enough to explain its presence; in fact, social prohibitions are not
simply conventions; they have—among other significations—an
ontological meaning that each individual experiences in his own way.
For example, it is interesting to examine the Oedipus complex; it is
248

too often considered as being produced by a struggle between
instinctive tendencies and social directives; but it is first of all an
interior conflict within the subject himself. The infant’s attachment to
the mother’s breast is first an attachment to Life in its immediate form,
in its generality and its immanence; the rejection of weaning is the
rejection of the abandonment to which the individual is condemned
once he is separated from the Whole; from then on, and as he
becomes more individualized and separated, the taste he retains for the
mother’s flesh now torn from his own can be termed “sexual”; his
sensuality is thus mediated, it has become transcendence to ward a
foreign object. But the sooner and more decidedly the child assumes
itself as subject, the more the carnal bond that challenges his
autonomy will become problematic for him. So he shuns his mother’s
caresses; his mother’s authority, the rights she has over him, even her
very presence, inspire a kind of shame in him. Particularly he finds it
embarrassing and obscene to be aware of her as flesh, and he avoids
thinking of her body; in the horror that he feels toward his father or a
second husband or a
lover, there is less jealousy than scandal; to be
reminded that his mother is a carnal being is to be reminded of his
own birth, an event he repudiates with all his force; or at least he
wishes to give it the majesty of a great cosmic phenomenon; he thinks
that Nature, which invests all individuals but belongs to none, should
be contained in his mother; he hates her to become prey, not—as it is
often presumed—because he wants to possess her himself, but
because he wants her to exist above all possession: she must not have
the ordinary features of wife or mistress. When in adolescence,
however, his sexuality becomes virile, his mother’s body begins to
disturb him; but it is because he grasps femininity in general in her;
and often the desire aroused by the sight of her thigh or her breast
disappears as soon as the young boy realizes that this flesh is maternal
flesh. There are many cases of perversion, since adolescence, being
the age of confusion, is the age of perversion where disgust leads to
sacrilege, where temptation is born from the forbidden. But it must
not be thought that the son naively wishes to sleep with his mother
and that exterior prohibitions interfere and oppress him; on the
contrary, desire is born because this prohibition is constituted within
the heart of the individual himself. This censure is the most normal,
the most general reaction. But there again, it does not arise from social
249

regulation masking instinctive desires. Rather, respect is the
sublimation of an original disgust; the young man refuses to regard
his mother as carnal; he transfigures her, he associates her with one of
the pure images of the sacred woman society offers. This is how he
helps strengthen the image of the ideal Mother who will save the next
generation. But this image has such force only because it emanates
from an individual dialectic. And since every woman is inhabited by
the general essence of Woman, thus Mother, it is certain that the
attitude to the Mother will have repercussions in his relations with
wife and mistress; but less simply than is often imagined. The
adolescent who has concretely and sensually desired his mother may
have desired woman in general in her: and the fervor of his
temperament will be appeased with any woman, no matter who; he is
not doomed to incestuous nostalgia.
32
On the other hand, a young
man who has had a tender but platonic respect for his mother may in
every case wish for woman to be part of maternal purity.
The importance of sexuality, and therefore ordinarily of woman, in
both pathological and normal behavior is well-known. Other objects
can also be feminized; because woman is certainly to a large extent
man’s
invention, he could also invent her in the male body: in
homosexuality, sexual division is maintained. But ordinarily Woman
is sought in feminine beings. Through her, through the best and the
worst of her, man learns happiness, suffering, vice and virtue, lust,
renunciation, devotion, and tyranny, and learns about himself; she is
play and adventure, but also contest; she is the triumph of victory and,
more bitter, of failure overcome; she is the giddiness of loss, the
fascination of damnation, of death. There is a world of significations
that exist only through woman; she is the substance of men’s actions
and feelings, the embodiment of all the values that seek their freedom.
It is understandable that even if he were condemned to the cruelest
disavowals, man would not want to relinquish a dream containing all
other dreams.
Here, then, is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is
everything he craves and everything he does not attain. She is the
wise mediator between auspicious Nature and man; and she is the
temptation of Nature, untamed against all reason. She is the carnal
embodiment of all moral values and their opposites, from good to bad;
she is the stuff of action and its obstacle, man’s grasp on the world
250

and his failure; as such she is the source of all man’s reflection on his
existence and all expression he can give of it; however, she works to
divert him from himself, to make him sink into silence and death. As
his servant and companion, man expects her also to be his public and
his judge, to confirm him in his being; but she opposes him with her
indifference, even with her mockery and her laughter. He projects
onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates.
And if it is difficult to say anything about her, it is because man seeks
himself entirely in her and because she is All. But she is All in that
which is inessential: she is wholly the
Other
. And as other she is also
other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is
never exactly
this
that she should be; she is everlasting
disappointment, the very disappointment of existence that never
successfully attains or reconciles itself with the totality of existents.
1.
“Woman is not the useless repetition of man but the enchanted space where the
living alliance of man and nature occurs. If she disappeared, men would be alone,
foreigners without passports in a glacial world. She is earth itself carried to life’s
summit, the earth become sensitive and joyful; and without her, for man, earth is mute
and dead,” wrote Michel Carrouges in “Les pouvoirs de la femme” (Woman’s Powers),
Cahiers du Sud
, no. 292 (1948).
2.

Stages on Life’s Way
.
3.
“Of Gaea sing I, Mother firm of all, the eldest one, who feedeth life on earth,
whichever walk on land or swim the seas, or fly,” says a Homeric hymn. Aeschylus also
glorifies the earth that “gives birth to all beings, nourishes them, and then receives the
fertilized germ once again.”
4.
“To the letter the woman is Isis, fertile nature. She is the river and the bed of the
river, the root and the rose, the earth and the cherry tree, the vine and the grape” (M.
Carrouges, “Woman’s Powers”).
5.
See our study on Montherlant, the epitome of this attitude, a little further on.
6.
Demeter is the archetype of the
mater dolorosa
. But other goddesses—Ishtar and
Artemis—are cruel. Kali is holding a blood-filled skull. “The heads of your newly
killed sons hang from your neck like a necklace … Your figure is beautiful like rain
clouds, your feet are soiled with blood,” says a Hindu poem.
7.

Metamorphoses of the Libido
.
8.
The difference between mystical and mythical beliefs and individuals’ lived
251

convictions is apparent in the following fact: Lévi-Strauss points out that “young
Winnebago Indians visit their mistresses and take advantage of the privacy of the
prescribed isolation of these women during their menstrual period.”
9.
A doctor from the Cher region pointed out to me that women in that situation are
banned from going into the mushroom beds. The question as to whether there is any
basis for these preconceived ideas is still discussed today. Dr. Binet’s only fact
supporting them is an observation by Schink (cited by Vignes). Schink supposedly
saw flowers wilt in an indisposed servant’s hands; yeast cakes made by this woman
supposedly rose only three centimeters instead of the five they usually rose. In any
case, these facts are pretty feeble and poorly established when considering the
importance and universality of the obviously mystical beliefs they come from.
10.
Quoted in Lévi-Strauss,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
.
11.
The moon is a source of fertility; it is seen as the “master of women”; it is often
believed that the moon, in the form of a man or a snake, couples with women. The
snake is an epiphany of the moon; it molts and regenerates, it is immortal, it is a power
that distributes fertility and science; it watches over holy sources, the Tree of Life, the
Fountain of Youth, and so on, but it is also the snake that takes immortality away from
man. It is said that it couples with women. Persian and rabbinical traditions claim that
menstruation is due to the first woman’s intercourse with the snake.
12.
Rabelais called the male sex “the worker of nature.” The religious and historical
origin of the phallus-plowshare–woman-furrow association has already been pointed
out.
13.
The power in combat attributed to the virgin comes from this: the Valkyries and
Joan of Arc, for example.
14.
The sentence by Samivel, quoted by Bachelard in
Earth and Reveries of Will
, is
telling: “I had ceased, little by little, to regard the mountains crouching in a circle at
my feet as foes to vanquish, as females to trample underfoot, or trophies to provide
myself and others proof of my own worth.” The mountain/woman ambivalence comes
across in the common idea of “foes to vanquish,” “trophies,” and “proof of my own
worth.”
This reciprocity can be seen, for example, in these two poems by Senghor:
Naked woman, dark woman
Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of
black wine, Mouth that gives music to my mouth
Savanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent caress
Of the East Wind …
252

And:
Oho! Congo, lying on your bed of forests, queen of subdued Africa
.
May the mountain phalluses hold high your pavilion
For you are woman by my head, by my tongue, You are woman by my belly
.
15.
“Hottentot women, in whom steatopygia is neither as developed nor as consistent
as in Bushman women, think this body type is aesthetically pleasing and starting in
childhood massage their daughters’ buttocks to develop them. Likewise, the artificial
fattening of women, a real stuffing by two means, immobility and abundant ingestion
of specific foods, especially milk, is found in various regions of Africa. It is still
practiced by rich Arab and Jewish city dwellers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco”
(Luquet, “Vénus des cavernes,”
Journal de Psychologie
, 1934).
*
Most likely:
Post coitum omne animal triste
. (“All animals are sad after sex.”)—
T
RANS
.
16.
For example, in Prévert’s ballet
Le rendez-vous
and in Cocteau’s
Le jeune homme et
la mort (The Young Man and Death
), Death is represented as a beloved young girl.
17.
Until the end of the twelfth century theologians—except Saint Anselm—thought,
according to Saint Augustine’s doctrine, that original sin was implied in the law of
generation itself. “Concupiscence is a vice … human flesh born from it is sinful flesh,”
wrote Saint Augustine. And Saint Thomas: “Since sin, the union of the sexes, when
accompanied by concupiscence, transmits original sin to the child.”
*
“A temple built over a sewer.”—T
RANS
.
†
“We are born between shit and piss.”—T
RANS
.
18.
We demonstrated that the myth of the praying mantis has no biological basis.
19.
This explains the privileged place she holds, for example, in Claudel’s work (see
pp. 237–246).
20.
One ought to quote Michel Leiris’s poem “La mère” (The Mother) in its entirety.
Here are some typical passages:
The mother in black, mauve, violet—robber of nights—that’s the sorceress whose
hidden industry brings you into the world, the one who rocks you, coddles you,
coffins you, when she doesn’t abandon her curled-up body—one last little toy—
into your hands, that lay it nicely into the coffin …
The mother—blind statue, fate set up in the middle of the inviolate sanctuary—
she’s nature caressing you, the wind censing you, the whole world that
penetrates you, lifts you sky-high (borne on multiple spires) and rots you …
The mother—young or old, beautiful or ugly, merciful or obstinate—it’s the
253

caricature, the monster jealous woman, the fallen Prototype—assuming the Idea
(a wrinkled Pythia perched on the tripod of her austere capital letter)—is but a
parody of quick, light, iridescent thoughts …
The mother—hip round or dry, breast atremble or firm—is the decline
promised to all women right from the start, the progressive crumbling of the rock
that sparkles beneath the menstrual flood, the slow burying—under the sand of
the old desert—of the luxuriant caravan heaped with beauty
.
The mother—angel of spying death, of the embracing universe, of the love
time’s wave throws back—she’s the shell with its senseless graphics (a sure sign
of poison) to toss into the deep pools, generator of circles for the oblivious
waters
.
The mother—somber puddle, eternally in mourning for everything and
ourselves—she is the misty pestilence that shimmers and bursts, expanding its
great bestial shadow (shame of flesh and milk) bubble by bubble, a stiff veil that
a bolt of lightning as yet unborn ought to rend …
Will it ever occur to any of these innocent bitches to drag themselves barefoot
through the centuries as pardon for this crime: having given birth to us?
[Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.—T
RANS.]
21.
See note 15,
this page
.
22.
It is allegoric in Claudel’s shameful recent poem, where Indochina is called “That
yellow girl”; it is affectionate, by contrast, in the verses of the black poet [Guy
Tirolien]:
Soul of the black country where the elders sleep
live and speak
tonight
in the uneasy strength along your hollow loins
.
23.
Jotted down at the theater.
*
Translated by James Lawler.—T
RANS
.
24.
Philology is rather mysterious on this question; all linguists recognize that the
distribution of concrete words into gender is purely accidental. Yet in French most
entities are feminine: beauty and loyalty, for example. And in German, most imported
foreign words,
others
, are feminine:
die Bar
, for instance.
25.
It goes without saying that they, of course, demonstrate intellectual qualities
perfectly identical to those of men.
26.
American detective novels—or American-style ones—are a striking example. Peter
254

Cheyney’s heroes, for instance, are always grappling with an extremely dangerous
woman, unmanageable for anyone but them: after a duel that unfolds all through the
novel, she is finally overcome by Campion or Callaghan and falls into his arms.
27.

La condition humaine (Man’s Fate
).
28.
“Man created woman—but what out of? Out of a rib of his God, of his ‘ideal’ ”
(Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols
).
29.

In Vino Veritas
.
30.
As we have seen, it was the theme of many lamentations in Greece and during the
Middle Ages.
31.
Marcel Schwob poetically renders this myth in
Le livre de Monelle (The Book of
Monelle):
I will speak to you of the Little Women of Pleasure that you may know of the
beginning … For you see, these little women call out to you … they utter a cry of
compassion, and they hold your hand in their emaciated hands. They only
understand you when you are unhappy; they can cry with you and console
you … None of them may stay long with you. They would be too sad and too
ashamed to remain. When you no longer weep, you have no need of them. They
teach you the lesson they have learned from you, then they flee. They come
through the cold and the rain to kiss your brow, to brush their lips across your
eyes, to drive from you the terror and the sadness that you know … You must not
think of what they do in the shadows.
32.
Stendhal is a striking example.
255

|
CHAPTER 2
|
In order to confirm this analysis of the feminine myth, as it is
collectively presented, we will look at the singular and syncretic form
it takes on in certain writers. The attitude to women seems typical in,
among others, Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and
Stendhal.
I. MONTHERLANT OR THE BREAD OF DISGUST
Montherlant belongs to the long male tradition of adopting the
arrogant Manichaeism of Pythagoras. Following Nietzsche, he belives
that the Eternal Feminine was exalted only during periods of
weakness and that the hero has to rise up against the Magna Mater.
As a specialist in heroism, he has undertaken the task of dislodging
her. Woman is night, disorder, and immanence. “These convulsive
shadows are nothing more than ‘the feminine in its pure state,’ ” he
writes about Mme Tolstoy.
1
The stupidity and baseness of men today,
he thinks, give a positive image of feminine deficiencies: the feminine
instinct, feminine intuition, and women’s clairvoyance are spoken
about, while their absence of logic, stubborn ignorance, and inability
to grasp the real should be denounced; they are neither good
observers nor psychologists; they neither know how to see things nor
understand human beings; their mystery is a trap, their unfathomable
treasures have the depth of nothingness; they have nothing to give
man and can only harm him. For Montherlant the mother is the first
major enemy; in
L’exil
(Exile), an early play of his, he depicts a
mother who keeps her son from enlisting; in
Les Olympiques
, the
teenager who wants to devote himself to sport is barred by his
mother’s fearful egotism; in
Les célibataires

(
The Bachelors
) and in
Les jeunes filles (The Girls
), the mother is vilified. Her crime is to
want to keep her son locked up forever in her womb’s depths; she
mutilates him to make him her own and thus to fill up the sterile
vacuum of her being; she is the worst educator; she cuts the child’s
256

wings; she pulls him back from the heights he aspires to; she turns
him into a moron and diminishes him. These reproaches are not
without some basis. But it is clear from the explicit criticisms that
Montherlant addresses to woman-mother that what he hates in her is
his own birth. He thinks he is God; he wants to be God: because he is
male, because he is a “superior man,” because he is Montherlant. A
god is not engendered; his body, if he has one, is a will molded in
hard and disciplined muscles, not in flesh mutely inhabited by life and
death; this flesh that he repudiates is perishable, contingent, and
vulnerable and is his mother’s fault. “The only part of Achilles’ body
that was vulnerable was the part his mother had held.”
2
Montherlant never wanted to assume the human condition; what he
calls his pride is, from the beginning, a panicked flight from the risks
contained in a freedom engaged in the world through flesh; he claims
to affirm freedom but to refuse engagement; without ties, without
roots, he dreams he is a subjectivity majestically withdrawn upon
itself; the memory of his carnal origins disturbs this dream, and he
resorts to a familiar process: instead of prevailing over it, he
repudiates it.
For Montherlant, the woman lover is just as harmful as the mother;
she prevents man from resurrecting the god in himself; woman’s lot,
he says, is life in its most immediate form, woman lives on feelings,
she wallows in immanence; she has a mania for happiness: she wants
to trap man in it; she does not experience the élan of her
transcendence, she does not have the sense of grandeur; she loves her
lover in his weakness and not in his strength, in his troubles and not
in his joys; she would like him defenseless, so unhappy as to try to
convince him of his misery regardless of any proof to the contrary.
He surpasses and thus escapes her: she means to reduce him to her
size to take him over. Because she needs him, she is not self-
sufficient; she is a parasite. Through Dominique’s eyes, Montherlant
portrayed the promenading women of Ranelagh, women “hanging on
their lovers’ arms like beings without backbones, like big disguised
slugs”;
3
except for sportswomen, women are incomplete beings,
doomed to slavery; soft and lacking muscle, they have no grasp on the
world; thus they fiercely work to annex a lover or, even better, a
husband. Montherlant, to
my knowledge, did not use the praying
mantis myth, but the content is there: for woman, to love is to devour;
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she pretends to give of herself, and she takes. He quotes Mme
Tolstoy’s cry: “I live through him, for him; I demand the same thing
for myself,” and he denounces the dangers of such a furious love; he
finds a terrible truth in Ecclesiastes: A man who wants to hurt you is
better than a woman who wants to help you. He invokes Lyautey’s
experience: “A man of mine who marries is reduced to half a man.”
He deems marriage to be even worse for a “superior man”; it is a
ridiculous conformism to bourgeois values; could you imagine
saying: “Mrs. Aeschylus,” or “I’m having dinner at the Dantes’ ”? A
great man’s prestige is weakened; and even more, marriage shatters
the hero’s magnificent solitude; he “needs not to be distracted from
his own self.”
4
I have already said that Montherlant has chosen a freedom
without
object;
that is, he prefers an illusion of autonomy to an authentic
freedom engaged in the world; it is this availability that he means to
use against woman; she is heavy, she is a burden. “It was a harsh
symbol that a man could not walk straight because the woman he
loved was on his arm.”
5
“I was burning, she puts out the fire. I was walking on water, she
takes my arm, I sink.”
6
How does she have so much power since she is only lack, poverty,
and negativity and her magic is illusory? Montherlant does not explain
it. He simply and proudly says that “the lion rightly fears the
mosquito.”
7
But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign
when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear
any burden. Montherlant has chosen ease; he claims to worship
difficult values: but he seeks to attain them easily. “The crowns we
give ourselves are the only ones worth being worn,” says the king in
Pasiphaé
. How easy. Montherlant overloaded his brow, draping it
with purple, but an outsider’s look was enough to show that his
diadems were papier-mâché and that, like Hans Christian Andersen’s
emperor, he was naked. Walking on water in a dream was far less
tiring than moving forward on earthly land in reality. And this is why
Montherlant the lion avoided the feminine mosquito with terror: he is
afraid to be tested by the real.
8
If Montherlant had really deflated the Eternal Feminine myth, he
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would have to be congratulated: women can be helped to assume
themselves as human beings by denying the Woman. But he did not
smash the idol, as has been shown: he converted it into a monster. He
too believed in this obscure and irreducible essence: femininity; like
Aristotle and Saint Thomas, he believed it was defined negatively;
woman was woman through a lack of virility; that is the destiny any
female individual has to undergo without being able to modify it.
Whoever claims to escape it places herself on the lowest rung of the
human ladder: she does not manage to become man, she gives up
being woman; she is merely a pathetic caricature, a sham; that she
might be a body and a consciousness does not provide her with any
reality: Platonist when it suited him, Montherlant seems to believe that
only the Ideas of femininity and virility possessed being; the
individual who partakes of neither has only an appearance of
existence. He irrevocably condemns these “vampires” who dare to
posit themselves as autonomous subjects, dare to think and act. And
he intends to prove through his depiction of Andrée Hacquebaut that
any woman endeavoring to make herself a person would be changed
into a grimacing marionette. Andrée is, of course, ugly, ungainly,
badly dressed, and even dirty, with dubious nails and forearms: the
little culture she is granted is enough to kill all her femininity; Costals
assures us she is intelligent, but with every page devoted to her,
Montherlant convinces us of her stupidity; Costals claims he feels
sympathy for her; Montherlant renders her obnoxious. Through this
clever equivocation, the idiocy of feminine intelligence is proven, and
an original fall perverting all the virile qualities to which women
aspire is established.
Montherlant is willing to make an exception for sportswomen; they
can acquire a spirit, a soul, thanks to the autonomous exercise of their
body; yet it was easy to bring them down from these heights; he
delicately moves away from the thousand-meter winner to whom he
devoted an enthusiastic hymn; knowing he could easily seduce her, he
wanted to spare her this disgrace. Alban calls her to the top, but
Dominique does not remain there; she falls in love with him: “She
who had been all spirit and all soul sweated, gave off body odours,
and out of breath, she cleared her throat.”
9
Alban chases her away,
indignant. If a woman kills the flesh in her through the discipline of
sports, she can still be esteemed; but an autonomous existence molded
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in a woman’s flesh is a repulsive scandal; feminine flesh is abhorrent
the moment a consciousness inhabits it. What is suitable for woman is
to be purely flesh. Montherlant approves the Oriental attitude: as an
object of pleasure, the weak sex has a place—modest, of course, but
worthwhile—on earth; the pleasure it gives man justifies it, and that
pleasure alone. The ideal woman is totally stupid and totally
subjugated; she is always willing to welcome the man and never ask
anything of him. Such was Douce, and Alban likes her when it is
convenient: “Douce, admirably silly and always lusted after the sillier
she is … useless outside of love and thus firmly but sweetly
avoided.”
10
Such is Rhadidja, the little Arab woman, a quiet beast of love who
docilely accepts pleasure and money. This “feminine beast” met on a
Spanish train can thus be imagined: “She looked so idiotic that I
began to desire her.”
11
The author explains: “What is irritating in women is their claim to
reason; if they exaggerate their animality, they border on the
superhuman.”
12
However, Montherlant is in no way an Oriental sultan; in the first
place, he does not have the sensuality. He is far from delighting in
“feminine beasts” without ulterior motives; they are “sick, nasty,
never really clean”;
13
Costals admits that young boys’ hair smelled stronger and better
than women’s; Solange sometimes makes him feel sick, her “cloying,
almost disgusting, smell, and this body without muscles, without
nerves, like a white slug.”
14
He dreams of more worthy embraces, between equals, where
gentleness was born of vanquished strength … The Oriental relishes
woman voluptuously, thereby bringing about carnal reciprocity
between lovers: the ardent invocations of the Song of Songs, the tales
of
The Thousand and One Nights
, and so much other Arab poetry
attest to the glory of the beloved; naturally, there are bad women; but
there are also delicious ones, and sensual man lets himself go into
their arms confidently, without feeling humiliated. But Montherlant’s
hero is always on the defensive: “Take without being taken, the only
acceptable formula between superior man and woman.”
15
He speaks
readily about the moment of desire, an aggressive moment, a virile
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one; he avoids the moment of pleasure; he might find that he risks
discovering he also sweated, panted, “gave off body odours”; but no,
who would dare breathe in his odor, feel his
dampness? His
defenseless flesh exists for no one, because there is no one opposite
him: his is the only consciousness, a pure transparent and sovereign
presence; and if pleasure exists for his own consciousness, he does
not take it into account: it would have power over him. He speaks
complacently of the pleasure he gave, never what he receives:
receiving means dependence. “What I want from a woman is to give
her pleasure”;
16
the living warmth of voluptuousness would imply
complicity: he accepts none whatsoever; he prefers the haughty
solitude of domination. He seeks cerebral, not sensual, satisfactions in
women.
And the first of these is an arrogance that aspires to express itself,
but without running any risks. Facing the woman, “we have the same
feeling as facing the horse or the bull: the same uncertainty and the
same taste
for testing one’s strength
.”
17
Testing it against other men
would be risky; they would be involved in the test; they would
impose unpredictable rankings, they would return an outside verdict;
with a bull or a horse, one remains one’s own judge, which is
infinitely safer. A woman also, if she is well chosen, remains alone
opposite the man. “I don’t love in equality, because I seek the child in
the woman.” This truism does not explain anything: Why does he
seek the child and not the equal? Montherlant would be more sincere
if he declared that he, Montherlant, does not have any equal; and more
precisely that he does not want to have one: his fellow man frightens
him. He admires the rigors of the Olympic Games that create
hierarchies in which cheating is not possible; but he has not himself
learned the lesson; in the rest of his work and life, his heroes, like
him, steer clear of all confrontation: they deal with animals,
landscapes, children, women-children, and never with equals. In love
with the hard clarity of sports, Montherlant accepts as mistresses only
those women from whom his fearful pride risks no judgment. He
chooses them “passive and vegetal,” infantile, stupid, and venal. He
systematically avoids granting them a consciousness: if he finds traces
of one, he balks, he leaves; there is never a question of setting up any
intersubjective relationship with woman: she has to be a simple
animated object in man’s kingdom; she can never be envisaged as
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subject; her point of view can never be taken into account.
Montherlant’s hero has a supposedly arrogant morality, but it is
merely convenient: he is only concerned with his relations with
himself. He is attached to woman—or rather he attaches woman—not
to take pleasure in her but to take pleasure in himself:
as she is
absolutely inferior, woman’s existence shows up the substantial, the
essential, and the indestructible superiority of the male; risk-free.
So Douce’s foolishness enables Alban to “reconstruct in some way
the sensations of the
ancient demigod
marrying a fabulous Goose.”
18
At Solange’s first touch, Costals changes into a mighty lion: “They
had barely sat down next to each other when he put his hand on the
girl’s thigh (on top of her dress), then placed it in the middle of her
body
as a lion
holds his paw spread out on the piece of meat he has
won.”
19
This gesture made daily by so many men in the darkness of
cinemas is for Costals the “primitive gesture of the
Lord
.”
20
If, like him, they had the sense of grandeur, lovers and husbands
who kiss their mistresses before taking them would experience these
powerful metamorphoses at low cost. “He vaguely sniffed this
woman’s face,
like a lion
who, tearing at the meat he held between his
paws, stops to lick it.”
21
This carnivorous arrogance is not the only pleasure the male gets
out of his female; she is his pretext for him to experience his heart
freely, spuriously, and always without risk. One night, Costals takes
such pleasure in suffering that, sated with the taste of his own pain, he
joyfully attacks a chicken leg. Rarely can one indulge in such a whim.
But there are other powerful or subtle joys. For example,
condescension; Costals condescends to answer some women’s letters,
and he even sometimes does it with care; to an unimportant,
enthusiastic peasant, he writes at the end of a pedantic dissertation, “I
doubt that you can understand me, but that is better than if I
abase
myself to you.”
22
He likes sometimes to shape a woman to his image: “I want you to
be like an Arab scarf for me … I did not
raise
you up to me for you
to be anything else but me.”
23
It amuses him to manufacture some
happy memories for Solange. But it is above all when he sleeps with a
woman that he drunkenly feels his prodigality. Giver of joy, peace,
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heat, strength, and pleasure: these riches he doles out fill him with
satisfaction. He owes nothing to his mistresses; to be absolutely sure
of that, he often pays them; but even when intercourse is an equal
exchange, the woman is obliged to him without reciprocity: she gives
nothing, he takes. He thinks nothing of sending Solange to the
bathroom the day he deflowers her; even if a woman is dearly
cherished, it would be out of the question for a man to go out of his
way for her; he is male by divine right,
she by divine right is doomed
to the douche and bidet. Costals’s pride is such a faithful copy of
caddishness that it is hard to tell him apart from a boorish traveling
salesman.
Woman’s first duty is to yield to his generosity’s demands; when
he imagines Solange does not appreciate his caresses, Costals turns
white with rage. He cherishes Rhadidja because her face lights up
with joy when he enters her. So he takes pleasure in feeling like both
a beast of prey and a magnificent prince. One may be perplexed,
however, by where this fever to take and to satisfy comes from if the
woman taken and satisfied is just a poor thing, some tasteless flesh
faintly palpitating with an ersatz consciousness. How can Costals
waste so much time with these futile creatures?
These contradictions show the scope of a pride that is nothing but
vanity.
A more subtle delectation belonging to the strong, the generous, the
master, is pity for the unfortunate race. Costals from time to time is
moved to feel such fraternal gravity, so much sympathy in his heart
for the humble, so much “pity for women.” What can be more
touching than the unexpected gentleness of tough beings? He brings
back to life this noble postcard image when deigning to consider these
sick animals that are women. He even likes to see sportswomen
beaten, wounded, exhausted, and bruised; as for the others, he wants
them as helpless as possible. Their monthly misery disgusts him, and
yet Costals confides that “he had always preferred women on those
days when he knew them to be affected.”
24
He even yields to this pity sometimes; he goes so far as to make
promises, if not to keep them: he promises to help Andrée, to marry
Solange. When pity retreats from his soul, these promises die:
Doesn’t he have the right to change his mind? He makes the rules of
the game that he plays with himself as the only partner.
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Inferior and pitiful, that is not enough. Montherlant wants woman
to be despicable. He sometimes claims that the conflict of desire and
scorn is a pathetic tragedy: “Oh! To desire what one disdains: what a
tragedy!… To have to attract and repel in virtually the same gesture, to
light and quickly put out as one does with a match, such is the tragedy
of our relations with women!”
25
In truth, the only tragedy is from the
match’s point of view, that is, a negligible point of view. For the
match lighter, careful not to burn his fingers, it is too obvious that this
exercise delights him. If his pleasure were not to “desire what he
disdains,” he would not systematically refuse to
desire what he
esteems: Alban would not repel Dominique; he would choose what he
desires: after all, what is so despicable about a little Spanish dancer,
young, pretty, passionate, and simple; is it that she is poor, from a low
social class, and without culture? In Montherlant’s eyes, these would
seem to be defects. But above all he scorns her as a woman, by
decree; he says in fact that it is not the feminine mystery that arouses
males’ dreams but these dreams that create mystery; but he also
projects onto the object what his subjectivity demands: it is not
because they are despicable that he disdains women but because he
wants to disdain them that they seem abject to him. He feels that the
lofty heights he is perched on are all the higher as the distance
between them and her is great; that explains why his heroes choose
such pathetic sweethearts: against Costals, the great writer, he pits an
old provincial virgin tortured by sex and boredom, and a little far-right
bourgeois, vacuous and calculating; this is measuring a superior
individual with humble gauges: the result is that he comes across as
very small to the reader through this awkward caution. But that does
not matter as Costals thinks himself grand. The humblest weaknesses
of woman are sufficient to feed his pride. A passage in
The Girls
is
particularly telling. Before sleeping with Costals, Solange is preparing
herself for the night. “She has to go to the toilet, and Costals
remembers this mare he had, so proud, so delicate that she neither
urinated nor defecated when he was riding her.” Here can be seen the
hatred of the flesh (Swift comes to mind: Celia shits), the desire to see
woman as a domestic animal, the refusal to grant her any autonomy,
even that of urinating; but Costals’s annoyance shows above all that
he has forgotten he too has a bladder and intestines; likewise, when he
is disgusted by a woman bathed in sweat and body odor, he abolishes
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all his own secretions: he is a pure spirit served by muscles and a sex
organ of steel. “Disdain is nobler than desire,” Montherlant declares
in
Aux fontaines du désir
(At the Fountains of Desire), and Alvaro:
“My bread is disgust.”
26
What an alibi scorn is when it wallows in
itself! Because one contemplates and judges, one feels totally other
than the other that one condemns, and one dismisses the defects one is
accused of free of charge. With what headiness has Montherlant
exhaled his scorn for human beings throughout his whole life! It is
sufficient for him to denounce their foolishness to believe he is
intelligent, to denounce their cowardice to believe himself brave. At
the beginning of the Occupation, he indulged in an orgy of scorn for
his vanquished fellow countrymen: he who is neither French nor
vanquished; he is
above it all. Incidentally, all things considered,
Montherlant, the accuser, did no more than the others to prevent the
defeat; he did not even consent to being an officer; but he quickly and
furiously resumed his accusations that take him well beyond
himself.
27
He affects to be distressed by his disgust so as to feel it is more
sincere and to take more delight in it. The truth is that he finds so
many advantages in it that he systematically seeks to drag the woman
into abjection. He amuses himself by tempting poor girls with money
and jewels: he exults when they accept his malicious gifts. He plays a
sadistic game with Andrée, for the pleasure not of making her suffer
but of seeing her debase herself. He encourages Solange in
infanticide; she welcomes this possibility, and Costals’s senses are
aroused: he takes this potential murderess in a ravishment of scorn.
The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude:
whatever his hidden intention, it is significant in itself.
28
Pissing on
caterpillars, Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and
exterminating others; he takes a laughing pity on those that are
determined to live and generally lets them off; he is delighted by this
game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would have been
just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in front
of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God’s
despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. Likewise,
faced with female animals, the male, from the top of his pedestal,
sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes
unpredictable, gives, takes back, satisfies, pities, or gets irritated; he
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defers to nothing but his own pleasure; he is sovereign, free, and
unique. But these animals must not be anything but animals; they
would be chosen on purpose, their weaknesses would be flattered;
they would be treated as animals with such determination that they
would end up accepting their condition. In similar fashion, the blacks’
petty robberies and lies charmed the whites of Louisiana and Georgia,
confirming the superiority of their own skin color; and if one of these
Negroes persists in being honest, he is treated even worse. In similar
fashion, the debasement of man was systematically practiced in the
concentration camps: the ruling race found proof in this abjection that
it was of superhuman essence.
This was no chance meeting. Montherlant is known to have
admired Nazi ideology. He loved seeing the swastika and the sun
wheel triumph in a celebration of the sun. “The victory of the sun
wheel is not just a victory of the Sun, of paganism. It is the victory of
the sun principle, which is that
everything changes … I see today the
triumph of the principle I am imbued with, that I praised, that with a
full consciousness I feel governs my life.”
29
It is also known with what a relevant sense of grandeur he
presented these Germans who “breathe the great style of strength” as
an example to the French during the Occupation.
30
The same panicky taste for facility that makes him run when facing
his equals brings him to his knees when facing the winners: kneeling
to them is his way of identifying with them; so now he is a winner,
which is what he always wanted, be it against a bull, caterpillars, or
women, against life itself and freedom. It must be said that even
before the victory, he was flattering the “totalitarian magicians.”
31
Like them, he has always been a nihilist, he has always hated
humanity. “People aren’t even worth being led (and humanity does
not have to have done something to you [for you] to detest it to this
extent)”;
32
like them, he thinks that certain beings—race, nation, or
he, Montherlant, himself—are in possession of an absolute privilege
that grants them full rights over others. His morality justifies and calls
for war and persecution. To judge his attitude regarding women, we
must scrutinize this ethic, because after all it is important to know
in
the name of what
they are condemned.
Nazi mythology had a historical infrastructure: nihilism expressed
German despair; the cult of the hero served positive aims for which
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millions of soldiers lost their lives. Montherlant’s attitude has no
positive counterweight, and it expresses nothing but his own
existential choice. In fact, this hero chooses fear. There is a claim to
sovereignty in every consciousness: but it can only be confirmed by
risking itself; no superiority is ever given since man is nothing when
reduced to his subjectivity; hierarchies can only be established among
men’s acts and works; merit must be ceaselessly won: Montherlant
knows it himself. “One only has rights over what one is willing to
risk.” But he never wants to risk
himself
amid his peers. And because
he does not dare confront humanity, he abolishes it. “Infuriating
obstacle that of beings,” says the king in
La reine morte
(The Dead
Queen). They give the lie to the complacent “fairyland” the conceited
creates around himself. They have to be negated. It is noteworthy that
none
of Montherlant’s works depicts a conflict between man and
man; coexistence is the great living drama: he eludes it. His hero
always rises up alone facing animals, children, women, landscapes; he
is prey to his own
desires (like the queen of
Pasiphaé
) or his own
demands (like the master of Santiago), but
no person
is ever beside
him. Even Alban in
The Dream
does not have a friend: when Prinet
was alive, he disdained him; he only exalts him over his dead body.
Montherlant’s works, like his life, recognize only
one
consciousness.
With this, all feeling disappears from this universe; there can be no
intersubjective relation if there is only one subject. Love is derisory;
but it is not in the name of friendship that it is worthy of scorn,
because “friendship lacks guts.”
33
And all human solidarity is haughtily rejected. The hero was not
engendered; he is not limited by space and time: “I do not see any
reasonable reason to be interested in exterior things that are of my
time more than any others of any past year.”
34
Nothing that happens to others counts for him: “In truth events
never counted for me. I only liked them for the rays they made in me
by going through me … Let them be what they want to be.”
35
Action is impossible: “Having had passion, energy, and boldness
and not being able to put them to any use through lack of faith in
anything human!”
36
That means that any
transcendence
is forbidden. Montherlant
recognizes that. Love and friendship are twaddle, scorn prevents
action; he does not believe in art for art’s sake, and he does not
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believe in God. All that is left is the immanence of pleasure. “My one
ambition is to use my senses better than others,”
37
he writes in 1925.
And again: “In fact, what do I want? To possess beings that please me
in peace and poetry.”
38
And in 1941: “But I who accuse, what have I done with these
twenty years? They have been a dream filled with my pleasure. I have
lived high and wide, drunk on what I love: what a mouth-to-mouth
with life!”
39
So be it. But is it not precisely because she wallows in
immanence that woman is trodden upon? What higher aims, what
great designs does Montherlant set against the mother’s or lover’s
possessive love? He also seeks “possession”; and as for the “mouth-
to-mouth with life,” many women can give that back in kind. He does
partake of unusual pleasures: those that can be had from animals,
boys, and preadolescent girls; he is indignant that a passionate
mistress would not dream of putting her twelve-year-old daughter in
his bed: this indignation is not very solar. Can he not be aware that
women’s sensuality is no less tormented than men’s? If that were the
criterion for ranking the sexes, women would perhaps be first.
Montherlant’s inconsistencies are truly abominable. In the name of
“alternation” he declares that since nothing is worth anything,
everything is equal; he accepts everything, he wants to embrace
everything, and it pleases him that mothers with children are
frightened by his broad-mindedness; but he is the one who demanded
an “inquisition” during the Occupation that would censure films and
newspapers;
40
American girls’ thighs disgust him, the bull’s
gleaming penis exalts him: to each his own; everyone re-creates his
own “phantasm”; in the name of what values does this great orgiast
spit with disgust on the orgies of others? Because they are not his
own? So can all morality be reduced to being Montherlant?
He would obviously answer that pleasure is not everything: style
matters. Pleasure should be the other side of renunciation; the
voluptuary also has to feel he is made of the stuff of heroes and
saints. But many women are expert in reconciling their pleasures with
the high image they have of themselves. Why should we think that
Montherlant’s narcissistic dreams are worth more than theirs?
Because, in truth, this is a question of dreams. Because he denies
them any objective content, the words Montherlant juggles with
—“grandeur,” “holiness,” and “heroism”—are merely eye-catchers.
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Montherlant is afraid of risking his own superiority among men; to be
intoxicated on this exalting wine, he retreats into the clouds: the
Unique is obviously supreme. He closes himself up in a museum of
mirages: mirrors reflect his own image infinitely, and he thinks that he
can thus populate the earth; but he is no more than a reclusive prisoner
of himself. He thinks he is free; but he alienates his liberty in the
interests of his ego; he models the Montherlant statue on postcard-
imagery standards. Alban repelling Dominique because he sees a fool
in the mirror illustrates this enslavement: it is in the eyes of others that
one is a fool. The arrogant Alban subjects his heart to this collective
consciousness that he despises. Montherlant’s liberty is an attitude,
not a reality. Without an aim, action is impossible, so he consoles
himself with gestures: it is mimicry. Women are convenient partners;
they give him his lines, he takes the leading role, he crowns himself
with laurels and
drapes himself in purple: but everything takes place
on his private stage; thrown onto the public square, in real light, under
a real sky, the actor no longer sees clearly, cannot stand, staggers, and
falls. In a moment of lucidity, Costals cries out: “Deep down, these
‘victories’ over women are some farce!”
41
Yes. Montherlant’s values and exploits are a sad farce. The noble
deeds that intoxicate him are also merely gestures, never undertakings:
he is touched by Peregrinus’s suicide, Pasiphaé’s boldness, and the
elegance of the Japanese who shelters his opponent under his
umbrella before taking his life in a duel. But he declares that “the
adversary’s specificity and the ideas he is supposedly representing are
not all that important.”
42
This declaration had a particular resonance in 1941. Every war is
beautiful, he also says, whatever its aims; force is always admirable,
whatever it serves. “Combat without faith is the formula we
necessarily end up with to maintain the only acceptable idea of man:
one where he is the hero and the sage.”
43
But it is curious that
Montherlant’s noble indifference regarding all causes inclines him not
toward resistance but toward national revolution, that his sovereign
freedom chooses submission, and that he looks for the secret of
heroic wisdom not in the Maquis but in the conquerors. This is not by
chance either. The pseudo-sublime of
The Dead Queen
and
The
Master of Santiago
is where these mystifications lead. In these plays
that are all the more significant for their ambition, two imperious
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males sacrifice women guilty of simply being human beings to their
hollow pride; they desire love and earthly happiness: as punishment,
one loses her life and the other her soul. If once again one asks, what
for? the author answers haughtily: for nothing. He does not want the
king’s reasons for killing Inès to be too imperious: the murder should
be a banal political crime. “Why do I kill her? There is probably a
reason, but I cannot see it,” he says. The reason is that the solar
principle triumphs over earthly banality; but this principle does not
inform any aim: it calls for destruction, nothing more, as has already
been seen. As for Alvaro, Montherlant says in a preface that he is
interested in certain men of this period in “their clear-cut faith, their
scorn for the outside reality, their taste for destruction, their passion
for nothing.” This is the passion to which the master of Santiago
sacrifices his daughter. She will be arrayed in the beautiful shimmer
of words mystical. Is it not boring to prefer happiness to mysticism?
Sacrifices and renunciations
have meaning only in the light of an aim,
a human aim; and aims that go beyond singular love or personal
happiness can only exist in a world that recognizes the price of both
love and happiness; the “shopgirl’s morality” is more authentic than
hollow phantasms because it is rooted in life and reality, where great
aspirations can spring forth. Inès de Castro can easily be pictured in
Buchenwald, with the king hurrying to the German embassy for
reasons of state. Many shopgirls were worthy of a respect that we
would not grant to Montherlant during the Occupation. The empty
words he crams himself with are dangerous for their very hollowness:
this superhuman mysticism justifies all kinds of temporal
devastations. The fact is that in the plays under discussion, this
mystique is attested to by two murders, one physical and the other
moral; Alvaro does not have far to go to become a grand inquisitor:
wild, solitary, unrecognizable; nor the king—misunderstood, rejected
—to become a Himmler. They kill women, they kill Jews, they kill
effeminate men and “Jewed” Christians, they kill everything they
want or like to kill in the name of these lofty ideas. Only by negations
can negative mysticisms be affirmed. True surpassing is a positive
step toward the future, toward humanity’s future. The false hero, to
convince himself he goes far and flies high, always looks back, at his
feet; he despises, he accuses, he oppresses, he persecutes, he tortures,
he massacres. It is through the evil he does to his neighbor that he
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measures his superiority over him. Such are Montherlant’s summits
that he points out with an arrogant finger when he interrupts his
“mouth-to-mouth with life.”
“Like the donkey at an Arab waterwheel, I turn, I turn, blind and
endlessly retracing my steps. But I don’t bring up freshwater.” There
is not much to add to this avowal that Montherlant signed in 1927.
Freshwater never sprang forth. Maybe Montherlant should have lit
Peregrinus’s pyre: that would have been the most logical solution. He
preferred to take refuge in his own cult. Instead of giving himself to
this world, which he did not know how to nourish, he settled for
seeing himself in it; and he organized his life in the interest of this
mirage visible to his eyes alone. “Princes are at ease in all situations,
even in defeat,” he writes;
44
and because he delighted in defeat, he
believes he is king. He learns from Nietzsche that “woman is the
hero’s amusement,” and he thinks that it is enough to get pleasure
from women to be anointed hero. The rest is the same. As Costals
might say: “Deep down, what a farce!”
II. D. H. LAWRENCE OR PHALLIC PRIDE
Lawrence is the very antipode of Montherlant. His objective is not to
define the special relations of woman and man but to situate them both
in the truth of Life. This truth is neither representation nor will: it
envelops the animality in which human beings have their roots.
Lawrence passionately rejects the antithesis sex versus brain; he has a
cosmic optimism radically opposed to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the
will to live expressed in the phallus is joy: thought and action must
derive their source from this, or else it would be an empty concept and
a sterile mechanism. The sexual cycle alone is not sufficient, because
it falls back into immanence: it is synonymous with death; but better
this mutilated reality—sex and death—than an existence cut off from
carnal humus. Unlike Antaeus, man needs more than to renew contact
with the earth from time to time; his life as a male has to be wholly the
expression of his virility, which posits and requires woman in its
immediacy; she is thus neither diversion nor prey, she is not an object
confronting a subject but a pole necessary for the existence of the pole
of the opposite sign. Men who have misunderstood this truth—a
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Napoleon, for example—have missed their destiny as men: they are
failures. It is by fulfilling his generality as intensely as possible, and
not by affirming his singularity, that the individual can save himself:
whether male or female, an individual should never seek the triumph
of pride or the exaltation of his self in erotic relations; to use one’s sex
as a tool of one’s will is the irreparable error; it is essential to break
the barriers of the ego, transcend the very limits of consciousness, and
renounce all personal sovereignty. Nothing could be more beautiful
than that little statue of a woman giving birth: “A terrible face, void,
peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of
sensation beneath.”
45
This ecstasy is neither sacrifice nor abandon;
there is no question of either sex letting itself be swallowed up by the
other; neither the man nor the woman should be like a broken
fragment of a couple; one’s sex is not a wound; each one is a
complete being, perfectly polarized; when one is assured in his
virility, the other in her femininity, “each acknowledges the perfection
of the polarized sex circuit”;
46
the sexual act is without annexation,
without surrender of either partner, the marvelous fulfillment of each
other. When Ursula and Birkin finally found each other, they “would
give each other this star-equilibrium
which alone is freedom” … “For
she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of
mystic, palpable, real otherness.”
47
Attaining each other in the
generous wrenching of passion, two lovers together attain the Other,
the All. So it is for Paul and Clara in the moment of their love: she is
for him “a strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the
darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than
themselves, that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their
meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit,
the wheel of the stars.”
48
Lady Chatterley and Mellors attain the same
cosmic joys: blending into each other, they blend into the trees, the
light, and the rain. Lawrence develops this doctrine extensively in
A
Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”:
“Marriage is no marriage that
is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with
the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in
the rhythm of days, in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of
quarters, of years, of decades and of centuries. Marriage is no
marriage that is not a correspondence of blood. For the blood is the
substance of the soul.” “The blood of man and the blood of woman
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are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled.” This is
why these two streams encircle the whole of life in their meanderings.
“The phallus is a column of blood, that fills the valley of blood of a
woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depth the great
river of female blood, yet neither breaks its bounds. It is the deepest
of all communions … And it is one of the greatest mysteries.” This
communion is a miraculous enrichment; but it requires that claims to
“personality” be abolished. When personalities seek to reach each
other without surrendering themselves, as usually happens in modern
civilization, their attempt is doomed to failure. There is a personal,
blank, cold, nervous, poetic sexuality that dissolves each one’s vital
stream. Lovers treat each other like instruments, breeding hate
between them: so it is with Lady Chatterley and Michaelis; they
remain locked in their subjectivity; they can experience a fever
analogous to that procured by alcohol or opium, but it is without
object: they fail to discover the reality of the other; they attain nothing.
Lawrence would have condemned Costals summarily. He depicted
Gerald as one of those proud and egotistical males; and Gerald is in
large part responsible for this hell he and Gundrun hurl themselves
into.
49
Cerebral and willful, he delights in the empty assertion of his
self and hardens himself against life: for the
pleasure of mastering a
spirited mare, he holds her firm against a fence where a train thunders
past, bloodying her rebellious flanks and intoxicating himself with his
power. This will to dominate debases the woman against whom it is
directed; physically weak, she is thus transformed into a slave. Gerald
leans over Pussum: “Her inchoate look of a violated slave, whose
fulfilment lies in her further and further violation, made his nerves
quiver … his was the only will, she was the passive substance of his
will.” Here is pitiful domination; if the woman is merely a passive
substance, the male dominates nothing. He thinks he is taking,
enriching himself: it is a delusion. Gerald embraces Gudrun tightly in
his arms: “She was the rich, lovely substance of his being … So she
was passed away and gone in him, and he was perfected.” But as
soon as he leaves her, he finds himself alone and empty; and the next
day, she fails to appear at their rendezvous. If the woman is strong,
the male claim arouses a symmetrical claim in her; fascinated and
rebellious, she becomes masochistic and sadistic in turn. Gudrun is
greatly disturbed when she sees Gerald press the frightened mare’s
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flanks between his thighs; but she is also disturbed when Gerald’s
wet nurse tells her how in the past she “pinched his little bottom.”
Masculine arrogance provokes feminine resistance. While Ursula is
won over and saved by Birkin’s sexual purity, as Lady Chatterley
was by the gamekeeper, Gerald drags Gudrun into a struggle with no
way out. One night, unhappy, shattered by a death, he abandons
himself in her arms. “She was the great bath of life, he worshipped
her. Mother and substance of all life she was … But the miraculous,
soft effluence of her breast suffused over him, over his seared,
damaged brain, like a healing lymph, like a soft, soothing flow of life
itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb again.” That night he
senses what communion with woman might be; but it is too late; his
happiness is vitiated because Gudrun is not really present; she lets
Gerald sleep on her shoulder, but she stays awake, impatient, apart. It
is the punishment of the individual who is his own prey: alone he
cannot end his solitude; in erecting barriers around his self, he erected
those around the Other: he will never connect to it. In the end, Gerald
dies, killed by Gudrun and by himself.
Thus it would seem at first that neither of the two sexes is
privileged. Neither is subject. Woman is neither a prey nor a simple
pretext. As Malraux notes, Lawrence thinks that it is not enough,
unlike Hindus, for woman to be merely the occasion for a contact
with the infinite, as would be a landscape: that would be another way
of making her an object.
50
She is as
real as the man; a real
communion has to be reached. This is why Lawrence’s heroes
demand much more from their mistresses than the gift of their bodies:
Paul does not want Myriam to give herself to him as a tender
sacrifice; Birkin does not want Ursula to limit herself to seeking
pleasure in his arms; cold or burning, the woman who remains closed
within herself leaves the man to his solitude: he must reject her. Both
have to give themselves to each other, body and soul. If this giving is
accomplished, they have to remain forever faithful to each other.
Lawrence believed in monogamous marriage. There is only a quest
for variety if one is interested in the uniqueness of beings: but phallic
marriage is founded on generality. When the virility-femininity circuit
is established, desire for change is inconceivable: it is a perfect circuit,
closed on itself and definitive.
Reciprocal gift, reciprocal fidelity: Is it really the reign of mutual
274

recognition? Far from it. Lawrence passionately believes in male
supremacy. The very expression “phallic marriage,” the equivalence
he establishes between the sexual and the phallic, is proof enough. Of
the two bloodstreams that mysteriously marry, the phallic stream is
favored. “The phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers,
that establishes the two streams in a oneness.” Thus man is not only
one of the terms of the couple, but also their relationship; he is their
surpassing: “The bridge to the future is the phallus.” Lawrence wants
to substitute the cult of the phallic for that of the Goddess Mother;
when he wants to highlight the sexual nature of the cosmos, it is
through man’s virility rather than woman’s womb. He almost never
shows a man excited by a woman: but over and over he shows
woman secretly overwhelmed by the vibrant, subtle, insinuating
appeal of the male; his heroines are beautiful and healthy, but not
sensuous, while his heroes are troubled wild animals. It is male
animals that embody the troubling and powerful mystery of Life;
women are subjugated by their spell: this one is affected by the fox,
that one is taken with a stallion, Gudrun feverishly challenges a herd
of young oxen; she is overwhelmed by the rebellious vigor of a
rabbit. A social privilege is connected to this cosmic one. Because the
phallic stream is impetuous and aggressive and bestrides the future—
Lawrence does not make himself perfectly clear on this point—it is up
to man to “carry forward the banner of life”;
51
he reaches for goals,
he incarnates transcendence; woman is absorbed by her sentiments,
she is all interiority; she is doomed to immanence. Not only does man
play the active role in sexual life, but it is through him that this life is
transcended; he is rooted in the sexual world, but he escapes from it;
she remains locked up in it. Thought and action have their roots in the
phallus; lacking the phallus, woman has no rights to either: she can
play the man’s role, and brilliantly at that, but it is a game without
truth. “Woman is really polarised downwards, towards the centre of
the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.
And man is polarised upwards, towards the sun and the day’s
activity.”
52
For woman, “her deepest consciousness is in the loins and
belly.”
53
If she turns upward, the moment comes when everything
collapses. In the domain of action, man must be the initiator, the
positive; woman is the positive on the emotional level. Thus Lawrence
goes back to the traditional bourgeois conception of Bonald, Auguste
275

Comte, and Clément Vautel. Woman must subordinate her existence
to that of man. “She’s got to believe in you …, and in the deep
purpose you stand for.”
54
Then man will owe her tenderness and infinite gratitude. “Ah, how
good it is to come home to your wife when she
believes
in you and
submits to your purpose that is beyond her … You feel an
unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you.”
55
Lawrence
adds that to merit this devotion, man must be authentically invested
with a higher purpose; if his project is but a sham, the couple sinks
into insignificant mystification; better still to enclose one’s self in the
feminine cycle—love and death—like Anna Karenina and Vronsky or
Carmen and Don José, than to lie to each other like Pierre and
Natasha. But subject to this reserve, Lawrence, like Proudhon and
Rousseau, advocates monogamous marriage where woman derives
the justification for her existence from her husband. Lawrence was
just as vituperative as Montherlant concerning the woman who wants
to reverse the roles. She should cease playing at the Magna Mater,
claiming to be in possession of the truth of life; dominating and
devouring, she mutilates the male, she forces him to fall back into
immanence, and she leads him astray from his goals. Lawrence was
far from disparaging motherhood: on the contrary; he rejoices in being
flesh, he accepts his birth, he cherishes his mother; mothers appear in
his work as magnificent examples of real femininity; they are pure
renunciation, absolute generosity, and all their human warmth is
devoted to their children; they accept them becoming men, they are
proud of it. But the egotistical lover who tries to bring the man back to
his childhood must be feared;
she cuts man down in his flight. “The
moon, the planet of women, sways us back.”
56
She speaks incessantly about love: but to love for her is to take, to
fill the void she feels in herself; this love is close to hate; so it is that
Hermione, who suffers from a horrible deficiency because she has
never been able to give herself, wants to annex Birkin; she fails; she
tries to kill him, and the voluptuous ecstasy she feels in striking him is
identical to the egotistic spasm of pleasure.
57
Lawrence detests modern women, celluloid and rubber creatures
who claim a consciousness. When the woman has become sexually
conscious, “there she is, functioning away from her own head and her
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own consciousness of herself and her own automatic self-will.”
58
He
forbids her to have an autonomous sensuality; she is made to give, not
to take. Putting words in Mellors’s mouth, Lawrence cries out his
horror of lesbians. But he also blames the woman who has a detached
or aggressive attitude to the male; Paul feels wounded and irritated
when Myriam caresses his loins, telling him: “You are so
fine!
”
Gundrun, like Myriam, is at fault when she feels enchanted with her
lover’s beauty: this contemplation separates them, as much as the
irony of icy women intellectuals who consider the penis pitiful or
male gymnastics ridiculous; the intense quest for pleasure is no less
blameworthy: there is an acute, solitary pleasure that also separates,
and woman should not aim for it. Lawrence sketched many portraits
of these independent, dominating women who have missed their
feminine vocation. Ursula and Gudrun are of this type. At first Ursula
is a dominator. “Man must render himself up to her. He must be
quaffed to the dregs by her.”
59
She will learn to overcome her will.
But Gudrun is stubborn; cerebral, artistic, she fiercely envies men
their independence and their potential for activity; she persists in
keeping her individuality intact; she wants to live for herself; ironic
and possessive, she will remain forever shut up in her subjectivity.
The most significant figure is Myriam because she is the least
sophisticated.
60
Gerald is partially responsible for Gudrun’s failure;
but vis-à-vis Paul, Myriam alone bears the full weight of her ill fate.
She also would like to be a man, and she hates men; she does not
accept herself in her generality; she wants to “distinguish herself”;
because the great stream of life does not pass through her, she can be
like a sorceress or a priestess, but never a bacchante; she is
moved by
things only when she has re-created them in her soul, giving them a
religious value: this fervor itself separates her from life; she is poetic,
mystical, maladapted. “She was not clumsy, and yet none of her
movements seemed quite THE movement … she put too much
strength into the effort.” She seeks interior joys, and reality frightens
her; sexuality frightens her; when she sleeps with Paul, her heart
stands aside in a kind of horror; she is always consciousness, never
life: she is not a companion; she does not consent to meld with her
lover; she wants to absorb him into herself. He is irritated by this will;
he becomes violently angry when he sees her caressing flowers: she
seems to want to tear their hearts out; he insults her: “You’re always
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begging things to love you … as if you were a beggar for
love … You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving
is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb,
absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a
shortage somewhere.” Sexuality does not exist to fill a void; it must
be the expression of a whole being. What women call love is their
greed before the virile force they want to grab. Paul’s mother lucidly
thinks about Myriam: “She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw
him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for
himself. He will never be a man on his own feet—she will suck him
up.” The young girl is happy when her friend is ill because she can
take care of him: she attempts to serve him, but it is a way of
imposing her will on him. Because she lives apart from him, she
excites in Paul “an intensity like madness. Which fascinated him, as
drug taking might.” But she is incapable of bringing him joy and
peace; from the depth of her love, in her secret self “she had hated him
because she loved him and he dominated her.” And Paul distances
himself from her. He seeks his balance with Clara; beautiful, lively,
animal, she gives herself unreservedly; and the lovers reach moments
of ecstasy that surpass them both; but Clara does not understand this
revelation. She believes that she owes this joy to Paul himself, to his
uniqueness, and she wants to appropriate him: she fails to keep him
precisely because she wants him for herself. As soon as love is
individualized, it changes into avid egotism, and the miracle of
eroticism vanishes.
The woman must renounce personal love: neither Mellors nor Don
Cipriano consents to saying words of love to his mistress. Teresa, the
model wife, becomes indignant when Kate asks her if she loves Don
Ramón.
61
“He is my life,” she replies; the gift she concedes to him is
something quite different from love. Woman must, like man, abdicate
all pride
and all will; if she embodies life for the man, he embodies it
for her as well; Lady Chatterley only finds peace and joy because she
recognizes this truth: “She would give up her own hard, bright female
power. She was weary of it, stiffened with it. She would sink in the
new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels, that sang
the voiceless song of adoration”: so she is called to the rapture of the
bacchantes; blindly obeying her lover, not seeking herself in his arms,
she forms with him a harmonious couple, in tune with the rain, the
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trees, and the spring flowers. Likewise, Ursula renounces her
individuality in Birkin’s hands, and they attain a “star-equilibrium.”
But it is
The Plumed Serpent
above all that reflects in its entirety
Lawrence’s ideal. For Don Cipriano is one of those men who “carry
forward the banner of life”; he has a mission and is entirely given
over to it to such an extent that virility in him is surpassed and exalted
to the point of divinity: if he anoints himself god, it is not a
mystification; every man who is fully man is a god; he thus deserves
the absolute devotion of a woman. Imbued with Western prejudices,
Kate at first refuses this dependence; she is attached to her personality
and her limited existence; but little by little letting herself be penetrated
by the great stream of life, she gives her body and soul to Cipriano. It
is not a slave’s surrender: before deciding to stay with him, she insists
that he recognize his need for her; he recognizes it, since in fact
woman is necessary for man; so she consents to never being anything
other than his companion; she adopts his goals, his values, his
universe. This submission expresses itself even in eroticism;
Lawrence does not want the woman to be tense in the search for
pleasure, separated from the male by the spasm that jolts her; he
deliberately refuses to bring her to orgasm; Don Cipriano withdraws
from Kate when he feels her close to this nervous pleasure; she
renounces even this sexual autonomy. “Her strange seething feminine
will and desire subsided in her and swept away, leaving her soft and
powerfully potent, like the hot springs of water that gushed up so
noiseless, so soft, yet so powerful, with a sort of secret potency.”
We can see why Lawrence’s novels are first and foremost
“guidebooks for women.” It is infinitely more difficult for the woman
than for the man to submit to the cosmic order, because he submits in
an autonomous fashion, whereas she needs the mediation of the male.
When the Other takes on the form of a foreign consciousness and
will, there is real surrender; on the contrary, an autonomous
submission strangely resembles a sovereign decision. Lawrence’s
heroes are either condemned from the start or else from the start they
hold the secret of wisdom;
62
their submission to the cosmos
was
consummated so long ago and they derive such interior certitude from
it that they seem as arrogant as a self-important individualist; there is a
god who speaks through their mouths: Lawrence himself. But the
woman must bow to their divinity. Even if the man is a phallus and
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not a brain, the virile individual keeps his privileges; woman is not
evil, she is even good: but subordinated. Once again, it is the ideal of
the “real woman” that Lawrence offers us, that is, of the woman who
unhesitatingly assents to defining herself as the Other.
III. CLAUDEL OR THE HANDMAIDEN OF THE LORD
The originality of Claudel’s Catholicism is of such an obstinate
optimism that evil itself turns to good:
Evil itself
Abides its own share of good which must not be wasted
.
63
Adopting the point of view that can only be that of the Creator—
since we assume the Creator to be all-powerful, omniscient, and
benevolent—Claudel subscribes to creation entirely; without hell and
sin, there could be no free will, no salvation; when he brought forth
the world from nothing, God foresaw the Fall and the redemption. In
the eyes of Jews and Christians, Eve’s disobedience had put her
daughters in a very bad position: we see how badly the Fathers of the
Church have mistreated women. But here, on the contrary, she is
justified if one accepts that she has served divine purposes. “Woman!
that service she once by her disobedience rendered to God in the
earthly Paradise; that deep agreement reached between her and him;
that flesh she put at the disposal of redemption by way of the fault!”
64
There is no doubt she is the source of sin, and through her man lost
paradise. But man’s sins have been redeemed, and this world is
blessed anew: “We have not left the paradise of delight in which God
first put us!”
65
“Every Land is the Promised Land.”
66
Nothing that has come from God’s hands, nothing that is given,
can be in itself bad: “We pray to God with the entirety of his work!
Nothing he
made is in vain, nothing is alien to anything else.”
67
And furthermore, there is nothing that is unnecessary. “All things
that he has created commune together, all at one and the same time are
necessary each to each.”
68
Thus it is that woman has her place in the harmony of the universe;
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but it is not just an ordinary place; there is a “strange and, in Lucifer’s
eyes, scandalous passion that binds the Eternal to this momentary
flower of Nothingness.”
69
Of course, woman can be destructive: In Lechy, Claudel incarnated
the bad woman who drives man to his destruction;
70
in
Break of
Noon
, Ysé ruins the life of those trapped by her love. But if there
were not this risk of loss, there would not be salvation either. Woman
“is the element of risk he deliberately introduced into the midst of his
marvelous construction.”
71
It is good that man should know the
temptations of the flesh. “It is this enemy within us that gives our
lives their dramatic element, their poignant salt. If our souls were not
so brutally assailed, they would continue to sleep, yet here they leap
up … This struggle is the apprenticeship of victory.”
72
Man is
summoned to become aware of his soul not only by the spiritual path
but also by that of the flesh. “And what flesh speaks more forcefully
to man than the flesh of a woman?”
73
Whatever wrenches him from
sleep, from security, is useful: love in whatever form it presents has
the virtue of appearing in “our small personal worlds, ordered by our
conventional reasoning, as a deeply perturbing element.”
74
Often
woman is but a deceptive giver of illusions:
I am the promise that cannot be kept, and my grace consists of
that very thing. I am the sweetness of what is, with the regret for
what is not. I am the truth that has the countenance of error, and
he who loves me does not bother to disentangle each from
each.
75
But there is also usefulness in illusion; this is what the Guardian
Angel announces to Doña Prouhèze:
Even sin! Sin also serves
.
So it was good for him to love me?
It was good for you to teach him desire
.
Desire for an illusion? For a shadow that forever escapes him?
Desire is for what is, illusion is for what is not. Desire pursued
to the furthermost point of illusion
Is desire pursued to the furthermost point of what is not
.
76
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By God’s will, what Prouhèze was for Rodrigo is “a sword
through his heart.”
77
But woman in God’s hands is not only this blade, this burn; the
riches of this world are not meant to be always refused: they are also
nourishment; man must take them with him and make them his own.
The loved one will embody for him all the recognizable beauty in the
universe; she will be a chant of adoration on his lips.
“How lovely you are, Violaine, and how lovely is the world where
you are.”
78
“Who is she who stands before me, gentler than the breeze, like the
moon among the young foliage?… Here she is like the fresh
honeybee unfolding its newborn wings, like a lanky doe, and like a
flower that does not even know it is beautiful.”
79
“Let me breathe your scent like that of the earth, when it glows and
is washed like an altar, and brings forth blue and yellow flowers.
“And let me breathe the summer’s aroma that smells of grass and
hay, and is like the autumn’s fragrance.”
80
She is the sum of all nature: the rose and the lily, the star, the fruit,
the bird, the wind, the moon, the sun, the fountain, “the peaceful
tumult, in noon’s light, of a great port.”
81
And she is still more: a peer.
“Now, this time for me, that luminous point of night’s living sands
is something quite different from a star,
“Someone human like me …”
82
“You will be alone no more, and I will be in you and with you,
with you
forever, the devoted one. Someone yours forever who will
never be absent, your wife.”
83
“Someone to listen to what I say and trust in me.
“A soft-voiced companion who takes us in her arms and attests she
is a woman.”
84
Body and soul, in taking her into his heart, man finds his roots in
this earth and accomplishes himself.
“I took this woman, and she is my measure and my earthly
allotment.”
85
She is a burden, and man is not made to be burdened.
“And the foolish man finds himself surprised by this absurd
person, this great heavy and cumbersome thing.
“So many dresses, so much hair, what can he do?
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“He is no longer able, he no longer wants to be rid of her.”
86
This burden is also a treasure. “I am a great treasure,” says
Violaine.
Reciprocally, woman achieves her earthly destiny by giving herself
to man.
“For what is the use of being a woman, unless to be gathered?
“And being this rose, if not to be devoured? And of being born,
“Unless to belong to another and to be the prey of a powerful
lion?”
87
“What shall we do, who can only be a woman in his arms, and in
his heart a cup of wine?”
88
“But you my soul say: I have not been created in vain and he who
is called to gather me is alive!”
“The heart that was waiting for me, ah! what joy for me to fill it.”
89
Of course this union of man and woman is to be consummated in
the presence of God; it is holy and belongs in the eternal; it should be
consented to by a deep movement of the will and
cannot
be broken by
an individual caprice. “Love, the consent that two free people grant
each other, seemed to God so great a thing that he made it a
sacrament. In this as in all other matters the sacrament gives reality to
that which was but the heart’s supreme desire.”
90
And further:
“Marriage is not pleasure but the sacrifice of pleasure, it is the
study made by two souls who forever, henceforth, and to end beyond
themselves,
“Must be content with each other.”
91
It is not only joy that man and woman will bring to each other
through this union; each will take possession of the other’s being.
“He it was who knew how to find that soul within my soul!… He it
was who came to me and held out his hand. He was my calling! How
can I describe it? He was my origin: it was he by whom and for
whom I came into the world.”
92
“A whole part of myself which I thought did not exist because I
was busy elsewhere and not thinking of it. Ah! My God, it exists, it
does exist, terribly.”
93
And this being appears as justified, necessary for the one it
completes. “It is in him that you were necessary,” says Prouhèze’s
Angel. And Rodrigo:
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“For what is it to die but to stop being necessary?
“When was she able to do without me? When shall I cease to be for
her that without which she could not have been herself?”
94
“They say that no soul was made except in a life and in a
mysterious relationship with other lives.
“But for us it is still more than that. For I exist as I speak; one
single thing resonating between two people.
“When we were being fashioned, Orion, I think that a bit of your
substance was left over and that I am made of what you lack.”
95
In the marvelous necessity of this union, paradise is regained, death
conquered:
“At last the being who existed in paradise is here remade of a man
and woman.”
96
“We will never manage to do away with death unless it be by one
another.
“As purple mixed with orange gives pure red.”
97
Finally, in the form of another, each one attains the Other, that is
God, in his plenitude.
“What we give one another is God in different guises.”
98
“Would your desire for heaven have been so great if you had not
glimpsed it once in my eyes?”
99
“Ah! Stop being a woman and let me at last see on your face the
God you are powerless to hide.”
100
“The love of God calls in us on the same faculty as the love of his
creatures, it calls on our feeling that we are not complete in ourselves
and that the supreme God in which we are consummated is someone
outside ourselves.”
101
Thus each finds in the other the meaning of his earthly life and also
irrefutable proof of the insufficiency of this life:
“Since I cannot grant him heaven, at least I can tear him from the
earth. I alone can give him need in the measure of his desire.”
102
“What I was asking from you, and what I wanted to give you, is
not compatible with time, but with eternity.”
103
Yet woman’s and man’s roles are not exactly symmetrical. On the
social level, man’s primacy is evident. Claudel believes in hierarchies
and, among others, the family’s: the husband is the head. Anne
Vercors rules over her home. Don Pelagio sees himself as the
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gardener entrusted with the care of this delicate plant, Doña Prouhèze;
he gives her a mission she does not dream of refusing. The fact alone
of being a male confers privilege. “Who am I, poor girl, to compare
myself to the male of my race?” asks Sygne.
104
It is man who labors in the fields, who builds cathedrals, who
fights with the sword, who explores the world, who acts, who
undertakes. God’s plans are accomplished on earth through him.
Woman is merely an auxiliary. She is the one who stays in place, who
waits, and, who, like Sygne, maintains: “I am she who remains and
who am always there.”
She defends the heritage of Coûfontaine, keeps his accounts in
order while he is far away fighting for the cause. The woman brings
the relief of hope to the fighter: “I bring irresistible hope.”
105
And that
of pity.
“I had pity on him. For where was he to turn, when he sought his
mother, but to his own humiliated mother,
“In a spirit of confession and shame.”
106
And Tête d’Or, dying, murmurs:
“That is the wounded man’s courage, the crippled man’s support,
“The dying man’s company …”
Claudel does not hold it against man that woman knows him in his
weakest moments; on the contrary: he would find man’s arrogance as
displayed in Montherlant and Lawrence sacrilege. It is good that man
knows he is carnal and lowly, that he forgets neither his origin nor his
death, which is symmetrical to it. Every wife could say the same
words as Marthe:
“It is true, it was not I who gave you life.
“But I am here to ask you for life once more. And a man’s
confusion in the presence of a woman comes from this very question
“Like conscience in the presence of a creditor.”
107
And yet this weakness has to yield to force. In marriage, the wife
gives herself
to the husband, who takes care of her: Lâla lies down on
the ground before Coeuvre, who places his foot on her. The relation
of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a
relation of vassalage. In George’s hands, Sygne takes the vow of the
knight to his sovereign.
“You are the lord and I the poor sibyl who keeps the fire.”
108
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“Let me take an oath like a new knight! O my lord! O my elder, let
me swear in your hands
“After the fashion of a nun who makes her profession,
“O male of my race!”
109
Fidelity and loyalty are the greatest of the female vassal’s human
virtues. Sweet, humble, resigned as a woman, she is, in the name of
her race and her lineage, proud and invincible; such is the proud
Sygne de Coûfontaine and Tête d’Or’s princess, who carries on her
shoulder the corpse of her assassinated father, who accepts the misery
of a lonely and wild life, the suffering of a crucifixion, and who
assists Tête d’Or in his agony before he dies at her side. Conciliator
and mediator is thus how woman often appears: she is docile Esther
accountable to Mordecai, Judith obeying the priests; she can
overcome her weakness, her faintheartedness, and her modesty
through loyalty to the cause that is hers since it is that of her masters;
she draws strength from her devotion, which makes her a precious
instrument.
So on the human level she is seen as drawing her greatness from
her very subordination. But in God’s eyes, she is a perfectly
autonomous person. The fact that for man existence surpasses itself
while for woman it
maintains itself only establishes a difference
between them on earth: in any case, transcendence is accomplished
not on earth but in God. And woman has just as direct a connection
with him as her companion does; perhaps hers is even more intimate
and secret. It is through a man’s voice—what is more, a priest’s—that
God speaks to Sygne; but Violaine hears his voice in the solitude of
her heart, and Prouhèze only deals with the Guardian Angel.
Claudel’s most sublime figures are women: Sygne, Violaine,
Prouhèze. This is partly because saintliness for him lies in
renunciation. And woman is less involved in human projects; she has
less personal will: made to give and not to take, she is closer to perfect
devotion. It is through her that the earthly joys that are permissible
and good will be surpassed, but their sacrifice is still better. Sygne
accomplishes this for a definite reason: to save the pope. Prouhèze
resigns herself to it first because she loves Rodrigo with a forbidden
love:
“Would you then have wanted me to put an adulteress into your
hands?… I would have been only a woman who soon dies on your
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heart and not that eternal star that you thirst for.”
110
But when this love could become legitimate, she makes no attempt
to accomplish it in this world. For the Angel whispers to her:
“Prouhèze, my sister, luminous child of God whom I salute,
“Prouhèze whom the angels see and who does not know that he is
watching, she it is whom you made so as to give her to him.”
111
She is human, she is woman, and she does not resign herself
without revolt: “He will not know how I taste!”
112
But she knows that her true marriage with Rodrigo is only
consummated by her denial:
“When will there no longer be any way to escape, when he will be
attached to me forever in an impossible marriage, when he will no
longer find a way to wrench himself from the cry of my powerful
flesh and that pitiless void, when I will have proved to him his
nothingness and the nothingness of myself, when there will no longer
be in his nothingness a secret that my secret cannot confirm.
“It is then that I shall give him to God, naked and torn, so that he
may be filled in a blast of thunder, it is then that I will have a husband
and clasp a god in my arms.”
113
Violaine’s resolution is more mysterious and gratuitous still; for
she chooses leprosy and blindness when a legitimate bond could have
united her to the man she loves and who loves her.
“Jacques, perhaps
“We loved each other too much for it to be right for us to belong to
each other, for it to be good to be each other’s.”
114
But if women are so singularly devoted to saintly heroism, it is
above all because Claudel still grasps them from a masculine
perspective. To be certain, each of the sexes embodies the
Other
in the
eyes of the complementary sex; but to his man’s eyes it is, in spite of
everything, the woman who is often regarded as an
absolute other
.
There is a mystical surpassing insofar as “we know that in and of
ourselves we are insufficient, hence the power of woman over us, like
the power of Grace.”
115
The “we” here represents only males and not
the human species, and faced with their imperfection, woman is the
appeal of infinity. In a way, there is a new principle of subordination
here: by the communion of saints each individual is an instrument for
all others; but woman is more precisely the instrument of salvation for
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man, without any reciprocity.
The Satin Slipper
is the epic of
Rodrigo’s salvation. The drama opens with a prayer his brother
addresses to God on his behalf; it closes with the death of Rodrigo,
whom Prouhèze has brought to saintliness. But, in another sense, the
woman thereby gains the fullest autonomy: for her mission is
interiorized in her, and in saving the man, or in serving as an example
to him, she saves herself in solitude. Pierre de Craon prophesies
Violaine’s destiny to her, and he receives in his heart the wonderful
fruits of her sacrifice; he will exalt her before mankind in the stones of
cathedrals. But Violaine accomplishes it without help. In Claudel there
is a mystique of woman akin to Dante’s for Beatrice, to that of the
Gnostics, and even to that of the Saint-Simonian tradition which
called woman a regenerator. But because men and women are equally
God’s creatures, he also attributed an autonomous destiny to her. So
that for him it is in becoming
other
—I am the Servant of the Lord—
that woman realizes herself as subject; and it is in her for-itself that
she appears as the Other.
There is a passage from
The Adventures of Sophie
that more or less
sums up the whole Claudelian concept. God, we read, has entrusted to
woman “this face which, however remote and deformed it may be, is
a certain
image of his perfection. He has rendered her desirable. He
has joined the end and the beginning. He has made her the keeper of
his projects and capable of restoring to man that creative slumber in
which even she was conceived. She is the foundation of destiny. She
is the gift. She is the possibility of possession … She is the
connection in this affectionate link that ever unites the Creator to his
work. She understands him. She is the soul that sees and acts. She
shares with Him in some way the patience and power of creation.”
In a way, it seems that woman could not be more exalted. But deep
down Claudel is only expressing in a poetic way a slightly
modernized Catholic tradition. We have seen that the earthly vocation
of woman does not cancel out any of her supernatural autonomy; on
the contrary, in recognizing this, the Catholic feels authorized to
maintain male prerogatives in this world. If the woman is venerated
in
God
, she will be treated like a servant in this world: and further, the
more total submission is demanded of her, the more surely will she
move forward on the road to her salvation. Her lot, the lot the
bourgeoisie has always assigned to her, is to devote herself to her
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children, her husband, her home, her realm, to country, and to church;
man gives activity, woman her person; to sanctify this hierarchy in the
name of divine will does not modify it in the least, but on the contrary
attempts to fix it in the eternal.
IV. BRETON OR POETRY
In spite of the gulf separating Claudel’s religious world and Breton’s
poetic universe, there is an analogy in the role they assign to women:
she is an element that perturbs; she wrests man from the sleep of
immanence; mouth, key, door, bridge, it is Beatrice initiating Dante
into the beyond. “The love of man for woman, if we think for a
moment about the palpable world, continues to fill the sky with
gigantic and wild flowers. It is the most awful stumbling block for the
mind that always feels the need to believe itself on safe ground.” The
love for an other, a woman, leads to the love of the Other. “It is at the
height of elective love for a particular being that the floodgates of love
for humanity open wide.” But for Breton the beyond is not a foreign
heaven: it is right here; it unveils itself if one knows how to lift the
veils of everyday banality; eroticism, for one, dissipates the lure of
false knowledge. “The sexual world, nowadays … has not stopped
pitting its unbreakable core of night against our will to penetrate the
universe.” Colliding with the mystery is the only way of discovering
it. Woman is
enigma and poses enigmas; the addition of her multiple
faces composes “the unique being in which we are granted the
possibility of seeing the last metamorphosis of the Sphinx”; and that
is why she is revelation. “You were the very image of secrecy,” says
Breton to a woman he loved. And a little farther: “That revelation you
brought me: before I even knew what it consisted of, I knew it was a
revelation.” This means that woman is poetry. She plays that role in
Gérard de Nerval as well: but in
Sylvie
and
Aurélia
she has the
consistency of a memory or a phantom because the dream, more real
than the real, does not exactly coincide with it; the coincidence is
perfect for Breton: there is only one world; poetry is objectively
present in things, and woman is unequivocally a being of flesh and
bones. She can be found wide-awake and not in a half dream, in the
middle of an ordinary day on a date like any other day on the calendar
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—April 5, April 12, October 4, May 29—in an ordinary setting: a
café, a street corner. But she always stands out through some unusual
feature. Nadja “carried her head high, unlike everyone else on the
sidewalk … She was curiously made up … I had never seen such
eyes.” Breton approaches her. “She smiles, but quite mysteriously and
somehow knowingly.” In
L’amour fou (Mad Love):
“This young
woman who just entered appeared to be swathed in mist—clothed in
fire?… And I can certainly say that here, on the twenty-ninth of May
1934, this woman was
scandalously
beautiful.”
116
The poet
immediately admits she has a role to play in his destiny; at times this
is a fleeting, secondary role, such as the child with Delilah’s eyes in
Les vases communicants (Communicating Vessels);
even when tiny
miracles emerge around her: the same day Breton has a rendezvous
with this Delilah, he reads a good review written by a friend called
Samson with whom he had not been in touch for a long time.
Sometimes wonders occur; the unknown woman of May 29, Ondine,
who had a swimming piece in her music-hall act, was presaged by a
pun heard in a restaurant: “Ondine, one dines”; and her first long date
with the poet had been described in great detail in a poem he wrote
eleven years earlier. Nadja is the most extraordinary of these
sorceresses: she predicts the future, and from her lips spring forth
words and images her friend has in mind at the very same instant; her
dreams and drawings are oracles: “I am the soul in limbo,” she says;
she went forward in life with “behavior, based as it was on the purest
intuition alone and ceaselessly relying on miracle”; around her,
objective chance spreads strange events; she is so marvelously
liberated from appearances that she
scorns laws and reason: she ends
up in an asylum. She is a “free genius, something like one of those
spirits of the air which certain magical practices momentarily permit
us to entertain but which we can never overcome.” This prevents her
from fulfilling her feminine role completely. Medium, prophetess,
inspiration, she remains too close to the unreal creatures that visited
Nerval; she opens the doors to the surreal world: but she is unable to
give it because she could not give herself. Woman accomplishes
herself and is really transformed in love; unique, accepting a unique
destiny—and not floating rootless through the universe—so she is the
sum of all. The moment her beauty reaches its highest point is at
night, when “she is the perfect mirror in which everything that has
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been and everything that is destined to be is suffused adorably in what
is going to be
this time
.” For Breton “finding the place and the
formula” is one with “possessing the truth within one soul and one
body.”
*
And this possession is only possible in reciprocal love, carnal love, of
course. “The portrait of the woman one loves must be not only an
image one smiles at but even more an oracle one questions”; but
oracle only if this very woman is something other than an idea or an
image; she must be the “keystone of the material world”; for the seer
this is the same world as Poetry, and in this world he has to really
possess Beatrice. “Reciprocal love alone is what conditions total
magnetic attraction which nothing can affect, which makes flesh sun
and splendid impression on the flesh, which makes spirit a forever-
flowing stream, inalterable and alive whose water moves once and for
all between marigold and wild thyme.”
This indestructible love can only be unique. It is the paradox of
Breton’s attitude that from
Communicating Vessels
to
Arcanum 17
,
he is determined to promise love both unique and eternal to different
women. But according to him, it is social circumstances, thwarting the
freedom of his choice, that lead man into erroneous choices; in fact,
through these errors, he is really looking for
one
woman. And if he
remembers the faces he has loved, he “will discover at the same time
in all these women’s faces one face only: the
last
face loved.
117
How
many times, moreover, have I noticed that under extremely dissimilar
appearances one exceptional trait was developing.” He asks Ondine in
Mad Love:
“Are you at last this woman, is it only today you were to
come?” But in
Arcanum 17:
“You know very well that
when I first
laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation.” In
a completed, renewed world, the couple would be indissoluble,
through an absolute and reciprocal gift: Since the beloved is all, how
could there be any room for another? She is also this other; and all the
more fully as she is more her self. “The unusual is inseparable from
love. Because you are unique you can’t help being for me always
another, another you. Across the diversity of these inconceivable
flowers over there, it is you over there changing whom I love in a red
blouse, naked, in a gray blouse.” And about a different but equally
unique woman, Breton wrote: “Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it,
is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand
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angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one
I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and
more gilded with life.”
This unique woman, both carnal and artificial, natural and human,
casts the same spell as the equivocal objects loved by the surrealists:
she is like the spoon-shoe, the table-magnifying glass, the sugar cube
of marble that the poet discovers at the flea market or invents in a
dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly discovered
in their truth, and the secret of plants and stones. She is all things:
My love whose hair is woodfire
Her thoughts heat lightning
Her hourglass waist …
My love whose sex is
Algae and sweets of yore …
My love of savannah eyes
.
But she is Beauty, above and beyond every other thing. Beauty for
Breton is not an idea one contemplates but a reality that reveals itself
—and therefore exists—only through passion; only through woman
does beauty exist in the world.
“And it is there—right in the depths of the human crucible, in this
paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really
chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of
ancient suns, where, however, loneliness rages also, in one of
nature’s fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that
under the ashes there remain snow—it is there that years ago I asked
that we look for a new beauty, a beauty ‘envisaged exclusively to
produce passion.’ ”
“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-
circumstantial, or it will not be.”
It is from woman that everything that is derives meaning. “Love
and love alone is precisely what the fusion of essence and existence
realizes to the highest degree.” It is accomplished for lovers and thus
throughout the whole world. “The recreation, the perpetual
recoloration of the world in a single being, such as they are
accomplished through love, light up with a thousand rays the advance
of the earth ahead.” For all poets—or almost all—woman embodies
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nature; but for Breton, she not only expresses it: she delivers it.
Because nature does not speak in a clear language, its mysteries have
to be penetrated in order to grasp its truth, which is the same thing as
its beauty: poetry is not simply the reflection of it but rather its key;
and woman here cannot be differentiated from poetry. That is why she
is the indispensable mediator without whom the whole earth would be
silenced: “Nature is likely to light up and to fade out, to serve and not
to serve me, only to the extent that I feel the rise and the fall of the fire
of a hearth which is love, the only love, that for a single being … It
was only lacking for a great iris of fire to emerge from me to give its
value to what exists … I contemplate to the point of dizziness your
hands opened above the fire of twigs which we just kindled and
which is now raging, your enchanting hands, your transparent hands
hovering over the fire of my life.” Every woman loved is a natural
wonder for Breton: “a tiny, unforgettable fern climbing the inside wall
of an ancient well.” “Something so blinding and serious that she could
not but bring to mind … the great natural physical necessity while at
the same time tenderly dreaming of the nonchalance of some tall
flowers beginning to blossom.” But inversely: every natural wonder
merges with the beloved; he exalts her when he waxes emotional
about a grotto, a flower, a mountain. Between the woman who warms
his hands on a landing of Teide and Teide itself, all distance is
abolished. The poet invokes both in one prayer: “Wonderful Teide,
take my life! Mouth of the heavens and yet mouth of hell, I prefer you
thus in your enigma, able to send natural beauty to the skies and to
swallow up everything.”
Beauty is even more than beauty; it fuses with “the deep night of
knowledge”; it is truth and eternity, the absolute; woman does not
deliver a temporal and contingent aspect of the world, she is the
necessary essence of it, not a fixed essence as Plato imagined it, but a
“fixed-explosive” one. “The only treasure I find in myself is the key
that opens this limitless field since I have known you, this field made
of the repetition of one plant, taller and taller, swinging in a wider and
wider arc and leading me to death … Because one woman and one
man, who until the end of time must be you and me, will drift in their
turn without ever turning back as far as the path goes, in the optical
glow, at the edges of life and of the oblivion
of life … The greatest
hope, I mean the one encompassing all the others, is that this be for all
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people, and that for all people this lasts, that the absolute gift of one
being to another who cannot exist without his reciprocity be in the
eyes of all the only natural and supernatural bridge spanning life.”
Through the love she inspires and shares, woman is thus the only
possible salvation for each man. In
Arcanum 17
, her mission spreads
and takes shape: she has to save humanity. Breton has always been
part of the Fourier tradition that, demanding rehabilitation of the flesh,
exalts woman as erotic object; it is logical that he should come to the
Saint-Simonian idea of the regenerating woman. In today’s society,
the male dominates to such an extent that it is an insult for someone
like Gourmont to say of Rimbaud: “a girl’s temperament.” However,
“the time has come to value the ideas of woman at the expense of
those of man, whose bankruptcy is coming to pass fairly
tumultuously today.” “Yes, it is always the lost woman, she who
sings in man’s imagination, but after such trials for her and for him, it
must also be the woman retrieved. And first of all, woman has to
retrieve herself; she has to learn to recognize herself through the hells
she is destined to by the more than problematic view that man, in
general, carries of her.”
The role she should fill is above all that of pacifier. “I’ve always
been stupefied that she didn’t make her voice heard, that she didn’t
think of taking every possible advantage, the immense advantage of
the two irresistible and priceless inflexions given to her, one for
talking to men during love, the other that commands all of a child’s
trust … What clout, what future would this great cry of warning and
refusal from woman have had … When will we see a woman simply
as woman perform quite a different
miracle
of extending her arms
between those who are about to grapple to say: You are brothers.” If
woman today looks ill adapted or off balance, it is due to the treatment
masculine tyranny has inflicted on her; but she maintains a miraculous
power because her roots plunge deep into the wellspring of life whose
secrets males have lost. “Melusina, half reclaimed by panic-stricken
life, Melusina with lower joints of broken stones, aquatic plants or the
down of a nest, she’s the one I invoke, she’s the only one I can see
who could redeem this savage epoch. She’s all of woman and yet
woman as she exists today, woman deprived of her human base,
prisoner of her mobile roots, if you will, but also through them in
providential communication with nature’s elemental forces. Woman
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deprived of her human base, legend has it, by the impatience and
jealousy of man.”
So today one has to be on woman’s side; while waiting for her real
worth to be restored to her, “Those of us in the arts must pronounce
ourselves unequivocally against man and for woman.” “The child-
woman. Systematically art must prepare her advent into the empire of
tangible things.” Why child-woman? Breton explains: “I choose the
child-woman not in order to oppose her to other women, but because
it seems to me that in her and in her alone exists in a state of absolute
transparency the
other
prism of vision.”
118
Insofar as woman is merely assimilated to a human being, she will
be as unable as male human beings to save the doomed world; it is
femininity as such that introduces this
other
element—the truth of life
and poetry—into civilization, and that alone can free humanity.
As Breton’s view is exclusively poetic, it is exclusively as poetry
and thus as
Other
that woman is envisaged. If one were to ask about
her own destiny, the response would be implied in the ideal of
reciprocal love: her only vocation is love; this is in no way inferiority,
since man’s vocation is also love. However, one would like to know
whether for her as well, love is the key to the world, the revelation of
beauty; will she find this beauty in her lover? Or in her own image?
Will she be capable of the poetic activity that makes poetry happen
through a sentient being: or will she be limited to approving her
male’s work? She is poetry itself, in the immediate that is, for man;
we are not told whether she is poetry for herself too. Breton does not
speak of woman as subject. Nor does he ever evoke the image of the
bad woman. In his work as a whole—in spite of a few manifestos and
pamphlets in which he vilifies the human herd—he focuses not on
categorizing the world’s superficial resistances but on revealing the
secret truth: woman interests him only because she is a privileged
“mouth.” Deeply anchored in nature, very close to the earth, she also
appears to be the key to the beyond. One finds in Breton the same
esoteric naturalism as in the Gnostics who saw in Sophia the principle
of redemption and even of creation, as in Dante choosing Beatrice for
guide, or Petrarch illuminated by Laura’s love. That is why the being
most rooted in nature, the closest to the earth, is also the key to the
beyond. Truth, Beauty, Poetry, she is All: once more all in the figure
of the other, All except herself.
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V. STENDHAL OR ROMANCING THE REAL
If now, leaving the present period, I return to Stendhal, it is because,
leaving behind these carnivals where Woman is disguised as shrew,
nymph,
morning star, or mermaid, I find it reassuring to approach a
man who lives among flesh-and-blood women.
Stendhal loved women sensually from childhood; he projected the
hopes of his adolescence onto them: he readily imagined himself
saving a beautiful stranger and winning her love. Once he was in
Paris, what he wanted the most ardently was a “charming wife; we
will adore each other, she will know my soul.” Grown old, he writes
the initials of the women he loved the most in the dust. “I believe that
dreaming was what I preferred above all,” he admits. And his dreams
are nourished by images of women; his memories of them enliven the
countryside. “The line of rocks when approaching Arbois and coming
from Dole by the main road was, I believe, a touching and clear image
for me of Métilde’s soul.” Music, painting, architecture, everything he
cherished, he cherished it with an unlucky lover’s soul; while he is
walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn of the page; by
the regrets, desires, sadnesses, and joys women awakened in him, he
came to know the nature of his own heart; it is women he wants as
judges: he frequents their salons, he wants to shine; he owes them his
greatest joys, his greatest pain, they were his main occupation; he
prefers their love to any friendship, their friendship to that of men;
women inspire his books, female figures populate them; he writes in
great part for them. “I might be lucky enough to be read in 1900 by
the souls I love, the Mme Rolands, the Mélanie Guilberts …” They
were the very substance of his life. Where did this privilege come
from?
This tender friend of women—and precisely because he loves them
in their truth—does not believe in feminine mystery; there is no
essence that defines woman once and for all; the idea of an eternal
feminine seems pedantic and ridiculous to him. “Pedants have been
repeating for two thousand years that women have quicker minds and
men more solidity; that women have more subtlety in ideas and men
more attention span. A Parisian passerby walking around the
Versailles gardens once concluded that from everything he saw, the
trees are born pruned.” The differences that one notices between men
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and women reflect those of their situation. For example, how could
women not be more romantic than their lovers? “A woman at her
embroidery frame, insipid work that only involves her hands, dreams
of her lover, who, galloping around the countryside with his troop, is
put under arrest if he makes one false move.” Likewise, women are
accused of lacking common sense. “Women prefer emotions to
reason; this is so simple: as they are not given responsibility for any
family affair by virtue of our pedestrian customs,
reason is never
useful to them …
Let your wife settle your affairs with the farmers on
two of your lands, and I wager that the books are better kept than by
you.” If so few female geniuses are
found in history, it is because
society denies them any means of expression. “All the geniuses who
are born
women
are lost for the public good; when chance offers them
the means to prove themselves, watch them attain the most difficult
skills.”
119
The worst handicap they have to bear is the deadening education
they are given; the oppressor always attempts to diminish those he
oppresses; man intentionally refuses women their chances. “We allow
their most brilliant qualities and the ones richest in happiness for
themselves and for us to remain idle.” At ten years of age, the girl is
quicker, subtler than her brother; at twenty, the scamp is a quick-
witted adult and the girl “a big awkward idiot, shy and afraid of a
spider”; at fault is the training she has received. Women should be
given exactly as much education as boys. Antifeminists object that
cultured and intelligent women are monsters: the whole problem
comes from the fact that they are still exceptional; if all women had
equal access to culture as naturally as men, they would just as
naturally take advantage of it. After having been mutilated, they are
then subjected to laws against nature: married against their hearts, they
are supposed to be faithful, and even divorce is reproached as wild
behavior. A great number of them are destined to idleness when the
fact is that there is no happiness without work. This condition
scandalizes Stendhal, and therein he finds the source of all the faults
blamed on women. They are neither angels nor demons nor sphinx:
but human beings reduced to semi-slavery by idiotic customs.
It is precisely because they are oppressed that the best of them will
avoid the faults that tarnish their oppressors; in themselves they are
neither inferior nor superior to man: but by a curious reversal, their
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unfortunate situation works in their favor. It is well-known that
Stendhal hates the spirit of seriousness:
*
money, honors, rank, and
power are the saddest of idols to him; the immense majority of men
alienate themselves in their pursuit; the pedant, the self-important man,
the bourgeois, and the husband stifle in themselves any spark of life
and truth; armed with preconceived ideas and learned feelings,
obeying social routines, they are inhabited only by emptiness; a world
populated with these creatures without a soul is a desert of boredom.
There are unfortunately many women who stagnate in these dismal
swamps; they are dolls with “narrow and Parisian ideas” or else self-
righteous hypocrites; Stendhal experiences “a mortal disgust for
decent women and the hypocrisy that is indispensable to them”; they
bring to their
frivolous occupations the same seriousness that
represses their husbands; stupid through education, envious, vain,
talkative, mean through idleness, cold, emotionless, pretentious,
harmful, they populate Paris and the provinces; they can be seen
swarming about behind the noble figure of a Mme de Rênal or a Mme
de Chasteller. The one Stendhal depicted with the most bitter care is
undoubtedly Mme Grandet, the exact negative of a Mme Roland or a
Métilde. Beautiful but expressionless, condescending and without
charm, she intimidates by her “famous virtue” but does not know real
modesty, which comes from the soul; full of admiration for self,
imbued with her own personage, she only knows how to copy
grandeur from the outside; deep down inside she is vulgar and
inferior; “she has no character … she bores me,” thinks M. Leuwen.
“Perfectly reasonable, concerned by the success of her projects,” she
focuses all of her ambition on making her husband a minister; “her
mind was arid”; careful and conformist, she always kept herself from
love, she is incapable of a generous movement; when passion sets
into this dry soul, it burns without illuminating her.
It is only necessary to reverse this image to discover what Stendhal
asks of women: first, not to fall prey to the traps of seriousness;
because the supposedly important things are out of their reach,
women risk alienating themselves in them less than men; they have a
better chance of preserving this natural side, this naïveté, this
generosity that Stendhal places higher than any other merit; what he
appreciates in them is what we would call today their authenticity: that
is the common trait of all the women he loved or invented with love;
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all are free and true beings. For some, their freedom is strikingly
visible: Angela Pietragrua, “sublime whore, Italian style, à la Lucrezia
Borgia,” and Mme Azur, “whore à la du Barry … one of the least
doll-like French women that I have met,” oppose social custom
openly. Lamiel laughs at conventions, customs, and laws; Sanseverina
throws herself ardently into the intrigue and does not stop at crime.
Others rise above the vulgar through the vigor of their minds: like
Menta or Mathilde de la Mole, who criticizes, denigrates, and scorns
the society that surrounds her and wants to stand apart from it. For
others, freedom takes a wholly negative form; what is remarkable in
Mme de Chasteller is her indifference to everything secondary;
subjected to her father’s will and even his opinions, she still manages
to contest bourgeois values by means of the indifference she is
criticized for as childish, and that is the source of her carefree gaiety;
Clélia Conti also stands apart by her reserve; balls and other
traditional entertainments for girls leave her cold; she always seems
distant “either out of scorn for what surrounds her or out of regret for
some missing chimera”; she judges the world, she takes offense at its
indignities. Mme de Rênal is the one whose soul’s independence is
the most deeply hidden; she herself does not know she is not really
resigned to her lot; her extreme delicacy and acute sensitivity show
her repugnance for her milieu’s vulgarity; she is without hypocrisy;
she has kept a generous heart, capable of violent emotions, and she
has the taste for happiness; the fire that smolders barely gives off any
heat, but only a breath is needed for it to be fully kindled. These
women are, simply,
living;
they know the source of real values is not
in exterior things but in the heart; that is what makes the charm of the
world they inhabit: they chase away boredom merely by being present
with their dreams, desires, pleasures, emotions, and inventions.
Sanseverina, that “active soul,” dreads boredom more than death.
Stagnating in boredom “is preventing one from dying, she said, it is
not living”; she is “always totally involved in something, always
active, always gay.” Foolhardy, childish, or deep, gay or serious,
reckless or secretive, they all refuse the heavy sleep in which
humanity sinks. And these women who have been able to preserve
their freedom, albeit unfulfilled, will rise up by passion to heroism as
soon as they meet an object worthy of them; their force of soul and
their energy attest to the fierce purity of total commitment.
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But freedom alone would not be sufficient to endow them with so
many romantic attractions: a pure freedom inspires esteem but not
emotion; what is touching is their effort to accomplish themselves in
spite of the obstacles that beleaguer them; it creates even more pathos
in women because the struggle is more difficult. The victory over
exterior constraints is sufficient to enchant Stendhal; in
Chroniques
italiennes (Three Italian Chronicles
) he cloisters his heroines in
remote convents, he locks them up in a jealous spouse’s palace: they
have to invent a thousand tricks to meet their lovers; secret doors,
rope ladders, bloody chests, kidnappings, sequestrations, and
assassinations, the unleashing of passion and disobedience is served
by an ingenuity in which all the mind’s resources are displayed; death
and the threat of tortures highlight even more the daringness of the
deranged souls he depicts. Even in his more mature work, Stendhal
remains sympathetic to this external expression of the romantic: it is
the manifestation of the one born from the heart; they cannot be
distinguished from each other just as a mouth cannot be separated
from its smile. Clélia invents love anew by inventing the alphabet that
allows her to correspond with Fabrice; Sanseverina is described to us
as “a soul always sincere who never acts with caution, who totally
gives herself over to the impression of the moment”; it is when she
schemes, when she poisons the prince and floods Parma, that this
soul is revealed to us: she is no other than the sublime and mad
escapade
that she has chosen to live. The ladder that Mathilde de la
Mole leans against her window is much more than a prop: her proud
recklessness, her penchant for the extraordinary, and her provocative
courage take a tangible form. The qualities of these souls would not
be revealed were they not surrounded by enemies: prison walls, a
lord’s will, and a family’s harshness.
But the most difficult constraints to overcome are those that one
finds in oneself: then the adventure of freedom is the most uncertain,
the most poignant, and the most piquant. Clearly, the more often
Stendhal’s heroines are prisoners, the greater his sympathy for them.
Yes, he enjoys whores—sublime or not—who have once and for all
trampled on the conventions; but he cherishes Métilde more tenderly,
restrained by her scruples and modesty. Lucien Leuwen is happy
when near Mme d’Hocquincourt, that liberated person: but it is Mme
de Chasteller, chaste, reserved, and hesitant, that he loves
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passionately; Fabrice admires the undivided soul of Sanseverina that
stops at nothing; but he prefers Clélia, and it is the young girl who
wins his heart. And Mme de Rênal, bound by her pride, her
prejudices, and her ignorance, is perhaps the most astonishing of all
the women Stendhal created. He readily places his heroines in the
provinces, in a confined milieu, under the authority of a husband or a
foolish father; it pleases him that they are uneducated and even full of
false ideas. Mme de Rênal and Mme de Chasteller are both obstinately
legitimist; the former is a timid mind and without experience, the latter
is a brilliant intelligence, but she underestimates its worth; they are
therefore not responsible for their errors, but they are the victims of
them as much as of institutions and social customs; and it is from
error that romance springs forth, as poetry is born from failure. A
lucid mind that decides on its actions in full knowledge is approved or
blamed coldly, whereas the courage and ruses of a generous heart
seeking its way in the shadows are admired with fear, pity, irony, or
love. It is because women are mystified that useless and charming
qualities such as their modesty, pride, and extreme delicacy flourish;
in one sense, these are defects: they lead to lies, susceptibilities, and
anger, but they can be explained by the situation in which women are
placed; it leads them to take pride in little things or at least in “things
determined by feeling” because all the “supposedly important” objects
are out of their reach; their modesty results from the dependence they
suffer: because it is forbidden to them to show their worth in action, it
is their very being that they put in question; it seems to them that the
other’s consciousness, and particularly that of their lover, reveals
them in their truth: they are afraid, they try to escape it; in their
evasions, their hesitations, their revolts, and even their lies, an
authentic concern for worth
is expressed; that is what makes them
respectable; but it is expressed awkwardly, even with bad faith, and
that makes them touching and even discreetly comic. When freedom is
hoist by its own petard and cheats on itself, it is at the most deeply
human and so in Stendhal’s eyes at its most endearing. Stendhal’s
women are imbued with pathos when their hearts pose unexpected
problems for them: no outside law, recipe, reasoning, or example can
then guide them; they have to decide alone: this abandon is the
extreme moment of freedom. Clélia is brought up with liberal ideas,
she is lucid and reasonable: but learned opinions, whether right or
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wrong, are of no help in a moral conflict; Mme de Rênal loves Julien
in spite of his morality, Clélia saves Fabrice in spite of herself: in both
cases there is the same surpassing of all accepted values. This daring
is what exalts Stendhal; but it is even more moving because it barely
dares to declare itself: it is all the more natural, spontaneous, and
authentic. In Mme de Rênal, boldness is hidden by innocence:
because she does not know love, she does not recognize it and yields
to it without resistance; one could say that having lived in darkness,
she is defenseless against the violent light of passion; she welcomes
it, blinded, even against God, against hell; when this fire goes out, she
falls back in the shadows that husbands and priests govern; she does
not trust her own judgment, but the evidence overwhelms her; as soon
as she sees Julien again, she once more unburdens her soul to him;
her remorse and the letter her confessor wrests from her show the
distance this ardent and sincere soul had to span to tear herself away
from the prison society enclosed her in and accede to the heaven of
happiness. The conflict is more conscious for Clélia; she hesitates
between loyalty to her father and pity inspired by love; she is
searching for a rationale; the triumph of the values in which Stendhal
believes is all the more striking to him in that this triumph is
experienced as a defeat by the victims of a hypocritical civilization;
and he delights in seeing them use ruses and bad faith to make the
truth of passion and happiness prevail against the lies in which they
believe: Clélia, promising the Madonna to no longer
see
Fabrice, and
accepting his kisses and his embraces for two years, providing she
closes her eyes, is both laughable and heartbreaking. Stendhal
considers Mme de Chasteller’s hesitations and Mathilde de la Mole’s
inconsistencies with the same tender irony; so many detours, changes
of mind, scruples, victories, and hidden defeats in order to reach
simple and legitimate ends is for him the most delightful of comedies;
there is drollery in these dramas because the actress is both judge and
party, because she is her own dupe, and because she burdens herself
with complicated paths where a decree would suffice for the Gordian
knot to be cut; but they nonetheless show the most respectable
concern that could torture a noble soul: she wants to remain worthy of
her own esteem; she places her own approbation higher than that of
others, and thus she realizes herself as an absolute. These solitary
debates without reverberation have more gravity than a ministerial
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crisis; when she wonders if she is going to respond to Lucien
Leuwen’s love or not, Mme de Chasteller decides for herself and the
world: Can one have confidence in others? Can one trust one’s own
heart? What is the value of love and human vows? Is it mad or
generous to believe and to love? These questions challenge the very
meaning of life, that of each and every one. The so-called important
man is futile, in fact, because he accepts ready-made justifications of
his life, while a passionate and deep woman revises established values
at each instant; she knows the constant tension of an unassisted
freedom; thus she feels herself in constant danger: she can win or lose
everything in a second. It is this risk, accepted with apprehension, that
gives her story the color of a heroic adventure. And the stakes are the
highest that can be: the very meaning of this existence of which
everyone has a share, his only part. Mina de Vanghel’s escapade can
seem absurd in one sense; but she brings to it a whole ethic. “Was her
life a false calculation? Her happiness lasted eight months. She had
too ardent a soul to settle for the real life.” Mathilde de la Mole is less
sincere than Clélia or Mme de Chasteller; she orders her acts on the
idea she has of herself rather than on the evidence of love and
happiness: Is it more arrogant, grander to keep oneself than to lose
oneself, to humiliate oneself before one’s beloved than to resist him?
She is alone with her doubts, and she risks this self-esteem that is
more important to her than life itself. It is the ardent quest for the real
reasons to live through the shadows of ignorance, prejudice, and
mystifications, in the wavering and feverish light of passion, it is the
infinite risk of happiness or death, of grandeur or shame that gives
romantic glory to these women’s destinies.
The woman is of course unaware of the seduction she radiates;
self-contemplation and playacting are always inauthentic attitudes; by
the mere fact of comparing herself to Mme Roland, Mme Grandet
proves she does not resemble her; if Mathilde de la Mole continues to
be endearing, it is because she gets confused in her playacting and is
often prey to her heart just when she thinks she governs it; she moves
us insofar as she is not ruled by her will. But the purest of heroines
lack consciousness of themselves. Mme de Rênal is unaware of her
grace just as Mme de Chasteller is of her intelligence. It is one of the
deep joys of the lover with whom the author and the reader identify:
he is the witness through whom these secret riches are revealed; the
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vivacity Mme De Rênal deploys out of everyone’s sight,
the “bright
wit, changing and deep,” unknown to Mme de Chasteller’s milieu, he
alone admires them; and even if others appreciate Sanseverina’s wit,
he is the one who penetrates the deepest into her soul. Faced with the
woman, the man tastes the pleasure of contemplation; she intoxicates
him like a landscape or a painting; she sings in his heart and lights up
the sky. This revelation reveals him to himself: one cannot understand
women’s delicacy, their sensibilities, and their ardor without
developing a delicate, sensitive, and ardent soul oneself; female
feelings create a world of nuances and requirements whose discovery
enriches the lover: when with Mme de Rênal, Julien becomes
someone other than the ambitious man he had decided to be; he
chooses himself anew. If the man has only a superficial desire for the
woman, he will find seducing her amusing. But it is real love that will
transfigure his life. “Love à la Werther opens the soul … to feeling
and pleasure in the
beautiful
in whatever form it takes, even in a hair
shirt. It makes happiness attainable even without wealth.” “It is a new
aim in life to which everything is connected and that changes the
appearance of everything. Love-as-passion throws in man’s eyes all
of nature with its sublime aspects as if it were a novelty invented
yesterday.” Love shatters daily routine, chases away boredom, the
boredom in which Stendhal sees such a deep evil because it is the
absence of all the reasons for living or dying; the lover has an aim,
and that is enough for each day to become an adventure: what a
pleasure for Stendhal to spend three days hidden in Menta’s cellar!
Rope ladders and bloody chests represent this taste for the
extraordinary in his novels. Love, that is woman, reveals the real ends
of existence: beauty, happiness, the freshness of feelings and of the
world. It tears man’s soul out and thus gives him possession of it; the
lover experiences the same tension, the same risks, as his mistress and
feels himself more authentically than during a planned career. When
Julien hesitates at the base of the ladder Mathilde has set up, he puts
his whole destiny into question: in that very moment, he demonstrates
his true worth. It is through women, under their influence, in reaction
to their behavior, that Julien, Fabrice, and Lucien learn about the
world and themselves. Test, reward, judge, or friend, the woman in
Stendhal is really what Hegel was once tempted to make of her: that
other consciousness that, in reciprocal recognition, gives to the other
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subject the same truth it receives from it. The happy couple that
recognizes each other in love defies the universe and time; it is
sufficient in itself, it realizes the absolute.
But this supposes that woman is not pure alterity: she is subject
herself. Stendhal never describes his heroines as a function of his
heroes: he provides them with their own destinies. He undertook
something rarer and
that no other novelist, I think, has ever done: he
projected himself into a female character. He does not examine Lamiel
as Marivaux does Marianne, or Richardson does Clarissa Harlowe:
he shares her destiny as he had shared that of Julien. Precisely
because of that, the character of Lamiel is singularly significant, if
somewhat theoretical. Stendhal sets up all imaginable obstacles
around the girl: she is a peasant, poor, ignorant, and brought up
harshly by people imbued with every prejudice; but she eliminates
from her path all the moral barriers the day she understands the scope
of these little words: “It’s stupid.” Her mind’s freedom enables her to
take responsibility for all the movements of her curiosity, her
ambition, her gaiety; faced with such a resolute heart, material
obstacles cannot fail to decrease; her only problem will be to carve out
a destiny worthy of her in a mediocre world. That destiny
accomplishes itself in crime and death: but that is also Julien’s lot.
There is no place for great souls in society as it is: men and women
are in the same boat.
It is remarkable that Stendhal is both so profoundly romantic and
so decidedly feminist; feminists are usually rational minds that adopt a
universal point of view in all things; but it is not only in the name of
freedom in general but also in the name of individual happiness that
Stendhal calls for women’s emancipation. Love, he thinks, will have
nothing to lose; on the contrary, it will be all the truer that woman, as
the equal of man, will be able to understand him more completely.
Undoubtedly, some of the qualities one enjoys in woman will
disappear: but their value comes from the freedom that is expressed in
them and that will show in other guises; and the romantic will not fade
out of this world. Two separate beings, placed in different situations,
confronting each other in their freedom, and seeking the justification
of existence through each other, will always live an adventure full of
risks and promises. Stendhal trusts the truth; as soon as one flees it,
one dies a living death; but where it shines, so shine beauty,
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happiness, love, and a joy that carries in it its own justification. That is
why he rejects the false poetry of myths as much as the mystifications
of seriousness. Human reality is sufficient for him. Woman,
according to him, is simply a human being: dreams could not invent
anything more intoxicating.
VI
These examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in
each singular writer: woman appears to us as
flesh;
male flesh is
engendered by the maternal womb and re-created in the woman
lover’s embrace: thus,
woman is akin to
nature
, she embodies it:
animal, little vale of blood, rose in bloom, siren, curve of a hill, she
gives humus, sap, tangible beauty, and the world’s soul to man; she
can hold the keys to
poetry;
she can be
mediator
between this world
and the beyond: grace or Pythia, star or witch, she opens the door to
the supernatural, the surreal; she is destined to
immanence;
and
through her passivity she doles out peace and harmony: but should
she refuse this role, she becomes praying mantis or ogress. In any
case, she appears as the
privileged Other
through whom the subject
accomplishes himself: one of the measures of man, his balance, his
salvation, his adventure, and his happiness.
But these myths are orchestrated differently for each individual.
The
Other
is singularly defined according to the singular way the
One
chooses to posit himself. All men assert themselves as freedom and
transcendence: but they do not all give the same meaning to these
words. For Montherlant transcendence is a state: he is the
transcendent, he soars in the sky of heroes; the woman crouches on
the ground, under his feet; he enjoys measuring the distance
separating him from her; from time to time, he raises her to him, takes
and then rejects her; never does he lower himself toward her sphere of
viscous darkness. Lawrence situates transcendence in the phallus; the
phallus is life and power only thanks to woman; immanence is thus
good and necessary; the false hero who deigns not to touch the earth,
far from being a demigod, fails to be a man; woman is not despicable,
she is deep wealth, hot spring; but she must renounce all personal
transcendence and settle for nourishing that of her male. Claudel
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demands the same devotion: woman is also for him the one who
maintains life, while man prolongs the vital momentum by his activity;
but for the Catholic everything that occurs on earth is steeped in vain
immanence: the only transcendent is God; in God’s eyes the active
man and the woman who serves him are exactly equal; each one has
to surpass his earthly condition: salvation in any case is an
autonomous undertaking. For Breton sexual hierarchy is inverted;
action and conscious thought in which the male situates his
transcendence are for him a banal mystification that engenders war,
stupidity, bureaucracy, and negation of the human; it is immanence,
the pure opaque presence of the real, that is the truth; true
transcendence would be accomplished by the return to immanence.
His attitude is the exact opposite of Montherlant’s: the latter likes war
because women are banished from it, Breton venerates woman
because she brings peace; one confuses mind and subjectivity, he
rejects the given universe; the other thinks the mind is objectively
present in the heart of the world; woman compromises Montherlant
because she shatters his solitude; she is, for Breton, revelation
because she wrests him from subjectivity. As for Stendhal, we saw
that woman barely takes on a mythical value for him: he considers her
as also being a transcendence; for this humanist, it is in their
reciprocal relations that freedoms are accomplished; and it is sufficient
that the
Other
is simply another for life to have, according to him, a
little spice; he does not seek a stellar equilibrium, he does not nourish
himself with the bread of disgust; he does not expect miracles; he
wishes to concern himself not with the cosmos or poetry but with
freedoms.
That is, he also experiences himself as a translucent freedom. The
others—and this is one of the most important points—posit
themselves as transcendences but feel they are prisoners of an opaque
presence in their own hearts: they project onto woman this
“unbreakable core of night.” In Montherlant there is an Adlerian
complex where heavy bad faith is born: these pretensions and fears
are what he incarnates in woman; the disgust he feels for her is what
he fears to feel for himself; he intends to trample in her the ever
possible proof of his own insufficiency; he asks scorn to save him;
woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that inhabit
him.
120
307

Lawrence’s life shows us that he suffered from an analogous
complex but more purely sexual: woman in his work has the value of
a compensatory myth; through her is found an exalted virility of
which the writer was not very sure; when he describes Kate at Don
Cipriano’s feet, he believes he has won a male triumph over Frieda;
nor does he accept that his female companion challenges him: if she
contested his aims, he would probably lose confidence in them; her
role is to reassure him. He asks for peace, rest, and faith from her, just
as Montherlant asks for the certitude of his superiority: they demand
what they lack. Self-confidence is not lacking in Claudel: if he is shy,
it is only the secret of God. Thus, there is no trace of the battle of the
sexes. Man bravely takes on the weight of woman: she is the
possibility of temptation or of salvation. For Breton it seems that man
is only true through the mystery that inhabits him; it pleases him that
Nadja sees that star he is going toward and that is like “a heartless
flower”; his dreams, intuitions, and the spontaneous unfolding of his
inner language: it is in these activities that are out of the control of will
and reason that he recognizes himself: woman is the tangible figure of
this veiled presence infinitely more essential than her conscious
personality.
As for Stendhal, he quietly coincides with himself; but he needs
woman as she does him so that his dispersed existence is gathered in
the unity of a figure and a destiny; it is as for-another that the human
being reaches being; but another still has to lend him his
consciousness: other men are too indifferent to their peers; only the
woman in love opens her heart to her lover and shelters it in its
entirety. Except for Claudel, who finds a perfect witness in God, all
the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux’s words, woman
to cherish in them this “incomparable monster” known to themselves
alone. In collaboration or combat, men come up against each other in
their generality. Montherlant, for his peers, is a writer, Lawrence a
doctrinaire, Breton a leader of a school, Stendhal a diplomat or a man
of wit; it is women who reveal in one a magnificent and cruel prince,
in another a disturbing animal, in still another a god or a sun or a
being “black and cold … like a man struck by lightning, lying at the
feet of the Sphinx,”
121
and in the other a seducer, a charmer, a lover.
For each of them, the ideal woman will be she who embodies the
most exactly the
Other
able to reveal him to himself. Montherlant, the
308

solar spirit, looks for pure animality in her; Lawrence, the phallic,
demands that she sum up the female sex in its generality; Claudel
defines her as a soul sister; Breton cherishes Melusina rooted in
nature, he puts his hopes in the child-woman; Stendhal wants his
mistress intelligent, cultivated, free of spirit and morals: an equal. But
the only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman,
soul sister, woman-sex, and female animal is always man. Regardless
of the ego looking for itself through her, it can only attain itself if she
consents to be his crucible. In any case, what is demanded of her is
self-forgetting and love. Montherlant consents to be moved by the
woman who enables him to measure his virile power; Lawrence
addresses an ardent hymn to the woman who renounces herself for
him; Claudel exalts the vassal, servant, and devoted woman who
submits herself to God by submitting herself to the male; Breton puts
his hopes in woman for humanity’s salvation because she is capable
of the most total love for her child and her lover; and even in Stendhal
the heroines are more moving than the masculine heroes because they
give themselves over to their passion with a more ardent violence;
they help man to accomplish his destiny as Prouhèze contributes to
Rodrigo’s salvation; in Stendhal’s novels, women often save their
lovers from ruin, prison, or death. Feminine devotion is demanded as
a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant,
Claudel, Breton,
and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice; they desire it without
claiming to deserve it; but—except for the astonishing
Lamiel
—all
their works show they expect from woman this altruism that Comte
admired in and imposed on her, and which, according to him, also
constituted both a flagrant inferiority and an equivocal superiority.
We could find many more examples: they would always lead to the
same conclusions. In defining woman, each writer defines his general
ethic and the singular idea he has of himself: it is also in her that he
often registers the distance between his view of the world and his
egotistical dreams. The absence or insignificance of the female
element in a body of work in general is itself symptomatic; it has an
extreme importance when it sums up in its totality all the aspects of
the Other, as it does for Lawrence; it remains important if woman is
grasped simply as another but the writer is interested in her life’s
individual adventure, which is Stendhal’s case; it loses importance in
a period like ours in which each individual’s particular problems are
309

of secondary import. However, woman as other still plays a role
inasmuch as even to transcend himself, each man still needs to take
consciousness of himself.
1.

Pitié pour les femmes (Pity for Women
).
2.
Ibid.
3.

Le songe (The Dream
).
4.

Pity for Women
.
5.

The Girls
.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Adler considered this process the classic origin of psychoses. The individual,
divided between a “will for power” and an “inferiority complex,” sets up the greatest
distance possible between society and himself so as to avoid the test of reality. He
knows it would undermine the claims he can maintain only if they are hidden by bad
faith.
9.

The Dream
.
10.
Ibid.
11.

La petite infante de Castille
(The Little Infanta of Castile).
12.
Ibid.
13.

The Girls
.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Ibid.
17.

The Little Infanta of Castile
.
18.

The Dream
.
19.

The Girls
.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Ibid.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Ibid.
25.

The Little Infanta of Castile
.
26.

Le maître de Santiago (The Master of Santiago
).
310

27.

Le solstice de juin
(June Solstice).
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid.
31.

L’équinoxe de septembre
(September Equinox).
32.

At the Fountains of Desire
.
33.
Ibid.
34.

La possession de soi-même
(The Possession of Oneself).
35.

June Solstice
.
36.

At the Fountains of Desire
.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid.
39.

June Solstice
.
40.
“We ask for a body that would have discretionary power to stop anything it deems
to be harmful to the essence of French human values. Some sort of an inquisition in
the name of French human values” (ibid.).
41.

The Girls
.
42.

June Solstice
.
43.
Ibid.
44.
Ibid.
45.

Women in Love
.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid.
48.

Sons and Lovers
.
49.

Women in Love
.
50.
Preface to
L’amant de Lady Chatterley
.
51.

Fantasia of the Unconscious
.
52.
Ibid.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid.
57.

Women in Love
.
58.

Fantasia of the Unconscious
.
311

59.

Women in Love
.
60.

Sons and Lovers
.
61.

The Plumed Serpent
.
62.
With the exception of Paul in
Sons and Lovers
, who is the most vibrant of all. But
that is the only novel that shows us a masculine learning experience.
63.

Partage de midi
. [
Break of Noon
, trans. Wallace Fowlie. All other Claudel
translations in this section are by James Lawler.—T
RANS.]
64.

Les aventures de Sophie
(The Adventures of Sophie).
65.

La cantate à trios voix
(Cantata for Three Voices).
66.

Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher
(Conversations in the Loir-et-Cher).
67.

Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper
).
68.

L’annonce faite à Marie (The Tidings Brought to Mary
).
69.

The Adventures of Sophie
.
70.

L’échange (The Trade
).
71.

The Adventures of Sophie
.
72.

L’oiseau noir dans le soleil levant
(The Black Bird in the Rising Sun).
73.

The Satin Slipper
.
74.

Positions et propositions
(Positions and Propositions).
75.

La ville (The City
).
76.

The Satin Slipper
.
77.
Ibid.
78.

The Tidings Brought to Mary
.
79.

La jeune fille Violaine
(The Young Violaine)
80.

The City
.
81.

The Satin Slipper
.
82.
Ibid.
83.

The City
.
84.

Le pain dur (Crusts
).
85.

The City
.
86.

Break of Noon
.
87.

Cantata for Three Voices
.
88.
Ibid.
89.
Ibid.
312

90.

Positions and Propositions
, Volume 2.
91.

The Satin Slipper
.
92.

L’histoire de Tobie et de Sara
(The History of Toby and Sara).
93.

Le père humilié (The Humiliation of the Father
).
94.

The Satin Slipper
.
95.

The Humiliation of the Father
.
96.

Feuilles de saints
(Leaves of Saints).
97.

The Satin Slipper
.
98.

Leaves of Saints
.
99.
Ibid.
100.

The Satin Slipper
.
101.

Positions and Propositions
, Volume 1.
102.

The Satin Slipper
.
103.

The Humiliation of the Father
.
104.

L’otage
(
The Hostage
).
105.

The City
.
106.

The Trade
.
107.
Ibid.
108.

The Hostage
.
109.
Ibid.
110.

The Satin Slipper
.
111.
Ibid.
112.
Ibid.
113.
Ibid.
114.

The Young Violaine
.
115.

The Satin Slipper
.
116.
Breton’s italics.
*
Arthur Rimbaud, “Vagabonds,” in
Illuminations
, and
“Adieu”
(“Farewell”) in
Une
saison en enfer (A Season in Hell
).—T
RANS
.
117.
Breton’s italics.
118.
Breton’s italics.
119.
Stendhal’s emphasis.
*

L’esprit de sérieux:
conventional thinking.—T
RANS
.
313

120.
Stendhal judged in advance the cruelties with which Montherlant amuses
himself: “In indifference, what should be done? Love-taste, but without the horrors.
The horrors always come from a little soul that needs reassurance of its own merits.”
121.

Nadja
.
314

|
CHAPTER 3
|
The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature; but what is
its importance in everyday life? To what extent does it affect
individual social customs and behavior? To reply to this question, we
will need to specify the relation of this myth to reality.
There are different kinds of myths. This one, sublimating an
immutable aspect of the human condition—that is, the “division” of
humanity into two categories of individuals—is a static myth; it
projects into a Platonic heaven a reality grasped through experience or
conceptualized from experience; for fact, value, significance, notion,
and empirical law, it substitutes a transcendent Idea, timeless,
immutable, and necessary. This idea escapes all contention because it
is situated beyond the given; it is endowed with an absolute truth.
Thus, to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of
women
,
mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the
definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-and-
blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that
Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine. Experiential
denials cannot do anything against myth. Though in a way, its source
is in experience. It is thus true that woman is other than man, and this
alterity is concretely felt in desire, embrace, and love; but the real
relation is one of reciprocity; as such, it gives rise to authentic dramas:
through eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives of
disappointment, hatred, and rivalry, the relation is a struggle of
consciousnesses, each of which wants to be essential, it is the
recognition of freedoms that confirm each other, it is the undefined
passage from enmity to complicity. To posit the Woman is to posit the
absolute Other, without reciprocity, refusing, against experience, that
she could be a subject, a peer.
In concrete reality, women manifest themselves in many different
ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize
her as a whole; each is supposed to be unique; the consequence of this
is a multiplicity
of incompatible myths, and men are perplexed before
315

the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity; as every woman
enters into many of these archetypes, each of which claims to
incarnate its Truth alone, men also find the same old confusion before
their companions as did the Sophists, who had difficulty
understanding how a person could be light and dark at the same time.
The transition to the absolute shows up in social representations:
relations are quickly fixed in classes, and roles in types, just as, for
the childlike mentality, relations are fixed in things. For example,
patriarchal society, focused on preserving the patrimony, necessarily
implies, in addition to individuals who hold and transmit goods, the
existence of men and women who wrest them from their owners and
circulate them; men—adventurers, crooks, thieves, speculators—are
generally repudiated by the group; women using their sexual attraction
can lure young people and even family men into dissipating their
patrimony, all within the law; they appropriate men’s fortunes or seize
their inheritance; this role being considered bad, women who play it
are called “bad women.” But in other families—those of their fathers,
brothers, husbands, or lovers—they can in fact seem like guardian
angels; the courtesan who swindles rich financiers is a patroness of
painters and writers. The ambiguity of personalities like Apasia and
Mme de Pompadour is easy to understand as a concrete experience.
But if woman is posited as the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, or the
Demon, then the mind reels to discover in her the Muse, the Goddess
Mother, and Beatrice as well.
As group representation and social types are generally defined by
pairs of opposite terms, ambivalence will appear to be an intrinsic
property of the Eternal Feminine. The saintly mother has its
correlation in the cruel stepmother, the angelic young girl has the
perverse virgin: so Mother will be said sometimes to equal Life and
sometimes Death, and every virgin is either a pure spirit or flesh
possessed by the devil.
It is obviously not reality that dictates to society or individuals their
choices between the two opposing principles of unification; in every
period, in every case, society and individual decide according to their
needs. Very often they project the values and institutions to which
they adhere onto the myth they adopt. Thus paternalism that calls for
woman to stay at home defines her as sentiment, interiority, and
immanence; in fact, every existent is simultaneously immanence and
316

transcendence; when he is offered no goal, or is prevented from
reaching any goal, or denied the victory of it, his transcendence falls
uselessly into the past, that is, it falls into immanence; this is the lot
assigned to women in patriarchy; but this is in no way a vocation, any
more than slavery is the slave’s vocation. The development
of this
mythology is all too clear in Auguste Comte. To identify Woman with
Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to
impose on women a categorical must-be.
The myth must not be confused with the grasp of a signification;
signification is immanent in the object; it is revealed to consciousness
in a living experience, whereas the myth is a transcendent Idea that
escapes any act of consciousness. When Michel Leiris in
L’âge
d’homme (Manhood
) describes his vision of female organs, he
provides significations and does not develop a myth. Wonder at the
feminine body and disgust for menstrual blood are apprehensions of a
concrete reality. There is nothing mythical in the experience of
discovering the voluptuous qualities of feminine flesh, and expressing
these qualities by comparisons to flowers or pebbles does not turn
them into myth. But to say that Woman is Flesh, to say that Flesh is
Night and Death, or that she is the splendor of the cosmos, is to leave
terrestrial truth behind and spin off into an empty sky. After all, man
is also flesh for woman; and woman is other than a carnal object; and
for each person and in each experience the flesh is takes on singular
significations. It is likewise perfectly true that woman—like man—is
a being rooted in nature; she is more enslaved to the species than the
male is, her animality is more manifest; but in her as in him, the given
is taken on by existence; she also belongs to the human realm.
Assimilating her with Nature is simply a prejudice.
Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling master caste
than this one: it justifies all its privileges and even authorizes taking
advantage of them. Men do not have to care about alleviating the
suffering and burdens that are physiologically women’s lot since they
are “intended by Nature”; they take this as a pretext to increase the
misery of the woman’s condition—for example, by denying woman
the right to sexual pleasure, or making her work like a beast of
burden.
1
Of all these myths, none is more anchored in masculine hearts than
the feminine “mystery.” It has numerous advantages. And first it
317

allows an easy explanation for anything that is inexplicable; the man
who does not “understand” a woman is happy to replace his
subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting
his ignorance, he recognizes the
presence of a mystery exterior to
himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the
same time. An infatuated heart thus avoids many disappointments: if
the loved one’s behavior is capricious, her remarks stupid, the
mystery serves as an excuse. And thanks to the mystery, this negative
relation that seemed to Kierkegaard infinitely preferable to positive
possession is perpetuated; faced with a living enigma, man remains
alone: alone with his dreams, hopes, fears, love, vanity; this subjective
game that can range from vice to mystical ecstasy is for many a more
attractive experience than an authentic relation with a human being.
Upon what bases does such a profitable illusion rest?
Surely, in a way, woman is mysterious, “mysterious like
everyone,” according to Maeterlinck. Each one is subject only for
himself; each one can grasp only his own self in his immanence; from
this point of view, the other is always mystery. In men’s view, the
opacity of the for-itself is more flagrant in the feminine other; they are
unable to penetrate her unique experience by any effect of sympathy;
they are condemned to ignorance about the quality of woman’s sexual
pleasure, the discomforts of menstruation, and the pains of childbirth.
The truth is that mystery is reciprocal: as another, and as a masculine
other, there is also a presence closed on itself and impenetrable to
woman in the heart of every man; she is without knowledge of male
eroticism. But according to a universal rule already mentioned, the
categories in which men think the world are constituted from
their
point of view as absolutes:
they fail to understand reciprocity here as
everywhere. As she is mystery for man, woman is regarded as
mystery in herself.
It is true that her situation especially disposes her to be seen in this
image. Her physiological destiny is very complex; she herself endures
it as a foreign story; her body is not for her a clear expression of
herself; she feels alienated from it; the link that for every individual
joins physiological to psychic life—in other words, the relation
between the facticity of an individual and the freedom that assumes it
—is the most difficult enigma brought about by the human condition:
for woman, this enigma is posed in the most disturbing way.
318

But what is called mystery is not the subjective solitude of
consciousness, or the secret of organic life. The word’s true meaning
is found at the level of communication: it cannot be reduced to pure
silence, to obscurity, to absence; it implies an emerging presence that
fails to appear. To say that woman is mystery is to say not that she is
silent but that her language is not heard; she is there, but hidden
beneath veils; she exists beyond these uncertain appearances. Who is
she? An angel, a demon, an inspiration, an
actress? One supposes that
either there are answers impossible to uncover or none is adequate
because a fundamental ambiguity affects the feminine being; in her
heart she is indefinable for herself: a sphinx.
The fact is, deciding
who
she
is
would be quite awkward for her;
the question has no answer; but it is not that the hidden truth is too
fluctuating to be circumscribed: in this area there is no truth. An
existent
is
nothing other than what he does; the possible does not
exceed the real, essence does not precede existence: in his pure
subjectivity, the human being
is nothing
. He is measured by his acts.
It can be said that a peasant woman is a good or bad worker, that an
actress has or does not have talent: but if a woman is considered in
her immanent presence, absolutely nothing can be said about that, she
is outside of the realm of qualification. Now, in amorous or conjugal
relations and in all relations where woman is the vassal, the Other, she
is grasped in her immanence. It is striking that the woman friend,
colleague, or associate is without mystery; on the other hand, if the
vassal is male and if, in front of an older and richer man or woman, a
young man, for example, appears as the inessential object, he also is
surrounded in mystery. And this uncovers for us an infrastructure of
feminine mystery that is economic. A sentiment cannot
be
something,
either. “In the domain of feeling, what is real is indistinguishable from
what is imaginary,” writes Gide. “And it is sufficient to imagine one
loves, in order to love, so it is sufficient to say to oneself that when
one loves one imagines one loves, in order to love a little less.” There
is no discriminating between the imaginary and the real except
through behavior. As man holds a privileged place in this world, he is
the one who is able actively to display his love; very often he keeps
the woman, or at least he helps her out; in marrying her, he gives her
social status; he gives her gifts; his economic and social independence
permits his endeavors and innovations: separated from Mme de
319

Villeparisis, M. de Norpois takes twenty-four-hour trips to be with
her; very often he is busy and she is idle: he
gives
her the time he
spends with her; she takes it: with pleasure, passion, or simply for
entertainment? Does she accept these benefits out of love or out of
one interest? Does she love husband or marriage? Of course, even the
proof man gives is ambiguous: Is such a gift given out of love or
pity? But while normally woman finds numerous advantages in
commerce with man, commerce with woman is profitable to man only
inasmuch as he loves her. Thus, the degree of his attachment to her
can be roughly estimated by his general attitude, while woman barely
has the means to sound out her own heart; according to her moods
she will take different points of view about her own feelings, and as
long as she submits to them passively, no interpretation will be truer
than
another. In the very rare cases where it is she who holds the
economic and social privileges, the mystery is reversed: this proves
that it is not linked to
this
sex rather than to the other but to a situation.
For many women, the roads to transcendence are blocked: because
they
do
nothing, they do not make themselves
be
anything; they
wonder indefinitely what they
could have
become, which leads them
to wonder what they
are:
it is a useless questioning; if man fails to
find that secret essence, it is simply because it does not exist. Kept at
the margins of the world, woman cannot be defined objectively
through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing but emptiness.
Furthermore, like all oppressed people, woman deliberately
dissimulates her objective image; slave, servant, indigent, all those
who depend upon a master’s whims have learned to present him with
an immutable smile or an enigmatic impassivity; they carefully hide
their real feelings and behavior. Woman is also taught from
adolescence to lie to men, to outsmart, to sidestep them. She
approaches them with artificial expressions; she is prudent,
hypocritical, playacting.
But feminine Mystery as recognized by mythical thinking is a more
profound reality. In fact, it is immediately implied in the mythology of
the absolute Other. If one grants that the inessential consciousness is
also a transparent subjectivity, capable of carrying out the cogito, one
grants that it is truly sovereign and reverts to the essential; for all
reciprocity to seem impossible, it is necessary that the Other be
another for itself, that its very subjectivity be affected by alterity; this
320

consciousness, which would be alienated as consciousness, in its pure
immanent presence, would obviously be a Mystery; it would be a
Mystery in itself because it would be it for itself; it would be absolute
Mystery. It is thus that, beyond the secrecy their dissimulation creates,
there is a mystery of the Black, of the Yellow, insofar as they are
considered absolutely as the inessential Other. It must be noted that
the American citizen who deeply confounds the average European is
nonetheless not considered “mysterious”: one more modestly claims
not to understand him; likewise, woman does not always
“understand” man, but there is no masculine mystery; the fact is that
rich America and the male are on the side of the Master, and Mystery
belongs to the slave.
Of course, one can only dream about the positive reality of the
Mystery in the twilight of bad faith; like certain marginal
hallucinations, it dissolves once one tries to pin it down. Literature
always fails to depict “mysterious” women; they can only appear at
the beginning of a novel as strange and enigmatic; but unless the story
remains unfinished, they give up their secret in the end and become
consistent and translucent characters.
The heroes in Peter Cheyney’s
books, for example, never cease to be amazed by women’s
unpredictable caprices; one can never guess how they will behave,
they confound all calculations; in truth, as soon as the workings of
their actions are exposed to the reader, they are seen as very simple
mechanisms: this one is a spy or that one a thief; however clever the
intrigue, there is always a key, and it could not be otherwise, even if
the author had all the talent, all the imagination possible. Mystery is
never more than a mirage; it vanishes as soon as one tries to approach
it.
Thus we see that myths are explained in large part by the use man
makes of them. The myth of the woman is a luxury. It can appear only
if man escapes the imperious influence of his needs; the more
relations are lived concretely, the less idealized they are. The fellah in
ancient Egypt, the bedouin peasant, the medieval artisan, and the
worker of today, in their work needs and their poverty, have relations
with the particular woman who is their companion that are too basic
for them to embellish her with an auspicious or fatal aura. Eras and
social classes that had the leisure to daydream were the ones who
created the black-and-white statues of femininity. But luxury also has
321

its usefulness; these dreams were imperiously guided by interest. Yes,
most myths have their roots in man’s spontaneous attitude to his own
existence and the world that invests it: but the move to surpass
experience toward the transcendent Idea was deliberately effected by
patriarchal society for the end of self-justification; through myths, this
society imposed its laws and customs on individuals in an imagistic
and sensible way; it is in a mythical form that the group imperative
insinuated itself into each consciousness. By way of religions,
traditions, language, tales, songs, and film, myths penetrate even into
the existence of those most harshly subjected to material realities.
Everyone can draw on myth to sublimate his own modest
experiences: betrayed by a woman he loves, one man calls her a slut;
another is obsessed by his own virile impotence: this woman is a
praying mantis; yet another takes pleasure in his wife’s company: here
we have Harmony, Repose, Mother Earth. The taste for eternity at
bargain prices and for a handy, pocket-sized absolute, seen in most
men, is satisfied by myths. The least emotion, a small disagreement,
become the reflection of a timeless Idea; this illusion comfortably
flatters one’s vanity.
The myth is one of those traps of false objectivity into which the
spirit of seriousness falls headlong. It is once again a matter of
replacing lived experience and the free judgments of experience it
requires by a static idol. The myth of Woman substitutes for an
authentic relationship with an autonomous existent the immobile
contemplation of a mirage. “Mirage! Mirage! Kill them since we
cannot seize them; or else reassure them, instruct them, help them give
up their taste for jewelry, make them real
equal companions, our
intimate friends, associates in the here and now, dress them
differently, cut their hair, tell them everything,” cried Laforgue. Man
would have nothing to lose, quite the contrary, if he stopped
disguising woman as a symbol. Dreams, when collective and
controlled—clichés—are so poor and monotonous compared to living
reality: for the real dreamer, for the poet, living reality is a far more
generous resource than a worn-out fantasy. The times when women
were the most sincerely cherished were not courtly feudal ones, nor
the gallant nineteenth century; they were the times—the eighteenth
century, for example—when men regarded women as their peers; this
is when women looked truly romantic: only read
Les liaisons
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dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), Le rouge et le noir
(
The Red and
the Black
), or
A Farewell to Arms
to realize this. Laclos’ heroines like
Stendhal’s and Hemingway’s are without mystery: and they are no
less engaging for it. To recognize a human being in a woman is not to
impoverish man’s experience: that experience would lose none of its
diversity, its richness, or its intensity if it was taken on in its
intersubjectivity; to reject myths is not to destroy all dramatic relations
between the sexes, it is not to deny the significations authentically
revealed to man through feminine reality; it is not to eliminate poetry,
love, adventure, happiness, and dreams: it is only to ask that behavior,
feelings, and passion be grounded in truth.
2
“Woman is lost. Where are the women? Today’s women are not
women”; we have seen what these mysterious slogans mean. In the
eyes of men—and of the legions of women who see through these
eyes—it is not enough to have a woman’s body or to take on the
female function as lover and mother to be a “real woman”; it is
possible for the subject to claim autonomy through sexuality and
maternity; the “real woman” is one who accepts herself as Other. The
duplicitous attitude of men today creates a painful split for women;
they accept, for the most part, that woman be a peer, an equal; and yet
they continue to oblige her to remain the inessential; for her, these two
destinies are not reconcilable; she hesitates between them without
being exactly suited to either, and that is the source of her lack of
balance. For man, there is no hiatus between public and private life:
the more he asserts his grasp on the world through action and work,
the more virile he looks; human and vital characteristics are merged in
him; but women’s own successes are in contradiction with her
femininity since the
“real woman” is required to make herself object,
to be the Other. It is very possible that on this point even men’s
sensibility and sexuality are changing. A new aesthetic has already
been born. Although the fashion for flat chests and narrow hips—the
boyish woman—only lasted a short while, the opulent ideal of past
centuries has nevertheless not returned. The feminine body is
expected to be flesh, but discreetly so; it must be slim and not
burdened with fat; toned, supple, robust, it has to suggest
transcendence; it is preferred tanned, having been bared to a universal
sun like a worker’s torso, not white like a hothouse plant. Woman’s
clothes, in becoming more practical, have not made her look asexual:
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on the contrary, short skirts have shown off her legs and thighs more
than before. There is no reason for work to deprive her of her erotic
appeal. To see woman as both a social person and carnal prey can be
disturbing: in a recent series of drawings by Peynet,
3
there is a young
fiancé deserting his fiancée because he was seduced by the pretty
mayoress about to celebrate the marriage; that a woman could hold a
“man’s office” and still be desirable has long been a subject of more
or less dirty jokes; little by little, scandal and irony have lost their bite
and a new form of eroticism seems to be coming about: perhaps it will
produce new myths.
What is certain is that today it is very difficult for women to assume
both their status of autonomous individual and their feminine destiny;
here is the source of the awkwardness and discomfort that sometimes
leads them to be considered “a lost sex.” And without doubt it is more
comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s
liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living. In
any case, turning back is no more possible than desirable. What must
be hoped is that men will assume, without reserve, the situation being
created; only then can women experience it without being torn. Then
will Laforgue’s wish be fulfilled: “O young women, when will you
be our brothers, our closest brothers without ulterior motives of
exploitation? When will we give to each other a true handshake?”
Then “Melusina, no longer under the burden of the fate unleashed on
her by man alone, Melusina rescued,” will find “her human base.”
4
Then will she fully be a human being, “when woman’s infinite
servitude is broken, when she lives for herself and by herself, man—
abominable until now—giving her her freedom.”
5
1.
Cf. Balzac,
Physiology of Marriage:
“Do not trouble yourself in any way about her
murmurings, her cries, her pains; nature has made her for your use, made her to bear all:
the children, the worries, the blows, and the sorrows of man. But do not accuse us of
harshness. In the codes of all the so-called civilised nations, man has written the laws
which rule the destiny of woman beneath this blood inscription:
Vae victis!
Woe to the
vanquished.”
2.
Laforgue goes on to say about woman: “As she has been left in slavery, idleness,
without arms other than her sex, she has overdeveloped it and has become the
Feminine … we have permitted her to overdevelop; she is on the earth for us … Well,
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that is all wrong … we have played doll with the woman until now. This has gone on
too long!”
3.
November 1948.
4.
Breton,
Arcanum 17
.
5.
Rimbaud, to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871.
325

VOLUME II
Lived Experience
326

What a curse to be a woman! And yet the very
worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not
to understand that it is one
.
—KIERKEGAARD
Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone
.
—J.-P. SARTRE
327

Introduction
Women of today are overthrowing the myth of femininity; they are
beginning to affirm their independence concretely; but their success in
living their human condition completely does not come easily. As they
are brought up by women, in the heart of a feminine world, their
normal destiny is marriage, which still subordinates them to man from
a practical point of view; virile prestige is far from being eradicated: it
still stands on solid economic and social bases. It is thus necessary to
study woman’s traditional destiny carefully. What I will try to
describe is how woman is taught to assume her condition, how she
experiences this, what universe she finds herself enclosed in, and
what escape mechanisms are permitted her. Only then can we
understand what problems women—heirs to a weighty past, striving
to forge a new future—are faced with. When I use the word “woman”
or “feminine,” I obviously refer to no archetype, to no immutable
essence; “in the present state of education and customs” must be
understood to follow most of my affirmations. There is no question of
expressing eternal truths here, but of describing the common ground
from which all singular feminine existence stems.
328

|
PART ONE
|
FORMATIVE YEARS
329

|
CHAPTER 1
|
Childhood
One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic,
or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on
in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary
product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only
the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an
Other
.
Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself
as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the
radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the
comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through
their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts. The drama of
birth and weaning takes place in the same way for infants of both
sexes; they have the same interests and pleasures; sucking is the first
source of their most pleasurable sensations; they then go through an
anal phase in which they get their greatest satisfactions from excretory
functions common to both; their genital development is similar; they
explore their bodies with the same curiosity and the same indifference;
they derive the same uncertain pleasure from the clitoris and the penis;
insofar as their sensibility already needs an object, it turns toward the
mother: it is the soft, smooth, supple feminine flesh that arouses
sexual desires, and these desires are prehensile; the girl like the boy
kisses, touches, and caresses her mother in an aggressive manner;
they feel the same jealousy at the birth of a new child; they show it
with the same behavior: anger, sulking, urinary problems; they have
recourse to the same coquetry to gain the love of adults. Up to twelve,
the girl is just as sturdy as her brothers; she shows the same
intellectual aptitudes; she is not barred from competing with them in
any area. If well before puberty and sometimes even starting from
early childhood she already appears sexually specified, it is not
because mysterious instincts immediately destine her to passivity,
coquetry, or motherhood but because the intervention of others in the
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infant’s life is almost originary, and her vocation is imperiously
breathed into her from the first years of her life.
The world is first present to the newborn only in the form of
immanent sensations; he is still immersed within the Whole as he was
when he was living in the darkness of a womb; whether raised on the
breast or on a bottle, he is invested with the warmth of maternal flesh.
Little by little he learns to perceive objects as distinct from himself: he
separates himself from them; at the same time, more or less suddenly,
he is removed from the nourishing body; sometimes he reacts to this
separation with a violent fit;
1
in any case, when it is consummated—
around six months—he begins to manifest the desire to seduce others
by mimicking, which then turns into a real display. Of course, this
attitude is not defined by a reflective choice; but it is not necessary to
think
a situation to
exist
it. In an immediate way the newborn lives the
primeval drama of every existent—that is, the drama of one’s relation
to the Other. Man experiences his abandonment in anguish. Fleeing
his freedom and subjectivity, he would like to lose himself within the
Whole: here is the origin of his cosmic and pantheistic reveries, of his
desire for oblivion, sleep, ecstasy, and death. He never manages to
abolish his separated self: at the least he wishes to achieve the solidity
of the in-itself, to be petrified in thing; it is uniquely when he is fixed
by the gaze of others that he appears to himself as a being. It is in this
vein that the child’s behavior has to be interpreted: in a bodily form he
discovers finitude, solitude, and abandonment in an alien world; he
tries to compensate for this catastrophe by alienating his existence in
an image whose reality and value will be established by others. It
would seem that from the time he recognizes his reflection in a mirror
—a time that coincides with weaning—he begins to affirm his
identity:
2
his self merges with this reflection in such a way that it is
formed only by alienating itself. Whether the mirror as such plays a
more or less considerable role, what is sure is that the child at about
six months of age begins to understand his parents’ miming and to
grasp himself under their gaze as an object. He is already an
autonomous subject transcending himself toward the world: but it is
only in an alienated form that he will encounter himself.
When the child grows up, he fights against his original
abandonment in two ways. He tries to deny the separation: he crushes
himself in his mother’s arms, he seeks her loving warmth, he wants
331

her caresses. And he
tries to win the approbation of others in order to
justify himself. Adults are to him as gods: they have the power to
confer being on him. He experiences the magic of the gaze that
metamorphoses him now into a delicious little angel and now into a
monster. These two modes of defense are not mutually exclusive: on
the contrary, they complete and infuse each other. When seduction is
successful, the feeling of justification finds physical confirmation in
the kisses and caresses received: it is the same contented passivity that
the child experiences in his mother’s lap and under her benevolent
eyes. During the first three or four years of life, there is no difference
between girls’ and boys’ attitudes; they all try to perpetuate the happy
state preceding weaning; both boys and girls show the same behavior
of seduction and display. Boys are just as desirous as their sisters to
please, to be smiled at, to be admired.
It is more satisfying to deny brutal separation than to overcome it,
more radical to be lost in the heart of the Whole than to be petrified by
the consciousness of others: carnal fusion creates a deeper alienation
than any abdication under the gaze of another. Seduction and display
represent a more complex and less easy stage than the simple
abandonment in maternal arms. The magic of the adult gaze is
capricious; the child pretends to be invisible, his parents play the
game, grope around for him, they laugh, and then suddenly they
declare: “You are bothersome, you are not invisible at all.” A child’s
phrase amuses, then he repeats it: this time, they shrug their
shoulders. In this world as unsure and unpredictable as Kafka’s
universe, one stumbles at every step.
3
That is why so many children
are afraid of growing up; they desperately want their parents to
continue taking them on their laps, taking them into their bed: through
physical frustration they experience ever more cruelly that
abandonment of which the human being never becomes aware
without anguish.
It is here that little girls first appear privileged. A second weaning,
slower and less brutal than the first one, withdraws the mother’s body
from the child’s embraces; but little by little boys are the ones who are
denied
kisses and caresses; the little girl continues to be doted upon,
she is allowed to hide behind her mother’s skirts, her father takes her
on his knees and pats her hair; she is dressed in dresses as lovely as
kisses, her tears and whims are treated indulgently, her hair is done
332

carefully, her expressions and affectations amuse: physical contact
and complaisant looks protect her against the anxiety of solitude. For
the little boy, on the other hand, even affectations are forbidden; his
attempts at seduction, his games irritate. “A man doesn’t ask for
kisses … A man doesn’t look at himself in the mirror … A man
doesn’t cry,” he is told. He has to be “a little man”; he obtains adults’
approbation by freeing himself from them. He will please by not
seeming to seek to please.
Many boys, frightened by the harsh independence they are
condemned to, thus desire to be girls; in times when they were first
dressed as girls, they cried when they had to give dresses up for long
pants and had to have their curls cut. Some obstinately would choose
femininity, which is one of the ways of gravitating toward
homosexuality: “I wanted passionately to be a girl, and I was
unconscious of the grandeur of being a man to the point of trying to
urinate sitting down,” Maurice Sachs recounts.
4
However, if the boy
at first seems less favored than his sisters, it is because there are
greater designs for him. The requirements he is subjected to
immediately imply a higher estimation. In his memoirs, Maurras
recounts that he was jealous of a cadet his mother and grandmother
doted upon; his father took him by the hand and out of the room. “We
are men; let’s leave these women,” he told him. The child is persuaded
that more is demanded of boys because of their superiority; the pride
of his virility is breathed into him in order to encourage him in this
difficult path; this abstract notion takes on a concrete form for him: it
is embodied in the penis; he does not experience pride spontaneously
in his little indolent sex organ; but he feels it through the attitude of
those around him. Mothers and wet nurses perpetuate the tradition
that assimilates phallus and maleness; whether they recognize its
prestige in amorous gratitude or in submission, or that they gain
revenge by seeing it in the baby in a reduced form, they treat the
child’s penis with a singular deference. Rabelais reports on
Gargantua’s wet nurses’ games and words;
5
history has recorded
those of Louis XIII’s wet nurses. Less daring
women, however, give
a friendly name to the little boy’s sex organ, they speak to him about it
as of a little person who is both himself and other than himself; they
make of it, according to the words already cited, “an alter ego usually
craftier, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual.”
6
333

Anatomically, the penis is totally apt to play this role; considered
apart from the body, it looks like a little natural plaything, a kind of
doll. The child is esteemed by esteeming his double. A father told me
that one of his sons at the age of three was still urinating sitting down;
surrounded by sisters and girl cousins, he was a shy and sad child;
one day his father took him with him to the toilet and said: “I will
show you how men do it.” From then on, the child, proud to be
urinating standing up, scorned the girls “who urinated through a
hole”; his scorn came originally not from the fact that they were
lacking an organ but that they had not like him been singled out and
initiated by the father. So, far from the penis being discovered as an
immediate privilege from which the boy would draw a feeling of
superiority, its value seems, on the contrary, like a compensation—
invented by adults and fervently accepted by the child—for the
hardships of the last weaning: in that way he is protected against
regret that he is no longer a breast-feeding baby or a girl. From then
on, he will embody his transcendence and his arrogant sovereignty in
his sex.
7
The girl’s lot is very different. Mothers and wet nurses have neither
reverence nor tenderness for her genital parts; they do not focus
attention on this secret organ of which only the outside envelope can
be seen and that cannot be taken hold of; in one sense, she does not
have a sex. She does not experience this absence as a lack; her body is
evidently a plenitude for her; but she finds herself in the world
differently from the boy; and a group of factors can transform this
difference into inferiority in her eyes.
Few questions are as much discussed by psychoanalysts as the
famous “female castration complex.” Most accept today that penis
envy manifests itself in very different ways depending on the
individual case.
8
First, many girls are ignorant of male anatomy until
an advanced age. The child accepts naturally that there are men and
women as there are a sun and a moon: she believes in essences
contained in words, and his curiosity is at
first not analytical. For
many others, this little piece of flesh hanging between boys’ legs is
insignificant or even derisory; it is a particularity like that of clothes
and hairstyle; often the female child discovers it at a younger brother’s
birth, and “when the little girl is very young,” says Helene Deutsch,
“she is not impressed by her younger brother’s penis”; she cites the
334

example of an eighteen-month-old girl who remained absolutely
indifferent to the discovery of the penis and did not give it any value
until much later, in connection with her personal preoccupations. The
penis can even be considered an anomaly: it is a growth, a vague
hanging thing like nodules, teats, and warts; it can inspire disgust.
Lastly, the fact is that there are many cases of the little girl being
interested in a brother’s or a friend’s penis; but that does not mean she
experiences a specifically sexual jealousy and even less that she feels
deeply moved by the absence of this organ; she desires to appropriate
it for herself as she desires to appropriate any object; but this desire
may remain superficial.
It is certain that the excretory function and particularly the urinary
one interest children passionately: wetting the bed is often a protest
against the parents’ marked preference for another child. There are
countries where men urinate sitting down, and there are women who
urinate standing up: this is the way among many women peasants; but
in contemporary Western society, custom generally has it that they
squat, while the standing position is reserved to males. This is the
most striking sexual difference for the little girl. To urinate she has to
squat down, remove some clothes, and above all hide, a shameful and
uncomfortable servitude. Shame increases in the frequent cases in
which she suffers from involuntary urinary emissions, when bursting
out laughing, for example; control is worse than for boys. For them,
the urinary function is like a free game with the attraction of all games
in which freedom is exercised; the penis can be handled, through it
one can act, which is one of the child’s deep interests. A little girl
seeing a boy urinate declared admiringly: “How practical!”
9
The
stream can be aimed at will, the urine directed far away: the boy draws
a feeling of omnipotence from it. Freud spoke of “the burning
ambition of early diuretics”; Stekel discussed this formula sensibly,
but it is true that, as Karen Horney says, “fantasies of omnipotence,
especially of a sadistic character, are as a matter of fact more easily
associated with the jet of urine passed by the male”;
10
there are many
such fantasies in children, and they
survive in some men.
11
Abraham
speaks of “the great pleasure women experience watering the garden
with a hose”; I think, in agreement with Sartre’s and Bachelard’s
theories,
12
that it is not necessarily the assimilation of the hose with
335

the penis that is the source of pleasure;
13
every stream of water seems
like a miracle, a defiance of gravity: directing or governing it means
carrying off a little victory over natural laws; in any case, for the little
boy there is a daily amusement that is impossible for his sisters. He is
also able to establish many relations with things through the urinary
stream, especially in the countryside: water, earth, moss, snow. There
are little girls who lie on their backs and try to practice urinating “in
the air” or who try to urinate standing up in order to have these
experiences. According to Karen Horney, they also envy the
opportunity to exhibit that the boy is granted. A sick woman suddenly
exclaimed, after seeing a man urinating in the street: “If I might ask a
gift of Providence, it would be to be able just for once to urinate like a
man,” Karen Horney reports. It seems to girls that the boy, having the
right to touch his penis, can use it as a plaything, while their organs
are taboo. That these factors make the possession of a male sex organ
desirable for many of them is a fact confirmed by many studies and
confidences gathered by psychiatrists. Havelock Ellis quotes the
words of a patient he calls Zenia: “The noise of a jet of water,
especially coming out of a long hose, has always been very
stimulating for me, recalling the noise of the stream of urine observed
in childhood in my brother and even in other people.”
14
Another
woman, Mrs. R.S., recounts that as a child she absolutely loved
holding a little friend’s penis in her hands; one day she was given a
hose: “It seemed delicious to hold that as if I was holding a penis.”
She emphasized that the penis had no sexual meaning for her; she
only knew its urinary usage. The most interesting case, that of Florrie,
is reported by Havelock Ellis and later analyzed by Stekel.
15
Here is a
detailed account from it.
The woman concerned is very intelligent, artistic, active,
biologically normal, and not homosexual. She says that the
urinary function played a great role in her childhood; she played
urinary games with
her brothers, and they wet their hands
without feeling disgust. “My earliest ideas of the superiority of
the male were connected with urination. I felt aggrieved with
nature because I lacked so useful and ornamental an organ. No
teapot without a spout felt so forlorn. It required no one to instill
into me the theory of male predominance and superiority.
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Constant proof was before me.” She took great pleasure in
urinating in the country. “Nothing could come up to the
entrancing sound as the stream descended on crackling leaves in
the depth of a wood and she watched its absorption. Most of all
she was fascinated by the idea of doing it into water” [as are
many little boys]. There is a quantity of childish and vulgar
imagery showing little boys urinating in ponds and brooks.
Florrie complains that the style of her knickers prevented her
from trying various desired experiments, but often during
country walks she would hold back as long as she could and
then suddenly relieve herself standing. “I can distinctly
remember the strange and delicious sensation of this forbidden
delight, and also my puzzled feeling that it came standing.” In her
opinion, the style of children’s clothing has great importance for
feminine psychology in general. “It was not only a source of
annoyance to me that I had to unfasten my drawers and then
squat down for fear of wetting them in front, but the flap at the
back, which must be removed to uncover the posterior parts
during the act, accounts for my early impression that in girls this
function is connected with those parts. The first distinction in sex
that impressed me—the one great difference in sex—was that
boys urinated standing and that girls had to sit down … The fact
that my earliest feelings of shyness were more associated with
the back than the front may have thus originated.” All these
impressions were of great importance in Florrie’s case because
her father often whipped her until the blood came and also a
governess had once spanked her to make her urinate; she was
obsessed by masochistic dreams and fancies in which she saw
herself whipped by a school mistress under the eyes of all and
having to urinate against her will, “an idea that gives one a
curious sense of gratification.” At the age of fifteen it happened
that under urgent need she urinated standing in a deserted street.
“In trying to analyze my sensations, I think the most prominent
lay in the shame that came from standing, and the consequently
greater distance the stream had to descend. It seemed to make the
affair important and conspicuous, even though clothing hid it. In
the ordinary attitude there is a kind of privacy. As a small child,
too,
the stream had not far to go, but at the age of fifteen I was
337

tall and it seemed to give one a glow of shame to think of this
stream falling unchecked such a distance. (I am sure that the
ladies who fled in horror from the urinette at Portsmouth thought
it most indecent for a woman to stand, legs apart, and to pull up
her clothes and make a stream which descended unabashed all
that way.)”
16
She renewed this experience at twenty and
frequently thereafter. She felt a mixture of shame and pleasure at
the idea that she might be surprised and that she would be
incapable of stopping. “The stream seemed to be drawn from me
without my consent, and
yet with even more pleasure than if I
were doing it freely
17
This curious feeling—that it is being
drawn away by some unseen power which is determined that
one shall do it—is an entirely feminine pleasure and a subtle
charm … There is a fierce charm in the torrent that binds one to
its will by a mighty force.” Later Florrie developed a flagellatory
eroticism always combined with urinary obsessions.
This case is very interesting because it throws light on several
elements of the child’s experience. But of course there are particular
circumstances that confer such a great importance upon them. For
normally raised little girls, the boy’s urinary privilege is too secondary
a thing to engender a feeling of inferiority directly. Psychoanalysts
following Freud who think that the mere discovery of the penis would
be sufficient to produce a trauma seriously misunderstand the child’s
mentality; it is much less rational than they seem to think, it does not
establish clear-cut categories and is not bothered by contradictions.
When the little girl seeing a penis declares, “I had one too” or “I’ll
have one too,” or even “I have one too,” this is not a defense in bad
faith; presence and absence are not mutually exclusive; the child—as
his drawings prove—believes much less in what he
sees
with his eyes
than in the signifying
types
that he has determined once and for all: he
often draws without looking, and in any case he finds in his
perceptions only what he puts there. Saussure, who emphasizes this
point, quotes this very important observation of Luquet’s: “Once a
line is considered wrong, it is as if inexistent,
the child literally no
longer sees it
, hypnotized in a way by the new line that replaces it, nor
does he take into account lines that can
be accidentally found on his
paper.”
18
Male anatomy constitutes a strong form that is often
338

imposed on the little girl; and
literally she no longer sees
her own
body. Saussure brings up the example of a four-year-old girl who,
trying to urinate like a boy between the bars of a fence, said she
wanted “a little long thing that runs.” She affirmed at the same time
that she had a penis and that she did not have one, which goes along
with the thinking by “participation” that Piaget described in children.
The little girl takes it for granted that all children are born with a penis
but that the parents then cut some of them off to make girls; this idea
satisfies the artificialism of the child who glorifies his parents and
“conceives of them as the cause of everything he possesses,” says
Piaget; he does not see punishment in castration right away. For it to
become a frustration, the little girl has to be unhappy with her
situation for some reason; as Deutsch justly points out, an exterior
event like the sight of a penis could not lead to an internal
development. “The sight of the male organ can have a traumatic
effect,” she says, “but only if a chain of prior experiences that would
create that effect had preceded it.” If the little girl feels powerless to
satisfy her desires of masturbation or exhibition, if her parents repress
her onanism, if she feels less loved or less valued than her brothers,
then she will project her dissatisfaction onto the male organ. “The little
girl’s discovery of the anatomical difference with the boy confirms a
previously felt need; it is her rationalization, so to speak.”
19
And
Adler also insisted on the fact that it is the validation by the parents
and others that gives the boy prestige, and that the penis becomes the
explanation and symbol in the little girl’s eyes. Her brother is
considered superior; he himself takes pride in his maleness; so she
envies him and feels frustrated. Sometimes she resents her mother and
less often her father; either she accuses herself of being mutilated, or
she consoles herself by thinking that the penis is hidden in her body
and that one day it will come out.
It is sure that the absence of a penis will play an important role in
the little girl’s destiny, even if she does not really envy those who
possess one. The great privilege that the boy gets from it is that as he
is bestowed with an organ that can be seen and held, he can at least
partially alienate himself in it. He projects the mystery of his body and
its dangers outside himself, which permits him to keep them at a
distance: of course, he feels endangered
through his penis, he fears
castration, but this fear is easier to dominate than the pervasive overall
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fear the girl feels concerning her “insides,” a fear that will often be
perpetuated throughout her whole life as a woman. She has a deep
concern about everything happening inside her; from the start, she is
far more opaque to herself and more profoundly inhabited by the
worrying mystery of life than the male. Because he recognizes himself
in an alter ego, the little boy can boldly assume his subjectivity; the
very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of
autonomy, transcendence, and power: he measures the size of his
penis; he compares his urinary stream with that of his friends; later,
erection and ejaculation will be sources of satisfaction and challenge.
But a little girl cannot incarnate herself in any part of her own body.
As compensation, and to fill the role of alter ego for her, she is
handed a foreign object: a doll. Note that the bandage wrapped on an
injured finger is also called a
poupée
(“doll” in French): a finger
dressed and separate from the others is looked on with amusement
and a kind of pride with which the child initiates the process of its
alienation. But it is a figurine with a human face—or a corn husk or
even a piece of wood—that will most satisfyingly replace this double,
this natural toy, this penis.
The great difference is that, on the one hand, the doll represents the
whole body and, on the other hand, it is a passive thing. As such, the
little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her person as a
whole and to consider it an inert given. While the boy seeks himself in
his penis as an autonomous subject, the little girl pampers her doll and
dresses her as she dreams of being dressed and pampered; inversely,
she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.
20
Through compliments and
admonishments, through images and words, she discovers the
meaning of the words “pretty” and “ugly”; she soon knows that to
please, she has to be “pretty as a picture”; she tries to resemble an
image, she disguises herself, she looks at herself in the mirror, she
compares herself to princesses and fairies from tales. Marie
Bashkirtseff gives a striking example of this infantile coquetry.
*
It is
certainly not by chance that, weaned late—she was three and a half—
she fervently felt the need at the age of four or five to be admired and
to exist for others: the shock must have been violent in a more mature
child, and she had to struggle even harder to overcome the inflicted
separation. “At five years old,” she writes in her diary, “I would dress
in Mummy’s lace, with
flowers in my hair, and I would go and dance
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in the living room. I was Petipa, the great dancer, and the whole house
was there to
look at me
.”
This narcissism appears so precociously for the little girl and will
play so fundamental a part in her life that it is readily considered as
emanating from a mysterious feminine instinct. But we have just seen
that in reality it is not an anatomical destiny that dictates her attitude.
The difference that distinguishes her from boys is a fact that she could
assume in many ways. Having a penis is certainly a privilege, but one
whose value naturally diminishes when the child loses interest in his
excretory functions and becomes socialized: if he retains interest in it
past the age of eight or nine years, it is because the penis has become
the symbol of a socially valorized virility. The fact is that the influence
of education and society is enormous here. All children try to
compensate for the separation of weaning by seductive and attention-
seeking behavior; the boy is forced to go beyond this stage, he is
saved from his narcissism by turning his attention to his penis,
whereas the girl is reinforced in this tendency to make herself object,
which is common to all children. The doll helps her, but it does not
have a determining role; the boy can also treasure a teddy bear or a rag
doll on whom he can project himself; it is in their life’s overall form
that each factor—penis, doll—takes on its importance.
Thus, the passivity that essentially characterizes the “feminine”
woman is a trait that develops in her from her earliest years. But it is
false to claim that therein lies a biological given; in fact, it is a destiny
imposed on her by her teachers and by society. The great advantage
for the boy is that his way of existing for others leads him to posit
himself for himself. He carries out the apprenticeship of his existence
as free movement toward the world; he rivals other boys in toughness
and independence; he looks down on girls. Climbing trees, fighting
with his companions, confronting them in violent games, he grasps
his body as a means to dominate nature and as a fighting tool; he is
proud of his muscles, as he is of his sex organ; through games,
sports, fights, challenges, and exploits, he finds a balanced use of his
strength; at the same time, he learns the severe lessons of violence; he
learns to take blows, to deride pain, to hold back tears from the
earliest age. He undertakes, he invents, he dares. Granted, he also
experiences himself as if “for others”; he tests his own virility, and
consequently, trouble ensues with adults and friends. But what is very
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important is that there is no fundamental opposition between this
objective figure that is his and his will for self-affirmation in concrete
projects. It is by doing that he makes himself be, in one single
movement. On the contrary, for the woman there is, from the start, a
conflict between her autonomous existence and her “beingother”;
she
is taught that to please, she must try to please, must make herself
object; she must therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like
a living doll, and freedom is denied her; thus a vicious circle is closed;
for the less she exercises her freedom to understand, grasp, and
discover the world around her, the less she will find its resources, and
the less she will dare to affirm herself as subject; if she were
encouraged, she could show the same vibrant exuberance, the same
curiosity, the same spirit of initiative, and the same intrepidness as the
boy. Sometimes this does happen when she is given a male
upbringing; she is thus spared many problems.
21
Interestingly, this is
the kind of education that a father habitually gives his daughter;
women brought up by a man escape many of the defects of
femininity. But customs oppose treating girls exactly like boys. I
knew a village where girls of three and four years old were persecuted
because their father made them wear trousers: “Are they girls or
boys?” And the other children tried to find out; the result was their
pleading to wear dresses. Unless she leads a very solitary life, even if
parents allow her to have boyish manners, the girl’s companions, her
friends, and her teachers will be shocked. There will always be aunts,
grandmothers, and girl cousins to counterbalance the father’s
influence. Normally, his role regarding his daughters is secondary.
One of the woman’s curses—as Michelet has justly pointed out—is
that in her childhood she is left in the hands of women. The boy is
also brought up by his mother in the beginning; but she respects his
maleness and he escapes from her relatively quickly, whereas the
mother wants to integrate the girl into the feminine world.
22
We will see later how complex the relation is between the mother
and the daughter: for the mother, the daughter is both her double and
an other, the mother cherishes her and at the same time is hostile to
her; she imposes her own destiny on her child: it is a way to proudly
claim her own femininity and also to take revenge on it. The same
process is found with pederasts, gamblers, drug addicts, and all those
who are flattered to belong to a certain community, and are also
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humiliated by it: they try through ardent proselytism to win over
converts. Thus, women given the care of a little girl are bent on
transforming her into women like themselves with zeal and arrogance
mixed with resentment. And even a generous mother who sincerely
wants the best for her child will, as a rule, think it wiser to make a
“true
woman” of her, as that is the way she will be best accepted by
society. So she is given other little girls as friends, she is entrusted to
female teachers, she lives among matrons as in the days of the
gynaeceum, books and games are chosen for her that introduce her to
her destiny, her ears are filled with the treasures of feminine wisdom,
feminine virtues are presented to her, she is taught cooking, sewing,
and housework as well as how to dress, how to take care of her
personal appearance, charm, and modesty; she is dressed in
uncomfortable and fancy clothes that she has to take care of, her hair
is done in complicated styles, posture is imposed on her: stand up
straight, don’t walk like a duck; to be graceful, she has to repress
spontaneous movements, she is told not to look like a tomboy,
strenuous exercise is banned, she is forbidden to fight; in short, she is
committed to becoming, like her elders, a servant and an idol. Today,
thanks to feminism’s breakthroughs, it is becoming more and more
normal to encourage her to pursue her education, to devote herself to
sports; but she is more easily excused for not succeeding; success is
made more difficult for her as another kind of accomplishment is
demanded of her: she must at least
also
be a woman; she must not
lose
her femininity.
In her early years she resigns herself to this lot without much
difficulty. The child inhabits the level of play and dream, he plays at
being, he plays at doing; doing and being are not clearly
distinguishable when it is a question of imaginary accomplishments.
The little girl can compensate for boys’ superiority of the moment by
those promises inherent in her woman’s destiny, which she already
achieves in her play. Because she still only knows her childhood
universe, her mother seems endowed with more authority than her
father; she imagines the world as a sort of matriarchy; she imitates her
mother, she identifies with her; often she even inverses the roles:
“When I am big and you are little …,” she often says. The doll is not
only her double: it is also her child, functions that are not mutually
exclusive insofar as the real child is also an alter ego for the mother;
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when she scolds, punishes, and then consoles her doll, she is
defending herself against her mother, and she assumes a mother’s
dignity: she sums up both elements of the couple as she entrusts
herself to her doll, educates her, asserts her sovereign authority over
her, and sometimes even tears off her arms, beats her, tortures her;
that is to say, through her she accomplishes the experience of
subjective affirmation and alienation. Often the mother is associated
with this imaginary life: in playing with the doll and the mother, the
child plays both the father and the mother, a couple where the man is
excluded. No “maternal instinct,” innate and mysterious, lies therein
either. The little girl observes that child care falls to the mother, that is
what she is taught; stories told, books read, all her little experience
confirms it; she is encouraged to feel delight for these future riches,
she is given dolls so she will already feel the tangible aspect of those
riches. Her “vocation” is determined imperiously. Because her lot
seems to be the child, and also because she is more interested in her
“insides” than the boy, the little girl is particularly curious about the
mystery of procreation; she quickly ceases to believe that babies are
born in cabbages or delivered by the stork; especially in cases where
the mother gives her brothers or sisters, she soon learns that babies
are formed in their mother’s body. Besides, parents today make less
of a mystery of it than before; she is generally more amazed than
frightened because the phenomenon seems like magic to her; she does
not yet grasp all of the physiological implications. First of all, she is
unaware of the father’s role and supposes that the woman gets
pregnant by eating certain foods, a legendary theme (queens in fairy
tales give birth to a little girl or a handsome boy after eating this fruit,
that fish) and one that later leads some women to link the idea of
gestation and the digestive system. Together these problems and these
discoveries absorb a great part of the little girl’s interests and feed her
imagination. I will cite a typical example from Jung,
23
which bears
remarkable analogies with that of little Hans, analyzed by Freud
around the same time:
When Anna was about three years old she began to question her
parents about where babies come from; Anna had heard that
children are “little angels.” She first seemed to think that when
people die, they go to heaven and are reincarnated as babies. At
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age four she had a little brother; she hadn’t seemed to notice her
mother’s pregnancy but when she saw her the day after the birth,
she looked at her “with something like a mixture of
embarrassment and suspicion” and finally asked her, “Aren’t
you going to die now?” She was sent to her grandmother’s for
some time; when she came back, a nurse had arrived and was
installed near the bed; she at first hated her but then she amused
herself playing nurse; she was jealous of her brother: she
sniggered, made up stories, disobeyed and threatened to go back
to her grandmother’s; she often accused her mother of not telling
the truth, because she suspected her of lying about the infant’s
birth; feeling obscurely that there was a difference between
“having” a child as a nurse and having one as a mother, she
asked
her mother: “Shall I be a different woman from you?” She
got into the habit of yelling for her parents during the night; and
as the earthquake of Messina was much talked about she made it
the pretext of her anxieties; she constantly asked questions about
it. One day, she asked outright: “Why is Sophie younger than I?
Where was Freddie before? Was he in heaven and what was he
doing there?” Her mother decided she ought to explain that the
little brother grew inside her stomach like plants in the earth.
Anna was enchanted with this idea. Then she asked: “But did he
come all by himself?” “Yes.” “But he can’t walk yet!” “He
crawled out.” “Did he come out here (pointing to her chest), or
did he come out of your mouth?” Without waiting for an answer,
she said she knew it was the stork that had brought it; but in the
evening she suddenly said: “My brother is in Italy;
24
he has a
house made of cloth and glass and it doesn’t fall down”; and she
was no longer interested in the earthquake and asked to see
photos of the eruption. She spoke again of the stork to her dolls
but without much conviction. Soon however, she had new
curiosities. Seeing her father in bed: “Why are you in bed? Have
you got a plant in your inside too?” She had a dream; she
dreamed of Noah’s Ark: “And underneath, there was a lid which
opened and all the little animals fell out”; in fact, her Noah’s Ark
opened by the roof: At this time, she again had nightmares: one
could guess that she was wondering about the father’s role. A
pregnant woman having visited her mother, the next day her
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mother saw Anna put a doll under her skirts and take it out
slowly, saying: “Look, the baby is coming out, now it is all out.”
Some time later, eating an orange, she said: “I’ll swallow it all
down into my stomach, and then I shall get a baby.” One
morning, her father was in the bathroom, she jumped on his bed,
lay flat on her face, and flailed with her legs, crying out, “Look,
is that what Papa does?” For five months she seemed to forget
her preoccupations and then she began to mistrust her father: she
thought he wanted to drown her, etc. One day she was happily
sowing seeds in the earth with the gardener, and she asked her
father: “How did the eyes grow into the head? And the hair?”
The father explained that they were already there from the
beginning and grew with the head. Then, she asked: “But how
did Fritz get into Mama? Who stuck him in? And who stuck you
into
your mama? Where did he come out?” Her father said,
smiling, “What do you think?” So she pointed to his sexual
organs: “Did he come out from there?” “Well, yes.” “But how
did he get into Mama? Did someone sow the seed?” So the
father explained that it is the father who gives the seed. She
seemed totally satisfied and the next day she teased her mother:
“Papa told me that Fritz was a little angel and was brought down
from heaven by the stork.” She was much calmer than before;
she had, though, a dream in which she saw gardeners urinating,
her father among them; she also dreamed, after seeing the
gardener plane a drawer, that he was planing her genitals; she
was obviously preoccupied with knowing the father’s exact role.
It seems that, almost completely enlightened at the age of five,
she did not experience any other disturbance.
*
This story is characteristic, although very often the little girl is less
precisely inquisitive about the role played by the father, or the parents
are much more evasive on this point. Many little girls hide cushions
under their pinafores to play at being pregnant, or else they walk
around with their doll in the folds of their skirts and let it fall into the
cradle, or they give it their breast. Boys, like girls, admire the mystery
of motherhood; all children have an “in depth” imagination that makes
them sense secret riches inside things; they are all sensitive to the
miracle of “nesting,” dolls that contain other, smaller dolls, boxes
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containing other boxes, vignettes identically reproduced in reduced
form; they are all enchanted when a bud is unfolded before their eyes,
when they are shown a chick in its shell or the surprise of “Japanese
flowers” in a bowl of water. One little boy, upon opening an Easter
egg full of little sugar eggs, exclaimed with delight: “Oh! A mummy!”
Having a child emerge from a woman’s stomach is beautiful, like a
magic trick. The mother seems endowed with wonderful fairy
powers. Many boys bemoan that such a privilege is denied them; if,
later, they take eggs from nests, stamp on young plants, if they
destroy life around them with a kind of rage, it is out of revenge at not
being able to hatch life, while the little girl is enchanted with the
thought of creating it one day.
In addition to this hope made concrete by playing with dolls, a
housewife’s life also provides the little girl with possibilities of
affirming herself. A great part of housework can be accomplished by
a very young child; a boy is usually exempted from it; but his sister is
allowed, even asked, to
sweep, dust, peel vegetables, wash a
newborn, watch the stew. In particular, the older sister often
participates in maternal chores; either for convenience or because of
hostility and sadism, the mother unloads many of her functions onto
her; she is then prematurely integrated into the universe of the serious;
feeling her importance will help her assume her femininity; but she is
deprived of the happy gratuitousness, the carefree childhood; a
woman before her time, she understands too soon what limits this
specificity imposes on a human being; she enters adolescence as an
adult, which gives her story a unique character. The overburdened
child can prematurely be a slave, condemned to a joyless existence.
But, if no more than an effort equal to her is demanded, she
experiences the pride of feeling efficient like a grown person and is
delighted to feel solidarity with adults. This solidarity is possible for
the child because there is not much distance between the child and the
housewife. A man specialized in his profession is separated from the
infant stage by years of training; paternal activities are profoundly
mysterious for the little boy; the man he will be later is barely
sketched in him. On the contrary, the mother’s activities are accessible
to the little girl. “She’s already a little woman,” say her parents, and
often she is considered more precocious than the boy: in fact, if she is
closer to the adult stage, it is because this stage traditionally remains
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more infantile for the majority of women. The fact is that she feels
precocious, she is flattered to play the role of “little mother” to the
younger ones; she easily becomes important, she speaks reason, she
gives orders, she takes on superior airs with her brothers, who are
still closed in the baby circle, she talks to her mother on an equal
footing.
In spite of these compensations, she does not accept her assigned
destiny without regret; growing up, she envies boys their virility.
Sometimes parents and grandparents poorly hide the fact that they
would have preferred a male offspring to a female; or else they show
more affection to the brother than to the sister: research shows that the
majority of parents wish to have sons rather than daughters. Boys are
spoken to with more seriousness and more esteem, and more rights
are granted them; they themselves treat girls with contempt, they play
among themselves and exclude girls from their group, they insult
them: they call them names like “piss pots,” thus evoking girls’ secret
childhood humiliations. In France, in coeducational schools, the boys’
caste deliberately oppresses and persecutes the girls’. But girls are
reprimanded if they want to compete or fight with them. They doubly
envy singularly boyish activities: they have a spontaneous desire to
affirm their power over the world, and they protest against the inferior
situation they are condemned to. They suffer in being forbidden
to
climb trees, ladders, and roofs, among other activities. Adler observes
that the notions of high and low have great importance, the idea of
spatial elevation implying a spiritual superiority, as can be seen in
numerous heroic myths; to attain a peak or a summit is to emerge
beyond the given world as sovereign subject; between boys, it is
frequently a pretext for challenge. The little girl, to whom exploits are
forbidden and who sits under a tree or by a cliff and sees the
triumphant boys above her, feels herself, body and soul, inferior. And
the same is true if she is left
behind
in a race or a jumping
competition, or if she is thrown
to the ground
in a fight or simply
pushed to the side.
The more the child matures, the more his universe expands and
masculine superiority asserts itself. Very often, identification with the
mother no longer seems a satisfactory solution. If the little girl at first
accepts her feminine vocation, it is not that she means to abdicate: on
the contrary, it is to rule; she wants to be a matron because matrons’
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society seems privileged to her; but when her acquaintances, studies,
amusements, and reading material tear her away from the maternal
circle, she realizes that it is not women but men who are the masters
of the world. It is this revelation—far more than the discovery of the
penis—that imperiously modifies her consciousness of herself.
She first discovers the hierarchy of the sexes in the family
experience; little by little she understands that the father’s authority is
not the one felt most in daily life, but it is the sovereign one; it has all
the more impact for not being wasted on trifling matters; even though
the mother reigns over the household, she is clever enough to put the
father’s will first; at important moments, she makes demands,
rewards, and punishes in his name. The father’s life is surrounded by
mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where
he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a
sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge
and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through
him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is
the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and
marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
25
This is what the
child feels physically in the power of his arms that lift her, in the
strength of his body that she huddles against. The mother loses her
place of honor to him just as
Isis once did to Ra and the earth to the
sun. But for the child, her situation is deeply altered: she was intended
one day to become a woman like her all-powerful mother; she will
never be the sovereign father; the bond that attached her to her mother
was an active emulation; from her father she can only passively expect
esteem. The boy grasps paternal superiority through a feeling of
rivalry, whereas the girl endures it with impotent admiration. I have
already stated that what Freud called the “Electra complex” is not, as
he maintains, a sexual desire; it is a deep abdication of the subject who
consents to be object in submission and adoration. If the father shows
tenderness for his daughter, she feels her existence magnificently
justified; she is endowed with all the merits that others have to acquire
the hard way; she is fulfilled and deified. It may be that she
nostalgically searches for this plenitude and peace her whole life. If
she is refused love, she can feel guilty and condemned forever; or else
she can seek self-esteem elsewhere and become indifferent—even
hostile—to her father. Besides, the father is not the only one to hold
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the keys to the world: all men normally share virile prestige; there is
no reason to consider them father “substitutes.” It is implicitly as men
that grandfathers, older brothers, uncles, girlfriends’ fathers, friends
of the family, professors, priests, or doctors fascinate a little girl. The
emotional consideration that adult women show the Man would be
enough to perch him on a pedestal.
26
Everything helps to confirm this hierarchy in the little girl’s eyes.
Her historical and literary culture, the songs and legends she is raised
on, are an exaltation of the man. Men made Greece, the Roman
Empire, France, and all countries, they discovered the earth and
invented the tools to develop it, they governed it, peopled it with
statues, paintings, and books. Children’s literature, mythology, tales,
and stories reflect the myths created by men’s pride and desires: the
little girl discovers the world and reads her destiny through the eyes
of men. Male superiority is overwhelming: Perseus, Hercules,
David,
Achilles, Lancelot, Duguesclin, Bayard, Napoleon—so many men for
one Joan of Arc; and behind her stands the great male figure of Saint
Michael the archangel! Nothing is more boring than books retracing
the lives of famous women: they are very pale figures next to those of
the great men; and most are immersed in the shadows of some male
hero. Eve was not created for herself but as Adam’s companion and
drawn from his side; in the Bible few women are noteworthy for their
actions: Ruth merely found herself a husband. Esther gained the
Jews’ grace by kneeling before Ahasuerus, and even then she was
only a docile instrument in Mordecai’s hands; Judith was bolder, but
she too obeyed the priests and her exploit has a dubious aftertaste: it
could not be compared to the pure and shining triumph of young
David. Mythology’s goddesses are frivolous or capricious, and they
all tremble before Jupiter; while Prometheus magnificently steals the
fire from the sky, Pandora opens the box of catastrophes. There are a
few sorceresses, some old women who wield formidable power in
stories. Among them is “The Garden of Paradise” by Andersen, in
which the figure of the mother of the winds recalls that of the
primitive Great Goddess: her four enormous sons fearfully obey her;
she beats and encloses them in bags when they behave badly. But
they are not attractive characters. More seductive are the fairies,
mermaids, and nymphs who escape male domination; but their
existence is dubious and barely individualized; they are involved in
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the human world without having their own destiny: the day
Andersen’s little mermaid becomes a woman, she experiences the
yoke of love and suffering that is her lot. In contemporary accounts as
in ancient legends, the man is the privileged hero. Mme de Ségur’s
books are a curious exception: they describe a matriarchal society
where the husband plays a ridiculous character when he is not absent;
but usually the image of the father is, as in the real world, surrounded
by glory. It is under the aegis of the father sanctified by his absence
that the feminine dramas of
Little Women
take place. In adventure
stories it is boys who go around the world, travel as sailors on boats,
subsist on breadfruit in the jungle. All important events happen
because of men. Reality confirms these novels and legends. If the little
girl reads the newspapers, if she listens to adult conversation, she
notices that today, as in the past, men lead the world. The heads of
state, generals, explorers, musicians, and painters she admires are
men; it is men who make her heart beat with enthusiasm.
That prestige is reflected in the supernatural world. Generally, as a
result of the role religion plays in women’s lives, the little girl, more
dominated by the mother than the boy, is also more subjected to
religious influences. And in Western religions, God the Father is a
man, an old man
endowed with a specifically virile attribute, luxuriant
white beard.
27
For Christians, Christ is even more concretely a man
of flesh and blood with a long blond beard. Angels have no sex,
according to theologians; but they have masculine names and are
shown as handsome young men. God’s emissaries on earth—the
pope, the bishop whose ring is kissed, the priest who says Mass, the
preacher, the person one kneels before in the secrecy of the
confessional—these are men. For a pious little girl, relations with the
eternal Father are analogous to those she maintains with her earthly
father; as they take place on an imaginary level, she experiences an
even more total surrender. The Catholic religion, among others,
exercises on her the most troubling of influences.
28
The Virgin
welcomes the angel’s words on her knees. “I am the
handmaiden
of
the Lord,” she answers. Mary Magdalene is prostrate at Christ’s feet,
and she washes them with her long womanly hair. Women saints
declare their love to a radiant Christ on their knees. On his knees,
surrounded by the odor of incense, the child gives himself up to
God’s and the angels’ gaze: a man’s gaze. There are many analogies
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between erotic and mystical language as spoken by women; for
example, Saint Thérèse writes of the child Jesus:
Oh my beloved, by your love I accept not to see on earth the
sweetness of your gaze, not to feel the inexpressible kiss from
your mouth, but I beg of you to embrace me with your love …
My beloved, of your first smile
Let me soon glimpse the sweetness
.
Ah! Leave me in my burning deliriousness
,
Yes, let me hide myself in your heart!
I want to be mesmerized by your divine gaze; I want to become
prey to your love. One day, I have hope, you will melt on me
carrying me to love’s hearth; you will put me into this burning
chasm to make me become, once and for all, the lucky victim.
But it must not be concluded from this that these effusions are
always sexual; rather, when female sexuality develops, it is penetrated
with the religious feeling that woman has devoted to man since
childhood. It is true that the little girl experiences a thrill in the
confessional and even at the foot of the altar close to what she will
later feel in her lover’s arms: woman’s love is one of the forms of
experience in which a consciousness makes itself an object for a being
that transcends it; and these are also the passive delights that the
young pious girl tastes in the shadows of the church.
Prostrate, her face buried in her hands, she experiences the miracle
of renunciation: on her knees she climbs to heaven; her abandon in
God’s arms assures her an assumption lined with clouds and angels.
She models her earthly future on this marvelous experience. The child
can also discover it in other ways: everything encourages her to
abandon herself in dreams to the arms of men to be transported to a
sky of glory. She learns that to be happy, she has to be loved; to be
loved, she has to await love. Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey
Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. In
songs and tales, the young man sets off to seek the woman; he fights
against dragons, he combats giants; she is locked up in a tower, a
palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive, put to sleep: she is
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waiting.
One day my prince will come … Someday he’ll come along,
the man I love …
the popular refrains breathe dreams of patience and
hope in her. The supreme necessity for woman is to charm a
masculine heart; this is the recompense all heroines aspire to, even if
they are intrepid, adventuresome; and only their beauty is asked of
them in most cases. It is thus understandable that attention to her
physical appearance can become a real obsession for the little girl;
princesses or shepherds, one must always be pretty to conquer love
and happiness; ugliness is cruelly associated with meanness, and
when one sees the misfortunes that befall ugly girls, one does not
know if it is their crimes or their disgrace that destiny punishes.
Young beauties promised a glorious future often start out in the role
of victim; the story of Geneviève de Brabant or of Griselda are not as
innocent as it would seem; love and suffering are intertwined in a
troubling way; woman is assured of the most delicious triumphs
when falling to the bottom of abjection; whether it be a question of
God or a man, the little girl learns that by consenting to the most
serious renunciations, she will become all-powerful: she takes
pleasure in a masochism that promises her supreme conquests. Saint
Blandine, white and bloody in the paws of lions,
Snow White lying as
if dead in a glass coffin, Sleeping Beauty, Atala fainting, a whole
cohort of tender heroines beaten, passive, wounded, on their knees,
humiliated, teach their younger sisters the fascinating prestige of
martyred, abandoned, and resigned beauty. It is not surprising that
while her brother plays at the hero, the little girl plays so easily at the
martyr: the pagans throw her to the lions, Bluebeard drags her by her
hair, the king, her husband, exiles her to the depth of the forests; she
resigns herself, she suffers, she dies, and her brow is haloed with
glory. “While still a little girl, I wanted to draw men’s attention,
trouble them, be saved by them, die in their arms,” Mme de Noailles
writes. A remarkable example of these masochistic musings is found
in
La voile noire
(The Black Sail) by Maria Le Hardouin.
At seven, from I don’t know which rib, I made my first man. He
was tall, thin, very young, dressed in a suit of black satin with
long sleeves touching the ground. His beautiful blond hair
cascaded in heavy curls onto his shoulders … I called him
Edmond … Then a day came when I gave him two
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brothers … These three brothers: Edmond, Charles, and Cedric,
all three dressed in black satin, all three blond and slim, procured
for me strange blessings. Their feet shod in silk were so
beautiful and their hands so fragile that I felt all sorts of
movements in my soul … I became their sister Marguerite … I
loved to represent myself as subjected to the whims of my
brothers and totally at their mercy. I dreamed that my oldest
brother, Edmond, had the right of life and death over me. I never
had permission to raise my eyes to his face. He had me whipped
under the slightest pretext. When he addressed himself to me, I
was so overwhelmed by fear and respect that I found nothing
else to answer him and mumbled constantly “Yes, my lordship,”
“No, my lordship,” and I savored the strange delight of feeling
like an idiot … When the suffering he imposed on me was too
great, I murmured “Thank you, my lordship,” and there came a
moment when, almost faltering from suffering, I placed, so as
not to shout, my lips on his hand, while, some movement finally
breaking my heart, I reached one of these states in which one
desires to die from too much happiness.
At an early age, the little girl already dreams she has reached the
age of love; at nine or ten, she loves to make herself up, she pads her
blouse, she disguises herself as a lady. She does not, however, look
for any erotic experience
with little boys: if she does go with them
into the corner to play “doctor,” it is only out of sexual curiosity. But
the partner of her amorous dreaming is an adult, either purely
imaginary or based on real individuals: in the latter case, the child is
satisfied to love him from afar. In Colette Audry’s memoirs there is a
very good example of a child’s dreaming;
29
she recounts that she
discovered love at five years of age:
This naturally had nothing to do with the little sexual pleasures
of childhood, the satisfaction I felt, for example, straddling a
certain chair in the dining room or caressing myself before
falling asleep … The only common characteristic between the
feeling and the pleasure is that I carefully hid them both from
those around me … My love for this young man consisted in
thinking of him before falling asleep and imagining marvelous
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stories … In Privas, I was in love with all the department heads
of my father’s office … I was never very deeply hurt by their
departure, because they were barely more than a pretext for my
amorous musings … In the evening in bed I got my revenge for
too much youth and shyness. I prepared everything very
carefully, I did not have any trouble making him present to me,
but it was a question of transforming myself, me, so that I could
see myself from the interior because I became her, and stopped
being I. First, I was pretty and eighteen years old. A tin of
sweets helped me a lot: a long tin of rectangular and flat sweets
that depicted two girls surrounded by doves. I was the dark,
curly-headed one, dressed in a long muslin dress. A ten-year
absence had separated us. He returned scarcely aged, and the
sight of this marvelous creature overwhelmed him. She seemed
to barely remember him, she was unaffected, indifferent, and
witty. I composed truly brilliant conversations for this first
meeting. They were followed by misunderstandings, a whole
difficult conquest, cruel hours of discouragement and jealousy
for him. Finally, pushed to the limit, he admitted his love. She
listened to him in silence, and just at the moment he thought all
was lost, she told him she had never stopped loving him, and
they embraced a little. The scene normally took place on a park
bench, in the evening. I saw the two forms close together, I
heard the murmur of voices, I felt at the same time the warm
body contact. But then everything came
loose … never did I
broach marriage
30
… The next day I thought of it a little while
washing. I don’t know why the soapy face I was looking at in
the mirror delighted me (the rest of the time I didn’t find myself
beautiful) and filled me with hope. I would have considered for
hours this misty, tilted face that seemed to be waiting for me
from afar on the road to the future. But I had to hurry; once I
dried my face, everything was over, and I got back my banal
child’s face, which no longer interested me.
Games and dreams orient the girl toward passivity; but she is a
human being before becoming a woman; and she already knows that
accepting herself as woman means resigning and mutilating herself;
while renunciation might be tempting, mutilation is abhorrent. Man
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and Love are still far away in the mist of the future; in the present, the
little girl seeks activity, autonomy, like her brothers. The burden of
freedom is not heavy for children, because it does not involve
responsibility; they know they are safe in the shelter of adults: they
are not tempted to flee from themselves. The girl’s spontaneous zest
for life, her taste for games, laughter, and adventure, make her
consider the maternal circle narrow and stultifying. She wants to
escape her mother’s authority, an authority that is wielded in a more
routine and intimate manner than the one that boys have to accept.
Rare are the cases in which she is as understanding and discreet as in
this Sido that Colette painted with love. Not to mention the almost
pathological cases—there are many
31
—where the mother is a kind of
executioner, satisfying her domineering and sadistic instincts on the
child; her daughter is the privileged object opposite whom she
attempts to affirm herself as sovereign subject; this attempt makes the
child balk in revolt. Colette Audry described this rebellion of a normal
girl against a normal mother:
I wouldn’t have known how to answer the truth, however
innocent it was, because I never felt innocent in front of Mama.
She was the essential adult, and I resented her for it as long as I
was not yet cured. There was deep inside me a kind of
tumultuous and fierce
sore that I was sure of always finding
raw … I didn’t think she was too strict; nor that she hadn’t the
right. I thought: no, no, no with all my strength. I didn’t even
blame her for her authority or for her orders or arbitrary defenses
but for
wanting to subjugate me
. She said it sometimes: when
she didn’t say it, her eyes and voice did. Or else she told ladies
that children are much more docile after a punishment. These
words stuck in my throat, unforgettable: I couldn’t vomit them; I
couldn’t swallow them. This anger was my guilt in front of her
and also my shame in front of me (because in reality she
frightened me, and all I had on my side in the form of retaliation
were a few violent words or acts of insolence) but also my glory,
nevertheless: as long as the sore was there, and living the silent
madness that made me only repeat, “Subjugate, docile,
punishment, humiliation,” I wouldn’t be subjugated.
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Rebellion is even more violent in the frequent cases when the
mother has lost her prestige. She appears as the one who waits,
endures, complains, cries, and makes scenes: and in daily reality this
thankless role does not lead to any apotheosis; victim, she is scorned;
shrew, she is detested; her destiny appears to be the prototype of
bland
repetition:
with her, life only repeats itself stupidly without
going anywhere; blocked in her housewifely role, she stops the
expansion of her existence, she is obstacle and negation. Her daughter
wants
not
to take after her. She dedicates a cult to women who have
escaped feminine servitude: actresses, writers, and professors; she
gives herself enthusiastically to sports and to studies, she climbs trees,
tears her clothes, tries to compete with boys. Very often she has a best
friend in whom she confides; it is an exclusive friendship like a love
affair that usually includes sharing sexual secrets: the little girls
exchange information they have succeeded in getting and talk about it.
Often there is a triangle, one of the girls falling in love with her
girlfriend’s brother: thus Sonya in
War and Peace
is in love with her
best friend Natasha’s brother. In any case, this friendship is shrouded
in mystery, and in general at this period the child loves to have
secrets; she makes a secret of the most insignificant thing: thus does
she react against the secrecies that thwart her curiosity; it is also a way
of giving herself importance; she tries by all means to acquire it; she
tries to be part of adults’ lives, she makes up stories about them that
she only half believes and in which she plays a major role. With her
friends, she feigns returning boys’ scorn with scorn; they form a
closed group, they sneer and mock them. But in fact, she is flattered
when they treat her as an equal; she seeks their approbation. She
would like to belong to the privileged
caste. The same movement that
in primitive hordes subjects woman to male supremacy is manifested
in each new “arrival” by a refusal of her lot: in her, transcendence
condemns the absurdity of immanence. She is annoyed at being
oppressed by rules of decency, bothered by her clothes, enslaved to
cleaning tasks, held back in all her enthusiasms; on this point there
have been many studies that have almost all given the same result:
32
all the boys—like Plato in the past—say they would have hated to be
girls; almost all the girls are sorry not to be boys. According to
Havelock Ellis’s statistics, one boy out of a hundred wanted to be a
girl; more than 75 percent of the girls would have preferred to change
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sex. According to a study by Karl Pipal (cited by Baudouin in his
work
L’âme enfantine
[
The Mind of the Child]
), out of twenty boys
of twelve to fourteen years of age, eighteen said they would rather be
anything in the whole world than a girl; out of twenty-two girls, ten
wished to be boys and gave the following reasons: “Boys are better:
they do not have to suffer like women … My mother would love me
more … A boy does more interesting work … A boy has more
aptitude for school … I would have fun frightening girls … I would
not fear boys anymore … They are freer … Boys’ games are more
fun … They are not held back by their clothes.” This last observation
is recurrent: almost all the girls complain of being bothered by their
clothes, of not being free in their movements, of having to watch their
skirts or light-colored outfits that get dirty so easily. At about ten or
twelve years of age, most little girls are really tomboys, that is,
children who lack the license to be boys. Not only do they suffer from
it as a privation and an injustice, but the regime they are condemned to
is unhealthy. The exuberance of life is prohibited to them, their
stunted vigor turns into nervousness; their goody-goody occupations
do not exhaust their brimming energy; they are bored: out of boredom
and to compensate for the inferiority from which they suffer, they
indulge in morose and romantic daydreams; they begin to have a taste
for these facile escapes and lose the sense of reality; they succumb to
their emotions with a confused exaltation; since they cannot act, they
talk, readily mixing up serious words with totally meaningless ones;
abandoned, “misunderstood,” they go looking for consolation in
narcissistic sentiments: they look on themselves as heroines in novels,
admire themselves, and complain; it is natural for them to become
keen on their appearance and to playact: these defects will grow
during puberty. Their malaise expresses itself in impatience, tantrums,
tears; they indulge in tears—an indulgence many women keep later—
largely because they love to play the victim: it is both a protest against
the harshness of their destiny and a way of endearing themselves to
others. “Little girls love to cry so much that I have known them to cry
in front of a mirror in order to double the pleasure,” says Monsignor
Dupanloup. Most of their dramas concern relations with their family;
they try to break their bonds with their mothers: either they are hostile
to them, or they continue to feel a profound need for protection; they
would like to monopolize their fathers’ love for themselves; they are
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jealous, touchy, demanding. They often make up stories; they imagine
they are adopted, that their parents are not really theirs; they attribute a
secret life to them; they dream about their sexual relations; they love to
imagine that their father is misunderstood, unhappy, that he is not
finding in his wife the ideal companion that his daughter would be for
him; or, on the contrary, that the mother rightly finds him rough and
brutal, that she is appalled by any physical relations with him.
Fantasies, acting out, childish tragedies, false enthusiasms, strange
things: the reason must be sought not in a mysterious feminine soul
but in the child’s situation.
It is a strange experience for an individual recognizing himself as
subject, autonomy, and transcendence, as an absolute, to discover
inferiority—as a given essence—in his self: it is a strange experience
for one who posits himself for himself as One to be revealed to
himself as alterity. That is what happens to the little girl when,
learning about the world, she grasps herself as a woman in it. The
sphere she belongs to is closed everywhere, limited, dominated by the
male universe: as high as she climbs, as far as she dares go, there will
always be a ceiling over her head, walls that block her path. Man’s
gods are in such a faraway heaven that in truth, for him, there are no
gods: the little girl lives among gods with a human face.
This is not a unique situation. American blacks, partially integrated
into a civilization that nevertheless considers them an inferior caste,
live it; what Bigger Thomas experiences with so much bitterness at
the dawn of his life is this definitive inferiority, this cursed alterity
inscribed in the color of his skin: he watches planes pass and knows
that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him.
33
Because
she is woman, the girl knows that the sea and the poles, a thousand
adventures, a thousand joys, are forbidden to her: she is born on the
wrong side. The great difference is that the blacks
endure their lot in
revolt—no privilege compensates for its severity—while for the
woman her complicity is invited. Earlier I recalled that in addition to
the authentic claim of the subject who claims sovereign freedom, there
is an inauthentic desire for renunciation and escape in the existent;
34
these are the delights of passivity that parents and educators, books
and myths, women and men dangle before the little girl’s eyes; in
early childhood she is already taught to taste them; temptation
becomes more and more insidious; and she yields to it even more
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fatally as the thrust of her transcendence comes up against harsher and
harsher resistance. But in accepting her passivity, she also accepts
without resistance enduring a destiny that is going to be imposed on
her from the exterior, and this fatality frightens her. Whether
ambitious, scatterbrained, or shy, the young boy leaps toward an open
future; he will be a sailor or an engineer, he will stay in the fields or
will leave for the city, he will see the world, he will become rich; he
feels free faced with a future where unexpected opportunities await
him. The girl will be wife, mother, grandmother; she will take care of
her house exactly as her mother does, she will take care of her
children as she was taken care of: she is twelve years old, and her
story is already written in the heavens; she will discover it day after
day without shaping it; she is curious but frightened when she thinks
about this life whose every step is planned in advance and toward
which each day irrevocably moves her.
This is why the little girl, even more so than her brothers, is
preoccupied with sexual mysteries; of course boys are interested as
well, just as passionately; but in their future, their role of husband and
father is not what concerns them the most; marriage and motherhood
put in question the little girl’s whole destiny; and as soon as she
begins to perceive their secrets, her body seems odiously threatened to
her. The magic of motherhood has faded: whether she has been
informed early or not, she knows, in a more or less coherent manner,
that a baby does not appear by chance in the mother’s belly and does
not come out at the wave of a magic wand; she questions herself
anxiously. Often it seems not extraordinary at all but rather horrible
that a parasitic body should proliferate inside her body; the idea of this
monstrous swelling frightens her. And how will the baby get out?
Even if she was never told about the cries and suffering of childbirth,
she has overheard things, she has read the words in the Bible: “In
sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”; she has the presentiment of
tortures she cannot even imagine; she invents strange operations
around her navel; she
is no less reassured if she supposes that the
fetus will be expelled by her anus: little girls have been seen to have
nervous constipation attacks when they thought they had discovered
the birthing process. Accurate explanations will not bring much relief:
images of swelling, tearing, and hemorrhaging will haunt her. The
more imaginative she is, the more sensitive the little girl will be to
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these visions; but no girl could look at them without shuddering.
Colette relates how her mother found her in a faint after reading
Zola’s description of a birth:
[The author depicted the birth] with a rough-and-ready, crude
wealth of detail, an anatomical precision, and a lingering over
colours, postures and cries, in which I recognized none of the
tranquil, knowing experience on which I as a country girl could
draw. I felt credulous, startled and vulnerable in my nascent
femininity … Other words, right in front of my eyes, depicted
flesh splitting open, excrement and sullied blood … The lawn
rose to welcome me … like one of those little hares that poachers
sometimes brought, freshly killed, into the kitchen.
*
The reassurance offered by grown-ups leaves the child worried;
growing up, she learns not to trust the word of adults; often it is on
the very mysteries of her conception that she has caught them in lies;
and she also knows that they consider the most frightening things
normal; if she has ever experienced a violent physical shock—tonsils
removed, tooth pulled, whitlow lanced—she will project the
remembered anxiety onto childbirth.
The physical nature of pregnancy and childbirth suggests as well
that “something physical” takes place between the spouses. The often-
encountered word “blood” in expressions like “same-blood children,”
“pure blood,” and “mixed blood” sometimes orients the childish
imagination; it is supposed that marriage is accompanied by some
solemn transfusion. But more often the “physical thing” seems to be
linked to the urinary and excremental systems; in particular, children
think that the man urinates into the woman. This sexual operation is
thought of as
dirty
. This is what overwhelms the child for whom
“dirty” things have been rife with the strictest taboos: How, then, can
it be that they are integrated into adults’ lives? The child is first of all
protected from scandal by the very absurdity he discovers: he finds
there is no sense to what he hears around him, what
he reads, what he
writes; everything seems unreal to him. In Carson McCullers’s
charming book
The Member of the Wedding
, the young heroine
surprises two neighbors in bed nude; the very anomaly of the story
keeps her from giving it too much importance:
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It was a summer Sunday and the hall door of the Marlowes’
room was open. She could see only a portion of the room, part
of the dresser and only the footpiece of the bed with Mrs.
Marlowe’s corset on it. But there was a sound in the quiet room
she could not place, and when she stepped over the threshold she
was startled by a sight that, after a single glance, sent her running
to the kitchen, crying: Mr. Marlowe is having a fit! Berenice had
hurried through the hall, but when she looked into the front
room, she merely bunched her lips and banged the
door … Frankie had tried to question Berenice and find out what
was the matter. But Berenice had only said that they were
common people and added that with a certain party in the house
they ought at least to know enough to shut a door. Though
Frankie knew she was the certain party, still she did not
understand. What kind of a fit was it? she asked. But Berenice
would only answer: Baby, just a common fit. And Frankie knew
from the voice’s tones that there was more to it than she was
told. Later she only remembered the Marlowes as common
people.
When children are warned against strangers, when a sexual incident
is described to them, it is often explained in terms of sickness,
maniacs, or madmen; it is a convenient explanation; the little girl
fondled by her neighbor at the cinema or the girl who sees a man
expose himself thinks that she is dealing with a crazy man; of course,
encountering madness is unpleasant: an epileptic attack, hysteria, or a
violent quarrel upsets the adult world order, and the child who
witnesses it feels in danger; but after all, just as there are homeless,
beggars, and injured people with hideous sores in harmonious
society, there can also be some abnormal ones without its base
disintegrating. It is when parents, friends, and teachers are suspected
of celebrating black masses that the child really becomes afraid.
When I was first told about sexual relations between man and
woman, I declared that such things were impossible since my
parents would have had to do likewise, and I thought too highly
of them to believe it. I said that it was much too disgusting for
me ever to do it.
Unfortunately, I was to be disabused shortly
362

after when I heard what my parents were doing … that was a
fearful moment; I hid my face under the bedcovers, stopped my
ears, and wished I were a thousand miles from there.
35
How to go from the image of dressed and dignified people, these
people who teach decency, reserve, and reason, to that of naked beasts
confronting each other? Here is a contradiction that shakes their
pedestal, darkens the sky. Often the child stubbornly refuses the
odious revelation. “My parents don’t do that,” he declares. Or he tries
to give coitus a decent image. “When you want a child,” said a little
girl, “you go to the doctor; you undress, you cover your eyes, because
you mustn’t watch; the doctor ties the parents together and helps them
so that it works right”; she had changed the act of love into a surgical
operation, rather unpleasant at that, but as honorable as going to the
dentist. But despite denial and escape, embarrassment and doubt creep
into the child’s heart; a phenomenon as painful as weaning occurs: it
is no longer separating the child from the maternal flesh, but the
protective universe that surrounds him falls apart; he finds himself
without a roof over his head, abandoned, absolutely alone before a
future as dark as night. What adds to the little girl’s anxiety is that she
cannot discern the exact shape of the equivocal curse that weighs on
her. The information she gets is inconsistent, books are contradictory;
even technical explanations do not dissipate the heavy shadow; a
hundred questions arise: Is the sexual act painful? Or delicious? How
long does it last? Five minutes or all night? Sometimes you read that a
woman became a mother with one embrace, and sometimes you
remain sterile after hours of sexual activity. Do people “do that” every
day? Or rarely? The child tries to learn more by reading the Bible,
consulting dictionaries, asking friends, and he gropes in darkness and
disgust. An interesting document on this point is the study made by
Dr. Liepmann; here are a few responses given to him by young girls
about their sexual initiation:
I continued to stray among my nebulous and twisted ideas. No
one broached the subject, neither my mother nor my
schoolteacher; no book treated the subject fully. Little by little a
sort of perilous and ugly mystery was woven around the act,
which at first had seemed so natural to me. The older girls of
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twelve used crude jokes to bridge
the gap between themselves
and our classmates. All that was still so vague and disgusting;
we argued about where the baby was formed, if perhaps the
thing only took place once for the man since marriage was the
occasion for so much fuss. My period at fifteen was another new
surprise. It was my turn to be caught up, in a way, in the round.
… Sexual initiation! An expression never to be mentioned in
our parents’ house!… I searched in books, but I agonized and
wore myself out looking for the road to follow … I went to a
boys’ school: for my schoolteacher the question did not even
seem to exist … Horlam’s work,
Little Boy and Little Girl
,
finally brought me the truth. My tense state and unbearable
overexcitement disappeared, although I was very unhappy and
took a long time to recognize and understand that eroticism and
sexuality alone constitute real love.
Stages of my initiation: (1) First questions and a few vague
notions (totally unsatisfactory). From three and a half to eleven
years old … No answers to the questions I had in the following
years. When I was seven, right there feeding my rabbit, I
suddenly saw little naked ones underneath her … My mother
told me that in animals and people little ones grow in their
mother’s belly and come out through the loins. This birth
through the loins seemed unreasonable to me … a nursemaid
told me about pregnancy, birth, and menstruation … Finally, my
father replied to my last question about his true function with
obscure stories about pollen and pistil. (2) Some attempts at
personal experimentation (eleven to thirteen years old). I dug out
an encyclopedia and a medical book … It was only theoretical
information in strange gigantic words. (3) Testing of acquired
knowledge (thirteen to twenty): (
a
) in daily life, (
b
) in scientific
works.
At eight, I often played with a boy my age. One day we
broached the subject. I already knew, because my mother had
already told me, that a woman has many eggs inside her … and
that a child was born from one of these eggs whenever the
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mother strongly desired it … Giving this same answer to my
friend, I received this reply: “You are completely stupid! When
our butcher and his wife want a baby, they go to bed and do
dirty things.” I was indignant … We had then (around twelve
and a half) a maid who told me all sorts of scandalous tales. I
never said a word to Mama, as I was ashamed; but
I asked her if
sitting on a man’s knees could give you a baby. She explained
everything as best she could.
At school I learned where babies emerged, and I had the feeling
that it was something horrible. But how did they come into the
world? We both formed a rather monstrous idea about the thing,
especially since one winter morning on the way to school
together in the darkness we met a certain man who showed us
his sexual parts and asked us, “Don’t they seem good enough to
eat?” Our disgust was inconceivable, and we were literally
nauseated. Until I was twenty-one, I thought babies were born
through the navel.
A little girl took me aside and asked me: “Do you know where
babies come from?” Finally she decided to speak out:
“Goodness! How foolish you are! Kids come out of women’s
stomachs, and for them to be born, women have to do
completely disgusting things with men!” Then she went into
details about how disgusting. But I had become totally
transformed, absolutely unable to believe that such things could
be possible. We slept in the same room as our parents … One
night later I heard take place what I had thought was impossible,
and, yes, I was ashamed, I was ashamed of my parents. All of
this made of me another being. I went through horrible moral
suffering. I considered myself a deeply depraved creature
because I was now aware of these things.
It should be said that even coherent instruction would not resolve
the problem; in spite of the best will of parents and teachers, the
sexual experience could not be put into words and concepts; it could
only be understood by living it; all analysis, however serious, will
have a comic side and will fail to deliver the truth. When, from the
365

poetic loves of flowers to the nuptials of fish, by way of the chick, the
cat, or the kid, one reaches the human species, the mystery of
conception can be theoretically elucidated: that of voluptuousness and
sexual love remains total. How would one explain the pleasure of a
caress or a kiss to a dispassionate child? Kisses are given and
received in a family way, sometimes even on the lips: Why do these
mucus exchanges in certain encounters provoke dizziness? It is like
describing colors to the blind. As long as there is no intuition of the
excitement and desire that give the sexual function its meaning and
unity, the different elements seem shocking and monstrous. In
particular, the little girl is revolted when she understands that she is
virgin and sealed, and that to change into a woman a man’s sex must
penetrate her. Since exhibitionism is a widespread
perversion, many
little girls have seen the penis in an erection; in any case, they have
observed the sexual organs of animals, and it is unfortunate that the
horse’s so often draws their attention; one imagines that they would
be frightened by it. Fear of childbirth, fear of the male sex organ, fear
of the “crises” that threaten married couples, disgust for dirty
practices, derision for actions devoid of signification, all of this often
leads a young girl to declare: “I will never marry.”
36
Therein lies the
surest defense against pain, folly, and obscenity. It is useless to try to
explain that when the day comes, neither deflowering nor childbirth
would seem so terrible, that millions of women resign themselves to it
and are none the worse for it. When a child fears an outside
occurrence, he is relieved of the fear, but not by predicting that, later,
he will accept it naturally: it is himself he fears meeting in the far-off
future, alienated and lost. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar,
through chrysalis and into butterfly, brings about a deep uneasiness:
Is it still the same caterpillar after this long sleep? Does she recognize
herself beneath these brilliant wings? I knew little girls who were
plunged into an alarming reverie at the sight of a chrysalis.
And yet the metamorphosis takes place. The little girl herself does
not understand the meaning, but she realizes that in her relations with
the world and her own body something is changing subtly: she is
sensitive to contacts, tastes, and odors that previously left her
indifferent; baroque images pass through her head; she barely
recognizes herself in mirrors; she feels “funny,” and things seem
“funny”; such is the case of little Emily, described by Richard Hughes
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in
A High Wind in Jamaica:
Emily, for coolness, sat up to her chin in water, and hundreds of
infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths every inch
of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing. Anyhow she
had lately come to hate being touched—but this was abominable.
At last, when she could stand it no longer, she clambered out and
dressed.
Even Margaret Kennedy’s serene Tessa feels this strange disturbance:
Suddenly she had become intensely miserable. She stared down
into the darkness of the hall, cut in two by the moonlight which
streamed in through the open door. She could not bear it. She
jumped up with a little cry of exasperation. “Oh!” she exclaimed.
“How I hate it all!” … She ran out to hide herself in the
mountains, frightened and furious, pursued by a desolate
foreboding which seemed to fill the quiet house. As she
stumbled up towards the pass she kept murmuring to herself: “I
wish I could die! I wish I was dead!”
She knew that she did not mean this; she was not in the least
anxious to die. But the violence of such a statement seemed to
satisfy her.
*
This disturbing moment is described at length in Carson
McCullers’s previously mentioned book,
The Member of the
Wedding:
This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being
Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big
no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy
and mean and sad. Besides being too mean to live, she was a
criminal … Then the spring of that year had been a long queer
season. Things began to change … There was something about
the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad.
She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar
sadness, she began to realize that she ought to leave the
town … She ought to leave the town and go to some place far
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away. For the late spring, that year, was lazy and too sweet. The
long afternoons flowered and lasted and the green sweetness
sickened her … Many things made Frankie suddenly wish to
cry. Very early in the morning she would sometimes go out into
the yard and stand for a long time looking at the sunrise sky.
And it was as though a question came into her heart, and the sky
did not answer. Things she had never noticed much before began
to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an
unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and
listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited.
But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though
she
waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her
suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in
the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a
light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was
afraid, and there was a queer tightness in her chest …
She went around town, and the things she saw and heard
seemed to be left somehow unfinished, and there was the
tightness in her that would not break. She would hurry to do
something, but what she did was always wrong … After the
long twilights of this season, when Frankie had walked around
the sidewalks of the town, a jazz sadness quivered her nerves
and her heart stiffened and almost stopped.
What is happening in this troubled period is that the child’s body is
becoming a woman’s body and being made flesh. Except in the case
of glandular deficiency where the subject remains fixed in the infantile
stage, the puberty crisis begins around the age of twelve or thirteen.
37
This crisis begins much earlier for girls than for boys, and it brings
about far greater changes. The little girl approaches it with worry and
displeasure. As her breasts and body hair develop, a feeling is born
that sometimes changes into pride, but begins as shame; suddenly the
child displays modesty, she refuses to show herself nude, even to her
sisters or her mother, she inspects herself with surprise mixed with
horror, and she observes with anxiety the swelling of this hard core,
somewhat painful, appearing under nipples that until recently were as
inoffensive as a navel. She is worried to discover a vulnerable spot in
herself: undoubtedly this pain is slight compared with a burn or a
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toothache; but in an accident or illness, pain was always abnormal,
while the youthful breast is normally the center of who knows what
indefinable resentment. Something is happening, something that is not
an illness, but that involves the very law of existence and is yet
struggle and suffering. Of course, from birth to puberty the little girl
grew up, but she never felt growth; day after day, her body was
present like an exact finished thing; now she is “developing”: the very
word horrifies her; vital phenomena are only reassuring when they
have found a balance and taken on the stable aspect of a fresh flower,
a polished animal; but in the blossoming of her breasts, the little girl
feels the ambiguity of the word “living.” She is neither gold nor
diamond, but a strange matter, moving and uncertain, inside of which
impure chemistries develop. She is used to a free-flowing
head of hair
that falls like a silken skein; but this new growth under her arms,
beneath her belly, metamorphoses her into an animal or alga. Whether
she is more or less prepared for it, she foresees in these changes a
finality that rips her from her self; thus hurled into a vital cycle that
goes beyond the moment of her own existence, she senses a
dependence that dooms her to man, child, and tomb. In themselves,
her breasts seem to be a useless and indiscreet proliferation. Arms,
legs, skin, muscles, and even the round buttocks she sits on, all have
had until now a clear usefulness; only the sex organ defined as
urinary was a bit dubious, though secret and invisible to others. Her
breasts show through her sweater or blouse, and this body that the
little girl identified with self appears to her as flesh; it is an object that
others look at and see. “For two years I wore capes to hide my chest,
I was so ashamed of it,” a woman told me. And another: “I still
remember the strange confusion I felt when a friend of my age, but
more developed than I was, stooped to pick up a ball, I noticed by the
opening in her blouse two already heavy breasts: this body so similar
to mine, on which my body would be modeled, made me blush for
myself.” “At thirteen, I walked around bare legged, in a short dress,”
another woman told me. “A man, sniggering, made a comment about
my fat calves. The next day, my mother made me wear stockings and
lengthen my skirt, but I will never forget the shock I suddenly felt in
seeing myself
seen
.” The little girl feels that her body is escaping her,
that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes
foreign to her; and at the same moment, she is grasped by others as a
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thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments;
she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh
and afraid to show her flesh.
This disgust is expressed in many young girls by the desire to lose
weight: they do not want to eat anymore; if they are forced, they
vomit; they watch their weight incessantly. Others become
pathologically shy; entering a room or going out on the street becomes
a torture. From these experiences, psychoses sometimes develop. A
typical example is Nadia, the patient from
Les obsessions et la
psychasthénie
(Obsessions and Psychasthenia), described by Janet:
Nadia, a young girl from a wealthy and remarkably intelligent
family, was stylish, artistic, and above all an excellent musician;
but from infancy she was obstinate and irritable …: “She
demanded excessive affection from everyone, her parents,
sisters, and servants, but she was so demanding and dominating
that she soon alienated people; horribly susceptible, when her
cousins used mockery to try
to change her character, she
acquired a sense of shame fixed on her body.” Then, too, her
need for affection made her wish to remain a child, to remain a
little girl to be petted, one whose every whim is indulged, and in
short made her fear growing up … A precocious puberty
worsened her troubles, mixing fears of modesty with fears of
growing up: “Since men like plump women, I want to remain
extremely thin.” Pubic hair and growing breasts added to her
fears. From the age of eleven, as she wore short skirts, it seemed
to her that everyone eyed her; she was given long skirts and was
then ashamed of her feet, her hips, and so on. The appearance of
menstruation drove her half-mad; believing that she was the only
one in the world having the monstrosity of pubic hair, she
labored up to the age of twenty “to rid herself of this savage
decoration by depilation.” The development of breasts
exacerbated these obsessions because she had always had a
horror of obesity; she did not detest it in others; but for herself
she considered it a defect. “I don’t care about being pretty, but I
would be too
ashamed
if I became bloated, that would horrify
me; if by bad luck I became fat, I wouldn’t dare let anyone see
me.” So she tried every means, all kinds of prayers and
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conjurations, to prevent normal growth: she swore to repeat
prayers five or ten times, to hop five times on one foot. “If I
touch one piano note four times in the same piece, I accept
growing and not being loved by anyone.” Finally she decided
not to eat. “I did not want to get fat, nor to grow up, nor
resemble a woman because I always wanted to remain a little
girl.” She solemnly promised to accept no food at all; when she
yielded to her mother’s pleas to take some food and broke her
vow, she knelt for hours writing out vows and tearing them up.
Her mother died when she was eighteen, and she then imposed a
strict regime on herself: two clear bouillon soups, an egg yolk, a
spoonful of vinegar, a cup of tea with the juice of a whole lemon,
was all she would take in a day. Hunger devoured her.
“Sometimes I spent hours thinking of food, I was so hungry: I
swallowed my saliva, gnawed on my handkerchief, and rolled on
the floor from wanting to eat.” But she resisted temptations. She
was pretty, but believed that her face was puffy and covered with
pimples; if her doctor stated that he did not see them, she said he
didn’t understand anything, that he couldn’t see the pimples
between the skin and the flesh. She left her family in the end and
hid in a small apartment, seeing only a guardian and the doctor;
she never went out; she accepted her father’s visit, but only with
difficulty; he
brought about a serious relapse by telling her that
she looked well; she dreaded having a fat face, healthy
complexion, big muscles. She lived most of the time in darkness,
so intolerable it was for her to be seen or even
visible
.
Very often the parents’ attitude contributes to inculcating shame in
the little girl for her physical appearance. A woman’s testimony:
I suffered from a very keen sense of physical inferiority, which
was accentuated by continual nagging at home … Mother, in her
excessive pride, wanted me to appear at my best, and she always
found many faults that required “covering up” to point out to the
dressmaker; for instance, drooping shoulders! Heavy hips! Too
flat in the back! Bust too prominent! Having had a swollen neck
for years, it was not possible for me to have an open neck. And
so on. I was particularly worried on account of the appearance of
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my feet … and I was nagged on account of my gait … There
was some truth in every criticism … but sometimes I was so
embarrassed, particularly during my “backfisch” stage, that at
times I was at a loss to know how to move about. If I met
someone, my first thought was: “If I could only hide my feet!”
38
This shame makes the girl act awkwardly, blush at the drop of a hat;
this blushing increases her timidity, and itself becomes the object of a
phobia. Stekel recounts, among others, a woman who “as a young girl
blushed so pathologically and violently that for a year she wore
bandages around her face with the excuse of toothaches.”
39
Sometimes, in prepuberty preceding the arrival of her period, the
girl does not yet feel disgust for her body; she is proud of becoming a
woman, she eagerly awaits her maturing breasts, she pads her blouse
with handkerchiefs and brags around her older sisters; she does not
yet grasp the meaning of the phenomena taking place in her. Her first
period exposes this meaning, and feelings of shame appear. If they
existed already, they are confirmed and magnified from this moment
on. All the accounts agree: whether or not the child has been warned,
the event always appears repugnant and humiliating. The mother very
often neglected to warn her; it has been noted that mothers explain the
mysteries of pregnancy, childbirth,
and even sexual relations to their
daughters more easily than that of menstruation;
40
they themselves
hate this feminine servitude, a hatred that reflects men’s old mystical
terrors and one that they transmit to their offspring. When the girl
finds suspicious stains on her underwear, she thinks she has diarrhea,
a fatal hemorrhage, a venereal disease. According to a survey that
Havelock Ellis cited in 1896, out of 125 American high school
students 36 at the time of their first period knew absolutely nothing on
the question, 39 had vague ideas; that is, more than half of the girls
were unaware. And according to Helene Deutsch, things had not
changed much by 1946. Ellis cites the case of a young girl who threw
herself into the Seine in Saint-Ouen because she thought she had an
“unknown disease.” Stekel, in
Letters to a Mother
, tells the story of a
little girl who tried to commit suicide, seeing in the menstrual flow the
sign of and punishment for the impurities that sullied her soul. It is
natural for the young girl to be afraid: it seems to her that her life is
seeping out of her. According to Klein and the English psychoanalytic
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school, blood is for the young girl the manifestation of a wound of the
internal organs. Even if cautious advice saves her from excessive
anxiety, she is ashamed, she feels dirty: she rushes to the sink, she
tries to wash or hide her dirtied underwear. There is a typical account
of the experience in Colette Audry’s book
In the Eyes of Memory:
At the heart of this exaltation, the brutal and finished drama. One
evening while getting undressed, I thought I was sick; it did not
frighten me, and I kept myself from saying anything in the hope
that it would disappear the next day … Four weeks later, the
illness occurred again, but more violently. I was quietly going to
throw my knickers into the hamper behind the bathroom door. It
was so hot that the diamond-shaped tiles of the hallway were
warm under my naked feet. When I then got into bed, Mama
opened my bedroom door: she came to explain things to me. I
am unable to remember the effect her words had on me at that
time, but while she was whispering, Kaki poked her head in. The
sight of this round and curious face drove me crazy. I screamed
at her to get out of there and she disappeared in fright. I begged
Mama to go and beat her because she hadn’t knocked before
entering. My mother’s calmness, her knowing and quietly happy
air, were all it took to make me lose my head. When she left, I
dug myself in for a stormy night.
Two memories all of a sudden come back: a few months
earlier, coming back from a walk with Kaki, Mama and I had
met the old doctor from Privas, built like a logger with a full
white beard. “Your daughter is growing up, madam,” he said
while looking at me; and I hated him right then and there without
understanding anything. A little later, coming back from Paris,
Mama put away some new little towels in the chest of drawers.
“What is that?” Kaki asked. Mama had this natural air of adults
who reveal one part of the truth while omitting the other three:
“It’s for Colette soon.” Speechless, unable to utter one question,
I hated my mother.
That whole night I tossed and turned in my bed. It was not
possible. I was going to wake up. Mama was mistaken, it would
go away and not come back again … The next day, secretly
changed and stained, I had to confront the others. I looked at my
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sister with hatred because she did not yet know, because all of a
sudden she found herself, unknown to her, endowed with an
overwhelming superiority over me. Then I began to hate men,
who would never experience this, and who knew. And then I
also hated women who accepted it so calmly. I was sure that if
they had been warned of what was happening to me, they would
all be overjoyed. “So it’s your turn now,” they would have
thought. That one too, I said to myself when I saw one. And this
one too. I was had by the world. I had trouble walking and
didn’t dare run. The earth, the sun-hot greenery, even the food,
seemed to give off a suspicious smell … The crisis passed and I
began to hope against hope that it would not come back again.
One month later, I had to face the facts and accept the evil
definitively, in a heavy stupor this time. There was now in my
memory a “before.” All the rest of my existence would no longer
be anything but an “after.”
Things happen in a similar way for most little girls. Many of them
are horrified at the idea of sharing their secret with those around them.
A friend told me that, motherless, she lived between her father and a
primary school teacher and spent three months in fear and shame,
hiding her stained underwear before it was discovered that she had
begun menstruating. Even peasant women who might be expected to
be hardened by their knowledge of the harshest sides of animal life
are horrified by this malediction, which in the countryside is still
taboo: I knew a young woman farmer who washed her underwear in
secret in the frozen brook, putting her soaking garment directly back
on her naked skin to hide her unspeakable secret. I
could cite a
hundred similar facts. Even admitting this astonishing misfortune
offers no relief. Undoubtedly, the mother who slapped her daughter
brutally, saying, “Stupid! You’re much too young,” is exceptional.
But this is not only about being in a bad mood; most mothers fail to
give the child the necessary explanations, and so she is full of anxiety
before this new state brought about by the first menstruation crisis:
she wonders if the future does not hold other painful surprises for
her; or else she imagines that from now on she could become
pregnant by the simple presence or contact with a man, and she feels
real terror of males. Even if she is spared these anxieties by intelligent
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explanations, she is not so easily granted peace of mind. Prior to this,
the girl could, with a little bad faith, still think herself an asexual
being, she could just not think herself; she even dreams of waking up
one morning changed into a man; these days, mothers and aunts flatter
and whisper to each other: “She’s a big girl now”; the brotherhood of
matrons has won: she belongs to them. Here she takes her place on
the women’s side without recourse. Sometimes, she is proud of it; she
thinks she has now become an adult and an upheaval will occur in her
existence. As Thyde Monnier recounts:
Some of us had become “big girls” during vacation; others
would while at school, and then, one after the other in the toilets
in the courtyard, where they were sitting on their “thrones” like
queens receiving their subjects, we would go and “see the
blood.”
41
But the girl is soon disappointed because she sees that she has not
gained any privilege and that life follows its normal course. The only
novelty is the disgusting event repeated monthly; there are children
that cry for hours when they learn they are condemned to this destiny;
what adds to their revolt is that this shameful defect is known by men
as well: what they would like is that the humiliating feminine
condition at least be shrouded in mystery for them. But no, father,
brothers, cousins, men know and even joke about it sometimes. This
is when the shame of her too carnal body is born or exacerbated. And
once the first surprise has passed, the monthly unpleasantness does
not fade away at all: each time, the girl finds the same disgust when
faced by this unappetizing and stagnant odor that comes from herself
—a smell of swamps and wilted violets—this less red and more
suspicious blood than that flowing from children’s cuts and scratches.
Day and
night she has to think of changing her protection, watching
her underwear, her sheets, and solving a thousand little practical and
repugnant problems; in thrifty families sanitary napkins are washed
each month and take their place among the piles of handkerchiefs; this
waste coming out of oneself has to be delivered to those handling the
laundry: the laundress, servant, mother, or older sister. The types of
bandages pharmacies sell in boxes named after flowers, Camellia or
Edelweiss, are thrown out after use; but while traveling, on vacation,
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or on a trip it is not so easy to get rid of them, the toilet bowl being
specifically prohibited. The young heroine of the
Psychoanalytical
Journal
described her horror of the sanitary napkin;
42
she did not
even consent to undress in front of her sister except in the dark during
these times. This bothersome, annoying object can come loose during
violent exercise; it is a worse humiliation than losing one’s knickers in
the middle of the street: this horrid possibility sometimes brings about
fits of psychasthenia. By a kind of ill will of nature, indisposition and
pain often do not begin until the initial bleeding—often hardly noticed
—has passed; young girls are often irregular: they might be surprised
during a walk, in the street, at friends’; they risk—like Mme de
Chevreuse—dirtying their clothes or their seat; such a possibility
makes one live in constant anxiety.
43
The greater the young girl’s
feeling of revulsion toward this feminine defect, the greater her
obligation to pay careful attention to it so as not to expose herself to
the awful humiliation of an accident or a little word of warning.
Here is the series of answers that Dr. Liepmann obtained during his
study of juvenile sexuality:
44
At sixteen years of age, when I was indisposed for the first time,
I was very frightened in seeing it one morning. In truth, I knew it
was going to happen, but I was so ashamed of it that I remained
in bed for a whole half day and had one answer to all questions:
I cannot get up.
I was speechless in astonishment when, not yet twelve, I was
indisposed for the first time. I was struck by horror, and as my
mother limited herself to telling me drily that this would happen
every
month, I considered it something disgusting and refused to
accept that this did not also happen to men.
This adventure made my mother decide to initiate me, without
forgetting menstruation at the same time. I then had my second
disappointment because as soon as I was indisposed, I ran
joyfully to my mother, who was still sleeping, and I woke her
up, shouting “Mother, I have it!” “And that is why you woke me
up?” she managed to say in response. In spite of everything, I
considered this thing a real upheaval in my existence.
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And so I felt the most intense horror when I was indisposed for
the first time seeing that the bleeding did not stop after a few
minutes. Nevertheless, I did not whisper a word to anyone, not
to my mother either. I had just reached the age of fifteen. In
addition I suffered very little. Only one time was I taken with
such terrifying pain that I fainted and stayed on the floor in my
room for almost three hours. But I still did not say anything to
anyone.
When for the first time this indisposition occurred, I was about
thirteen. My school friends and I had already talked about it, and
I was proud to finally become one of the big girls. With great
importance I explained to the gym teacher that it was impossible
today for me to take part in the lesson because I was indisposed.
It was not my mother who initiated me. It was not until the age
of nineteen that she had her period, and for fear of being scolded
for dirtying her underwear, she buried it in a field.
I reached the age of eighteen, and I then had my period for the
first time.
45
I was totally unprepared for what was
happening … At night, I had violent bleeding accompanied by
heavy diarrhea, and I could not rest for one second. In the
morning, my heart racing, I ran to my mother and, weeping
constantly, asked her advice. But I only obtained this harsh
reprimand: “You should have been aware of it sooner and not
have dirtied the sheets and bed.” That was all as far as
explanation was concerned. Naturally, I tried very hard to know
what crime I might have committed, and I suffered terrible
anguish.
I already knew what it was. I was waiting for it impatiently
because I was hoping my mother would reveal to me how
children were made.
The celebrated day arrived, but my mother
remained silent. Nevertheless, I was joyous. “From now on,” I
said to myself, “you can make children: you are a lady.”
This crisis takes place at a still tender age; the boy only reaches
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adolescence at about fifteen or sixteen; the girl changes into a woman
at thirteen or fourteen. But the essential difference in their experience
does not stem from there; nor does it lie in the physiological
manifestations that give it its awful shock in the case of the girl:
puberty has a radically different meaning for the two sexes because it
does not announce the same future to them.
Granted, boys too at puberty feel their body as an embarrassing
presence, but because they have been proud of their virility from
childhood, it is toward that virility that they proudly transcend the
moment of their development; they proudly exhibit the hair growing
between their legs, and that makes men of them; more than ever, their
sex is an object of comparison and challenge. Becoming adults is an
intimidating metamorphosis: many adolescents react with anxiety to a
demanding freedom; but they accede to the dignified status of male
with joy. On the contrary, to become a grown-up, the girl must
confine herself within the limits that her femininity imposes on her.
The boy admires undefined promises in the growing hair: she remains
confused before the “brutal and finished drama” that limits her
destiny. Just as the penis gets its privileged value from the social
context, the social context makes menstruation a malediction. One
symbolizes virility and the other femininity: it is because femininity
means alterity and inferiority that its revelation is met with shame. The
girl’s life has always appeared to her to be determined by this
impalpable essence to which the absence of the penis has not managed
to give a positive image: it is this essence that is revealed in the red
flow that escapes from between her thighs. If she has already
assumed her condition, she welcomes the event with joy: “Now you
are a lady.” If she has always refused it, the bloody verdict strikes her
like lightning; most often, she hesitates: the menstrual stain inclines
her toward disgust and fear. “So this is what these words mean: being
a woman!” The fate that until now has weighed on her ambivalently
and from the outside is lodged in her belly; there is no escape; she
feels trapped. In a sexually egalitarian society, she would envisage
menstruation only as her unique way of acceding to an adult life; the
human body has many other more repugnant servitudes in men and
women: they easily make the best of them because as they are
common to all they do not represent a flaw for anyone; menstrual
periods inspire horror in adolescent girls because they thrust them into
378

an inferior and damaged category. This
feeling of degradation will
weigh heavily on the girl. She would retain the pride of her bleeding
body if she did not lose her self-respect as a human being. And if she
succeeds in preserving her self-respect, she will feel the humiliation of
her flesh much less vividly: the girl who opens paths of transcendence
in sports, social, intellectual, and mystical activities will not see a
mutilation in her specificity, and she will overcome it easily. If the
young girl often develops psychoses in this period, it is because she
feels defenseless in front of a deaf fate that condemns her to
unimaginable trials; her femininity signifies illness, suffering, and
death in her eyes, and she is transfixed by this destiny.
One example that vividly illustrates these anxieties is that of the
patient called Molly described by Helene Deutsch:
Molly was fourteen when she began to suffer from psychic
disorders; she was the fourth child in a family of five siblings.
Her father is described as extremely strict and narrow-minded.
He criticized the appearance and behavior of his children at every
meal. The mother was worried and unhappy; and every so often
the parents were not on speaking terms; one brother ran away
from home. The patient was a gifted youngster, a good tap
dancer; but she was shy, took the family troubles seriously, and
was afraid of boys. Her older sister got married against her
mother’s wishes and Molly was very interested in her
pregnancy: she had a difficult delivery and forceps were
necessary and she heard that women often die in childbirth. She
took care of the baby for two months; when the sister left the
house, there was a terrible scene and the mother fainted. Molly
fainted too. She had seen classmates faint in class and her
thoughts were much concerned with death and fainting. When
she got her period, she told her mother with an embarrassed air:
“That thing is here.” She went with her sister to buy some
menstrual pads; on meeting a man in the street, she hung her
head. In general she acted “disgusted with herself.” She never
had pain during her periods, but tried to hide them from her
mother, even when the latter saw stains on the sheets. She told
her sister: “Anything might happen to me now. I might have a
baby.” When told: “You have to live with a man for that to
379

happen,” she replied: “Well, I am living with two men—my
father and your husband.”
The father did not permit his daughters to go out … because
one heard stories of rape: these fears helped to give Molly the
idea of men being redoubtable creatures. From her first
menstruation her
anxiety about becoming pregnant and dying in
childbirth became so severe that after a time she refused to leave
her room, and now she sometimes stays in bed all day; if she has
to go out of the house, she has an attack and faints. She is afraid
of cars and taxis and she cannot sleep, she fears that someone is
trying to enter the house at night, she screams and cries. She has
eating spells; sometimes she eats too much to keep herself from
fainting; she is also afraid when she feels closed in. She cannot
go to school anymore or lead a normal life.
A similar story not linked to the crisis of menstruation but which
shows the girl’s anxiety about her insides is Nancy’s:
46
Toward the age of thirteen the little girl was on intimate terms
with her older sister, and she had been proud to be in her
confidence when the sister was secretly engaged and then
married: to share the secret of a grown-up was to be accepted
among the adults. She lived for a time with her sister; but when
the latter told her that she was going “to buy” a baby, Nancy got
jealous of her brother-in-law and of the coming child: to be
treated again as a child to whom one made little mysteries of
things was unbearable. She began to experience internal troubles
and wanted to be operated on for appendicitis. The operation was
a success, but during her stay at the hospital Nancy lived in a
state of severe agitation; she made violent scenes with a nurse
she disliked; she tried to seduce the doctor, making dates with
him, being provocative and demanding throughout her crises to
be treated as a woman. She accused herself of being to blame for
the death of a little brother some years before. And in particular
she felt sure that they had not removed her appendix or had left a
part of it inside her; her claim that she had swallowed a penny
was probably intended to make sure an X-ray would be taken.
380

This desire for an operation—and in particular for the removal of the
appendix—is often seen at this age; girls thus express their fear of
rape, pregnancy, or having a baby. They feel in their womb obscure
perils and hope that the surgeon will save them from this unknown
and threatening danger.
It is not only the arrival of her period that signals to the girl her
destiny
as a woman. Other dubious phenomena occur in her. Until
then, her eroticism was clitoral. It is difficult to know if solitary sexual
practices are less widespread in girls than in boys; the girl indulges in
them in her first two years, and perhaps even in the first months of
her life; it seems that she stops at about two before taking them up
again later; because of his anatomical makeup, this stem planted in the
male flesh asks to be touched more than a secret mucous membrane:
but the chances of rubbing—the child climbing on a gym apparatus or
on trees or onto a bicycle—of contact with clothes, or in a game or
even initiation by friends, older friends, or adults, frequently make the
girl discover sensations she tries to renew. In any case, pleasure,
when reached, is an autonomous sensation: it has the lightness and
innocence of all childish amusements.
47
As a child, she hardly
established a relation between these intimate delights and her destiny
as a woman; her sexual relations with boys, if there were any, were
essentially based on curiosity. And all of a sudden she experiences
emotional confusion in which she does not recognize herself.
Sensitivity of the erogenous zones is developing, and they are so
numerous in the woman that her whole body can be considered
erogenous: this is what comes across from familial caresses, innocent
kisses, the casual touching of a dressmaker, a doctor, a hairdresser, or
a friendly hand on her hair or neck; she learns and often deliberately
seeks a deeper excitement in her relations of play and fighting with
boys or girls: thus Gilberte fighting on the Champs Elysées with
Proust; in the arms of her dancing partners, under her mother’s naive
eyes, she experiences a strange lassitude. And then, even a well-
protected young woman is exposed to more specific experiences; in
conventional circles regrettable incidents are hushed up by common
agreement; but it often happens that some of the caresses of friends of
the household, uncles, cousins, not to mention grandfathers and
fathers, are much less inoffensive than the mother thinks; a professor,
a priest, or a doctor was bold, indiscreet. Such experiences are found
381

in
In the Prison of Her Skin
by Violette Leduc, in
Maternal Hatred
by Simone de Tervagne, and in
The Blue Orange
by Yassu Gauclère.
Stekel thinks that grandfathers in particular are often very dangerous:
I was fifteen. The night before the funeral, my grandfather came
to sleep at our house. The next day, my mother was already up,
he
asked me if he could get into bed with me to play; I got up
immediately without answering him … I began to be afraid of
men, a woman recounted.
Another girl recalled receiving a serious shock at eight or ten
years of age when her grandfather, an old man of sixty, had
groped her genitals. He had taken her on his lap while sliding his
finger into her vagina. The child had felt an immense anxiety but
yet did not dare talk about it. Since that time she has been very
afraid of everything sexual.
48
Such incidents are usually endured in silence by the little girl because
of the shame they cause. Moreover, if she does reveal them to her
parents, their reaction is often to reprimand her. “Don’t say such
stupid things … you’ve got an evil mind.” She is also silent about
bizarre activities of some strangers. A little girl told Dr. Liepmann:
We had rented a room from the shoemaker in the basement.
Often when our landlord was alone, he came to get me, took me
in his arms, and kissed me for a long time all the while wiggling
back and forth. His kiss wasn’t superficial besides, since he
stuck his tongue into my mouth. I detested him because of his
ways. But I never whispered a word, as I was very fearful.
49
In addition to enterprising companions and perverse girlfriends,
there is this knee in the cinema pressed against the girl’s, this hand at
night in the train, sliding along her leg, these boys who sniggered
when she passed, these men who followed her in the street, these
embraces, these furtive touches. She does not really understand the
meaning of these adventures. In the fifteen-year-old head, there is
often a strange confusion because theoretical knowledge and concrete
experiences do not match. She has already felt all the burnings of
excitement and desire, but she imagines—like Clara d’Ellébeuse
382

invented by Francis Jammes—that a male kiss is enough to make her
a mother; she has a clear idea of the genital anatomy, but when her
dancing partner embraces her, she thinks the agitation she feels is a
migraine. It is certain that girls are better informed today than in the
past. However, some psychiatrists affirm that there is more than one
adolescent
girl who does not know that sexual organs have a use
other than urinary.
50
In any case, girls do not draw much connection
between their sexual agitation and the existence of their genital organs,
since there is no sign as precise as the male erection indicating this
correlation. There is such a gap between their romantic musings
concerning man and love and the crudeness of certain facts that are
revealed to them that they do not create any link between them. Thyde
Monnier relates that she had made the pledge with a few girlfriends to
see how a man was made and to tell it to the others:
Having entered my father’s room on purpose without knocking,
I described it: “It looks like a leg of lamb; that is, it is like a
rolling pin, and then there is a round thing.” It was difficult to
explain. I drew it. I even did it three times, and each one took
hers away hidden in her blouse, and from time to time she burst
out laughing while looking at it and then went all
dreamy … How could innocent girls like us set up a connection
between these objects and sentimental songs, pretty little
romantic stories where love as a whole—respect, shyness, sighs,
and kissing of the hand—is sublimated to the point of making a
eunuch?
51
Nevertheless, through reading, conversations, theater, and words
she has overheard, the girl gives meaning to the disturbances of her
flesh; she becomes appeal and desire. In her fevers, shivers,
dampness, and uncertain states, her body takes on a new and
unsettling dimension. The young man is proud of his sexual
propensities because he assumes his virility joyfully; sexual desire is
aggressive and prehensile for him; there is an affirmation of his
subjectivity and transcendence in it; he boasts of it to his friends; his
sex organ is for him a disturbance he takes pride in; the drive that
sends him toward the female is of the same nature as that which
throws him toward the world, and so he recognizes himself in it. On
383

the contrary, the girl’s sexual life has always been hidden; when her
eroticism is transformed and invades her whole flesh, the mystery
becomes agonizing: she undergoes the disturbance as a shameful
illness; it is not active: it is a state, and even in imagination she cannot
get rid of it by any autonomous decision; she does not dream of
taking, pressing, violating: she is wait and appeal; she feels
dependent; she feels herself at risk in her alienated flesh.
Her diffuse hope and her dream of happy passivity clearly reveal
her
body as an object destined for another; she seeks to know sexual
experience only in its immanence; it is the contact of the hand, mouth,
or another flesh that she desires; the image of her partner is left in the
shadows, or she drowns it in an idealized haze; however, she cannot
prevent his presence from haunting her. Her terrors and juvenile
revulsions regarding man have assumed a more equivocal character
than before, and because of that they are more agonizing. Before, they
stemmed from a profound divorce between the child’s organism and
her future as an adult; now they come from this very complexity that
the girl feels in her flesh. She understands that she is destined for
possession because she wants it: and she revolts against her desires.
She at once wishes for and fears the shameful passivity of the
consenting prey. She is overwhelmed with confusion at the idea of
baring herself before a man; but she also senses that she will then be
given over to his gaze without recourse. The hand that takes and that
touches has an even more imperious presence than do eyes: it is more
frightening. But the most obvious and detestable symbol of physical
possession is penetration by the male’s sex organ. The girl hates the
idea that this body she identifies with may be perforated as one
perforates leather, that it can be torn as one tears a piece of fabric. But
the girl refuses more than the wound and the accompanying pain; she
refuses that these be
inflicted
. “The idea of being
pierced
by a man is
horrible,” a girl told me one day. It is not fear of the virile member that
engenders horror of the man, but this fear is the confirmation and
symbol; the idea of penetration acquires its obscene and humiliating
meaning within a more generalized form, of which it is in turn an
essential element.
The girl’s anxiety shows itself in nightmares that torment her and
fantasies that haunt her: just when she feels an insidious complaisance
in herself, the idea of rape becomes obsessive in many cases. It
384

manifests itself in dreams and behavior in the form of many more or
less obvious symbols. The girl explores her room before going to bed
for fear of finding some robber with shady intentions; she thinks she
hears thieves in the house; an aggressor comes in through the window
armed with a knife and he stabs her. In a more or less acute way, men
inspire terror in her. She begins to feel a certain disgust for her father;
she can no longer stand the smell of his tobacco, she detests going
into the bathroom after him; even if she continues to cherish him, this
physical revulsion is frequent; it takes on an intensified form if the
child was already hostile to her father, as often happens in the
youngest children. A dream often encountered by psychiatrists in their
young female patients is that they imagine being raped by a man in
front of an older woman and with her consent. It is clear that they are
symbolically
asking their mother for permission to give in to their
desires. That is because one of the most detestable constraints
weighing on them is that of hypocrisy. The girl is dedicated to
“purity,” to innocence, at precisely the moment she discovers in and
around her the mysterious disturbances of life and sex. She has to be
white like an ermine, transparent like crystal, she is dressed in
vaporous organdy, her room is decorated with candy-colored
hangings, people lower their voices when she approaches, she is
prohibited from seeing indecent books; yet there is not one child on
earth who does not relish “abominable” images and desires. She tries
to hide them from her best friend, even from herself; she only wants
to live or to think by the rules; her self-defiance gives her a devious,
unhappy, and sickly look; and later, nothing will be harder than
combating these inhibitions. But in spite of all these repressions, she
feels oppressed by the weight of unspeakable faults. Her
metamorphosis into a woman takes place not only in shame but in
remorse for suffering that shame.
We understand that the awkward age is a period of painful distress
for the girl. She does not want to remain a child. But the adult world
seems frightening or boring to her. Colette Audry says:
So I wanted to grow up, but never did I seriously dream of
leading the life I saw adults lead … And thus the desire to grow
up without ever assuming an adult state, without ever feeling
solidarity with parents, mistresses of the house, housewives, or
385

heads of family, was forming in me.
She would like to free herself from her mother’s yoke; but she also
has an ardent need for her protection. The faults that weigh on her
consciousness—solitary sexual practices, dubious friendships,
improper books—make this refuge necessary. The following letter,
written to a girlfriend by a fifteen-year-old girl, is typical:
Mother wants me to wear a long dress at the big dance party at
W.’s—my first long dress. She is surprised that I do not want to.
I begged her to let me wear my short pink dress for the last
time … I am so afraid. This long dress makes me feel as if
Mummy were going on a long trip and I did not know when she
would. Isn’t that silly? And sometimes she looks at me as
though I were still a little girl. Ah, if she knew! She would tie
my hands to the bed and despise me.
52
Stekel’s book
Frigidity in Woman
is a remarkable document on
female childhood. In it a Viennese
süsse Mädel
wrote a detailed
confession at about the age of twenty-one.
*
It is a concrete synthesis
of all the moments we have studied separately:
“At the age of five I chose for my playmate Richard, a boy of six
or seven … For a long time I had wanted to know how one can
tell whether a child is a girl or a boy. I was told: by the
earrings … or by the nose. This seemed to satisfy me, though I
had a feeling that they were keeping something from me.
Suddenly Richard expressed a desire to urinate … Then the
thought came to me of lending him my chamber pot … When I
saw his organ, which was something entirely new to me, I went
into highest raptures: ‘What have you there? My, isn’t that nice!
I’d like to have something like that, too.’ Whereupon I took hold
of the membrum and held it enthusiastically … My great-aunt’s
cough awoke us … and from that day on our doings and games
were carefully watched.”
At nine she played “marriage” and “doctor” with two other
boys of eight and ten; they touched her parts and one day one of
the boys touched her with his organ, saying that her parents had
386

done just the same thing when they got married. “This aroused
my indignation: ‘Oh, no! They never did such a nasty thing!’ ”
She kept up these games for a long time in a strong sexual
friendship with the two boys. One day her aunt caught her and
there was a frightful scene with threats to put her in the
reformatory. She was prevented from seeing Arthur, whom she
preferred, and she suffered a good deal from it; her work went
badly, her writing was deformed, and she became cross-eyed.
She started another intimacy with Walter and Franz. “Walter
became the goal of all thoughts and feeling. I permitted him very
submissively to reach under my dress while I sat or stood in
front of him at the table, pretending to be busy with a writing
exercise; whenever my mother … opened the door, he withdrew
his hand on the instant; I, of course, was busy writing … In the
course of time, we also behaved as husband and wife; but I
never allowed him to stay long; whenever he thought he was
inside me, I tore myself away saying that somebody was
coming … I did not reflect that this was ‘sinful’…
“My childhood boy friendships were now over. All I had left
were girl friends. I attached myself to Emmy, a highly refined,
well-educated girl. One Christmas we exchanged gilded heart-
shaped lockets with our initials engraved on them—we were, I
believe, about twelve years of age at the time—and we looked
upon this as a token of ‘engagement’; we swore eternal
faithfulness ‘until death do us part.’ I owe to Emmy a goodly
part of my training. She taught me also a few things regarding
sexual matters. As far back as during my fifth grade at school I
began seriously to doubt the veracity of the stork story. I thought
that children developed within the body and that the abdomen
must be cut open before a child can be brought out. She filled me
with particular horror of self-abuse. In school the Gospels
contributed a share towards opening our eyes with regard to
certain sexual matters. For instance, when Mary came to
Elizabeth, the child is said to have ‘leaped in her womb’; and we
read other similarly remarkable Bible passages. We underscored
these words; and when this was discovered the whole class
barely escaped a ‘black mark’ in deportment. My girl friend told
me also about the ‘ninth month reminder’ to which there is a
387

reference in Schiller’s
The Robbers …
Emmy’s father moved
from our locality and I was again alone. We corresponded, using
for the purpose a cryptic alphabet which we had devised between
ourselves; but I was lonesome and finally I attached myself to
Hedl, a Jewish girl. Once Emmy caught me leaving school in
Hedl’s company; she created a scene on account of her
jealousy … I kept up my friendship with Hedl until I entered the
commercial school. We became close friends. We both dreamed
of becoming sisters-in-law sometimes, because I was fond of
one of her brothers. He was a student. Whenever he spoke to me
I became so confused that I gave him an irrelevant answer. At
dusk we sat in the music room, huddled together on the little
divan, and often tears rolled down my cheek for no particular
reason as he played the piano.
“Before I befriended Hedl, I went to school for a number of
weeks with a certain girl, Ella, the daughter of poor people. Once
she caught her parents in a ‘tête-à-tête.’ The creaking of the bed
had awakened her … She came and told me that her father had
crawled on top of her mother, and that the mother had cried out
terribly; and then the father said to her mother: ‘Go quickly and
wash so that nothing will happen!’ After this I was angry at her
father and avoided him on the street, while for her mother I felt
the greatest sympathy. (He must have hurt her terribly if she
cried out so!)
“Again with another girl I discussed the possible length of the
male membrum; I had heard that it was 12 to 15 cm long. During
the fancy-work period (at school) we took the tape-measure and
indicated the stated length on our stomachs, naturally reaching to
the navel. This horrified us; if we should ever marry we would
be literally impaled.”
She saw a male dog excited by the proximity of a female, and
felt strange stirrings inside herself. “If I saw a horse urinate in
the street, my eyes were always glued to the wet spot in the road;
I believe the length of time (urinating) is what always impressed
me.” She watched flies in copulation and in the country
domesticated animals doing the same.
“At twelve I suffered a severe attack of tonsillitis. A friendly
physician was called in. He seated himself on my bed and
388

presently he stuck his hand under the covers, almost touching me
on the genitalia. I exclaimed: ‘Don’t be so rude!’ My mother
hurried in; the doctor was much embarrassed. He declared I was
a horrid monkey, saying he merely wanted to pinch me on the
calf. I was compelled to ask his forgiveness … When I finally
began to menstruate and my father came across the blood-stained
cloths on one occasion, there was a terrible scene. How did it
happen that he, so clean a man, had to live among such dirty
females?… I felt the injustice of being put in the wrong on
account of my menstruation.” At fifteen she communicated with
another girl in shorthand “so that no one else could decipher our
missives. There was much to report about conquests. She copied
for me a vast number of verses from the walls of lavatories; I
took particular notice of one. It seemed to me that love, which
ranged so high in my fantasy, was being dragged in the mud by
it. The verse read: ‘What is love’s highest aim? Four buttocks on
a stem.’ I decided I would never get into that situation; a man
who loves a young girl would be unable to ask such a thing of
her.
“At fifteen and a half I had a new brother. I was tremendously
jealous, for I had always been the only child in the family. My
friend reminded me to observe ‘how the baby boy was
constructed,’ but with the best intentions I was unable to give her
the desired information … I could not look there. At about this
time another girl described to me a bridal night scene … I think
that then I made up my mind to marry after all, for I was very
curious; only the ‘panting
like a horse,’ as mentioned in the
description, offended my aesthetic sense … Which one of us
girls would not have gladly married then to undress before the
beloved and be carried to bed in his arms? It seemed so
thrilling!”
It will perhaps be said—even though this is a normal and not a
pathological case—that this child was exceptionally “perverse”; she
was only less watched over than others. If the curiosities and desires
of “well-bred” girls do not manifest themselves in acts, they
nonetheless exist in the form of fantasies and games. I once knew a
very pious and disconcertingly innocent girl—who became an
389

accomplished woman, devoted to maternity and religion—who one
evening confided all trembling to an older woman, “How marvelous it
must be to get undressed in front of a man! Let’s suppose you are my
husband”; and she began to undress, all trembling with emotion. No
upbringing can prevent the girl from becoming aware of her body and
dreaming of her destiny; the most one can do is to impose strict
repression that will then weigh on her for her whole sexual life. What
would be desirable is that she be taught, on the contrary, to accept
herself without excuses and without shame.
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at
puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her
femininity; she already knew her sex condemned her to a mutilated
and frozen existence; she now discovers it in the form of an impure
illness and an obscure crime. Her inferiority was at first understood as
a privation: the absence of a penis was converted to a stain and fault.
She makes her way toward the future wounded, shamed, worried, and
guilty.
1.
Judith Gautier says in her accounts of her memories that she cried and wasted away
so terribly when she was pulled away from her wet nurse that she had to be reunited
with her. She was weaned much later.
2.
This is Dr. Lacan’s theory in
Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de
l’individu (Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual
). This fundamental
fact would explain that during its development “the self keeps the ambiguous form of
spectacle.”
3.
In
L’orange bleue (The Blue Orange
), Yassu Gauclère says about her father: “His
good mood seemed as fearsome as his impatiences because nothing explained to me
what could bring it about … As uncertain of the changes in his mood as I would have
been of a god’s whims, I revered him with anxiety … I threw out my words as I might
have played heads or tails, wondering how they would be received.” And further on,
she tells the following anecdote: “For example, one day, after being scolded, I began
my litany: old table, floor brush, stove, large bowl, milk bottle, casserole, and so on.
My mother heard me and burst out laughing … A few days later, I tried to use my
litany to soften my grandmother, who once again had scolded me: I should have
known better this time. Instead of making her laugh, I made her angrier and got an
extra punishment. I told myself that adults’ behavior was truly incomprehensible.”
4.

Le sabbath (Witches’ Sabbath
).
390

5.
“And already beginning to exercise his codpiece, which each and every day his
nurses would adorn with lovely bouquets, fine ribbons, beautiful flowers, pretty tufts,
and they spent their time bringing it back and forth between their hands like a cylinder
of salve, then they laughed their heads off when it raised its ears, as if they liked the
game. One would call it my little spigot, another my ninepin, another my coral branch,
another my stopper, my cork, my gimlet, my ramrod, my awl, my pendant.”
6.
Cited by A. Bálint,
The Psychoanalysis of the Nursery
.
7.
See Volume I, Chapter 2,
this page
.
8.
Besides Freud’s and Adler’s works, there is today an abundant literature on the
subject. Abraham was the first one to put forward the idea that the girl considered her
sex a wound resulting from a mutilation. Karen Horney, Jones, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot,
H. Deutsch, and A. Bálint studied the question from a psychoanalytical point of view.
Saussure tries to reconcile psychoanalysis with Piaget’s and Luquet’s ideas. See also
Pollack,
Children’s Ideas on Sex Differences
.
9.
Cited by A. Bálint.
10.
“On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,”
International Journal of
Psycho analysis
(1923–24).
11.
Montherlant’s “The caterpillars,”
June Solstice
.
12.
See Volume I, Part One,
Chapter 2
.
13.
It is clear, though, in some cases.
14.
Cf. Ellis [discussion of “undinism” in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
.
—TRANS.]
.
15.
H. Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, Volume 13.
16.
In an allusion to an episode she related previously: at Portsmouth a modern
urinette for ladies was opened that called for the standing position; all the clients were
seen to depart hastily as soon as they entered.
17.
Florrie’s italics.
18.
“Psychologie génétique et psychanalyse” (“Genetic Psychology and
Psychoanalysis”),
Revue Française de Psychanalyse
(1933).
19.
H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
. She also cites the authority of K. Abraham and
J.H.W. van Ophuijsen.
20.
The analogy between the woman and the doll remains until the adult age; in
French, a woman is vulgarly called a doll; in English, a dressed-up woman is said to be
“dolled up.”
*
Bashkirtseff,
I Am the Most Interesting Book of All
.—T
RANS
.
21.
At least in her early childhood. In today’s society, adolescent conflicts could, on
391

the contrary, be exacerbated.
22.
There are, of course, many exceptions: but the mother’s role in bringing up a boy
cannot be studied here.
23.
Jung, “Pyschic Conflicts of a Child.”
24.
This was a made-up older brother who played a big role in her games.
*
In Jung,
Development of Personality
.—T
RANS
.
25.
“His generous person inspired in me a great love and an extreme fear,” says Mme de
Noailles, speaking of her father. “First of all, he astounded me. The first man astounds
a little girl. I well understood that everything depended on him.”
26.
It is worth noting that the cult of the father is most prevalent with the oldest child:
the man is more involved in his first paternal experience; it is often he who consoles
his daughter, as he consoles his son, when the mother is occupied with newborns, and
the daughter becomes ardently attached to him. On the contrary, the younger child
never has her father to herself; she is ordinarily jealous of both him and her older
sister; she attaches herself to that same sister whom the devoted father invests with
great prestige, or she turns to her mother, or she revolts against her family and looks
for relief somewhere else. In large families, the youngest girl child finds other ways to
have a special place. Of course, many circumstances can motivate the father to have
special preferences. But almost all of the cases I know confirm this observation on the
contrasting attitudes of the oldest and the youngest sisters.
27.
“Moreover, I was no longer suffering from my inability to
see
God, because I had
recently managed to imagine him in the form of my dead grandfather; this image in
truth was rather human; but I had quickly glorified it by separating my grandfather’s
head from his bust and mentally putting it on a sky blue background where white
clouds made him a collar,” Yassu Gauclère says in
The Blue Orange
.
28.
There is no doubt that women are infinitely more passive, given to man, servile,
and humiliated in Catholic countries, Italy, Spain, and France, than in the Protestant
Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon ones. And this comes in great part from their own
attitude: the cult of the Virgin, confession, and so on invites them to masochism.
29.

Aux yeux du souvenir
(In the Eyes of Memory).
30.
Unlike Le Hardouin’s masochistic imagination, Audry’s is sadistic. She wants the
beloved to be wounded, in danger, for her to save him heroically, not without
humiliating him. This is a personal note, characteristic of a woman who will never
accept passivity and will attempt to conquer her autonomy as a human being.
31.
Cf. V. Leduc,
L’asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin);
S. de Tervagne,
La haine
maternelle
(Maternal Hatred); H. Bazin,
Vipère au poing (Viper in the Fist
).
392

32.
There is an exception, for example, in a Swiss school where boys and girls
participating in the same coeducation, in privileged conditions of comfort and
freedom, all declared themselves satisfied; but such circumstances are exceptional.
Obviously, the girls
could be
as happy as the boys, but in present society the fact is
that they are not.
33.
Richard Wright,
Native Son
.
34.
See
Introduction
to Volume I.
*

Claudine’s House
.—T
RANS
.
35.
Cited by Dr. W. Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
36.
“Filled with repugnance, I implored God to grant me a religious vocation that
would allow me to escape the laws of maternity. And after having long reflected on the
repugnant mysteries that I hid in spite of myself, reinforced by such repulsion as by a
divine sign, I concluded: chastity is certainly my vocation,” writes Yassu Gauclère in
The Blue Orange
. Among others, the idea of perforation horrified her. “Here, then, is
what makes the wedding night so terrible! This discovery overwhelmed me, adding the
physical terror of this operation that I imagined to be extremely painful to the disgust
I previously felt. My terror would have been all the worse if I had supposed that birth
came about through the same channel; but having known for a long time that children
were born from their mother’s belly, I believed that they were detached by
segmentation.”
*

The Constant Nymph
.—T
RANS
.
37.
These purely physiological processes have already been described in Volume I,
Chapter 1. [In Part One, “Destiny.”—T
RANS
.]
38.
Stekel,
Frigidity in Woman
.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Cf. The works of Daly and Chadwick, cited by Deutsch, in
Psychology of Women
(1946).
41.

Moi
(Me).
42.
Translated by Clara Malraux.
43.
Disguised as a man during the Fronde, Mme de Chevreuse, after a long excursion
on horseback, was unmasked because of bloodstains seen on the saddle.
44.
Dr. W. Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
45.
She was a girl from a very poor Berlin family.
46.
Cited also by H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
47.
Except, of course, in numerous cases where the direct or indirect intervention of the
393

parents, or religious scruples, make a sin of it. Little girls have sometimes been
subjected to abominable persecutions, under the pretext of saving them from “bad
habits.”
48.

Frigidity in Woman
.
49.
Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
50.
Cf. H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
51.

Me
.
52.
Quoted by H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
*

Süsse Mädel:
“sweet girl.”—T
RANS
.
394

|
CHAPTER 2
|
The Girl
Throughout her childhood, the little girl was bullied and mutilated; but
she nonetheless grasped herself as an autonomous individual; in her
relations with her family and friends, in her studies and games, she
saw herself in the present as a transcendence: her future passivity was
something she only imagined. Once she enters puberty, the future not
only moves closer: it settles into her body; it becomes the most
concrete reality. It retains the fateful quality it always had; while the
adolescent boy is actively routed toward adulthood, the girl looks
forward to the opening of this new and unforeseeable period where
the plot is already hatched and toward which time is drawing her. As
she is already detached from her childhood past, the present is for her
only a transition; she sees no valid ends in it, only occupations. In a
more or less disguised way, her youth is consumed by waiting. She is
waiting for Man.
Surely the adolescent boy also dreams of woman, he desires her;
but she will never be more than one element in his life: she does not
encapsulate his destiny; from childhood, the little girl, whether
wishing to realize herself as woman or overcome the limits of her
femininity, has awaited the male for accomplishment and escape; he
has the dazzling face of Perseus or Saint George; he is the liberator;
he is also rich and powerful, he holds the keys to happiness, he is
Prince Charming. She anticipates that in his caress she will feel
carried away by the great current of life as when she rested in her
mother’s bosom; subjected to his gentle authority, she will find the
same security as in her father’s arms: the magic of embraces and
gazes will petrify her back into an idol. She has always been
convinced of male superiority; this male prestige is not a childish
mirage; it has economic and social foundations; men are, without any
question, the masters of the world; everything convinces the
adolescent girl that it is in her interest to be their vassal; her parents
395

prod her on; the father is proud of his daughter’s success, the mother
sees the promise of a prosperous future, friends envy and
admire the
one among them who gets the most masculine admiration; in
American colleges, the student’s status is based on the number of
dates she has. Marriage is not only an honorable and less strenuous
career than many others; it alone enables woman to attain her complete
social dignity and also to realize herself sexually as lover and mother.
This is the role her entourage thus envisages for her future, as she
envisages it herself. Everyone unanimously agrees that catching a
husband—or a protector in some cases—is for her the most important
of undertakings. In her eyes, man embodies the Other, as she does for
man; but for her this
Other
appears in the essential mode, and she
grasps herself as the inessential opposite him. She will free herself
from her parents’ home, from her mother’s hold; she will open up her
future not by an active conquest but by passively and docilely
delivering herself into the hands of a new master.
It has often been declared that if she resigns herself to this
surrender, it is because physically and morally she has become
inferior to boys and incapable of competing with them: forsaking
hopeless competition, she entrusts the assurance of her happiness to a
member of the superior caste. In fact, her humility does not stem from
a given inferiority: on the contrary, her humility engenders all her
failings; its source is in the adolescent girl’s past, in the society
around her, and precisely in this future that is proposed to her.
True, puberty transforms the girl’s body. It is more fragile than
before; female organs are vulnerable, their functioning delicate;
strange and uncomfortable, breasts are a burden; they remind her of
their presence during strenuous exercise, they quiver, they ache. From
here on, woman’s muscle force, endurance, and suppleness are
inferior to man’s. Hormonal imbalances create nervous and
vasomotor instability. Menstrual periods are painful: headaches,
stiffness, and abdominal cramps make normal activities painful and
even impossible; added to these discomforts are psychic problems;
nervous and irritable, the woman frequently undergoes a state of
semi-alienation each month; central control of the nervous and
sympathetic systems is no longer assured; circulation problems and
some autointoxications turn the body into a screen between the
woman and the world, a burning fog that weighs on her, stifling her
396

and separating her: experienced through this suffering and passive
flesh, the entire universe is a burden too heavy to bear. Oppressed and
submerged, she becomes a stranger to herself because she is a
stranger to the rest of the world. Syntheses disintegrate, instants are
no longer connected, others are recognized but only abstractly; and if
reasoning and logic do remain intact, as in melancholic delirium, they
are subordinated to passions that surge out of organic disorder.
These
facts are extremely important; but the way the woman becomes
conscious of them gives them their weight.
At about thirteen, boys serve a veritable apprenticeship in violence,
developing their aggressiveness, their will for power, and their taste
for competition; it is exactly at this moment that the little girl
renounces rough games. Some sports remain accessible to her, but
sport that is specialization, submission to artificial rules, does not
offer the equivalent of a spontaneous and habitual recourse to force; it
is marginal to life; it does not teach about the world and about one’s
self as intimately as does an unruly fight or an impulsive rock climb.
The sportswoman never feels the conqueror’s pride of the boy who
pins down his comrade. In fact, in many countries, most girls have no
athletic training; like fights, climbing is forbidden to them, they only
submit to their bodies passively; far more clearly than in their early
years, they must forgo
emerging
beyond the given world, affirming
themselves
above
the rest of humanity: they are banned from
exploring, daring, pushing back the limits of the possible. In
particular, the attitude of defiance, so important for boys, is unknown
to them; true, women compare themselves with each other, but
defiance is something other than these passive confrontations: two
freedoms confront each other as having a hold on the world whose
limits they intend to push; climbing higher than a friend or getting the
better in arm wrestling is affirming one’s sovereignty over the world.
These conquering actions are not permitted to the girl, and violence in
particular is not permitted to her. Undoubtedly, in the adult world
brute force plays no great role in normal times; but it nonetheless
haunts the world; much of masculine behavior arises in a setting of
potential violence: on every street corner skirmishes are waiting to
happen; in most cases they are aborted; but it is enough for the man to
feel in his fists his will for self-affirmation for him to feel confirmed
in his sovereignty. The male has recourse to his fists and fighting
397

when he encounters any affront or attempt to reduce him to an object:
he does not let himself be transcended by others; he finds himself
again in the heart of his subjectivity. Violence is the authentic test of
every person’s attachment to himself, his passions, and his own will;
to radically reject it is to reject all objective truth, it is to isolate one’s
self in an abstract subjectivity; an anger or a revolt that does not exert
itself in muscles remains imaginary. It is a terrible frustration not to be
able to imprint the movements of one’s heart on the face of the earth.
In the South of the United States, it is strictly impossible for a black
person to use violence against whites; this rule is the key to the
mysterious “black soul”; the way the black experiences himself in the
white world, his behavior in adjusting to it, the compensations he
seeks, his whole way of feeling and acting, are explained on the basis
of the passivity to which he is condemned. During the Occupation,
the French who had decided not to let themselves resort to violent
gestures against the occupants even in cases of provocation (whether
out of egotistical prudence or because they had overriding duties) felt
their situation in the world profoundly overturned: depending upon
the whims of others, they could be changed into objects, their
subjectivity no longer had the means to express itself concretely, it
was merely a secondary phenomenon. In the same way, for the
adolescent boy who is allowed to manifest himself imperiously, the
universe has a totally different face from what it has for the adolescent
girl whose feelings are deprived of immediate effectiveness; the
former ceaselessly calls the world into question, he can at every
instance revolt against the given and thus has the impression of
actively confirming it when he accepts it; the latter only submits to it;
the world is defined without her, and its face is immutable. This lack
of physical power expresses itself as a more general timidity: she does
not believe in a force she has not felt in her body, she does not dare to
be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation,
she can only accept a place that society has already made for her. She
accepts the order of things as a given. A woman told me that all
through her youth, she denied her physical weakness with fierce bad
faith; to accept it would have been to lose her taste and courage to
undertake anything, even in intellectual or political fields. I knew a
girl, brought up as a tomboy and exceptionally vigorous, who thought
she was as strong as a man; though she was very pretty, though she
398

had painful periods every month, she was completely unconscious of
her femininity; she had a boy’s toughness, exuberance of life, and
initiative; she had a boy’s boldness: on the street she would not
hesitate to jump into a fistfight if she saw a child or a woman
harassed. One or two bad experiences revealed to her that brute force
is on the male’s side. When she became aware of her weakness, a
great part of her assurance crumbled; this was the beginning of an
evolution that led her to feminize herself, to realize herself as
passivity, to accept dependence. To lose confidence in one’s body is
to lose confidence in one’s self. One needs only to see the importance
that young men give to their muscles to understand that every subject
grasps his body as his objective expression.
The young man’s erotic drives only go to confirm the pride that he
obtains from his body: he discovers in it the sign of transcendence
and its power. The girl can succeed in accepting her desires: but most
often they retain a shameful nature. Her whole body is experienced as
embarrassment. The defiance she felt as a child regarding her
“insides” contributes to
giving the menstrual crisis the dubious nature
that renders it loathsome. The psychic attitude evoked by menstrual
servitude constitutes a heavy handicap. The threat that weighs on the
girl during certain periods can seem so intolerable for her that she will
give up expeditions and pleasures out of fear of her disgrace
becoming known. The horror that this inspires has repercussions on
her organism and increases her disorders and pains. It has been seen
that one of the characteristics of female physiology is the tight link
between endocrinal secretions and the nervous system: there is
reciprocal action; a woman’s body—and specifically the girl’s—is a
“hysterical” body in the sense that there is, so to speak, no distance
between psychic life and its physiological realization. The turmoil
brought about by the girl’s discovery of the problems of puberty
exacerbates them. Because her body is suspect to her, she scrutinizes
it with anxiety and sees it as sick: it is sick. It has been seen that
indeed this body is fragile and real organic disorders arise; but
gynecologists concur that nine-tenths of their patients have imaginary
illnesses; that is, either their illnesses have no physiological reality, or
the organic disorder itself stems from a psychic attitude. To a great
extent, the anguish of being a woman eats away at the female body.
It is clear that if woman’s biological situation constitutes a handicap
399

for her, it is because of the perspective from which it is grasped.
Nervous frailty and vasomotor instability, when they do not become
pathological, do not keep her from any profession: among males
themselves, there is a great diversity of temperament. A one- or two-
day indisposition per month, even painful, is not an obstacle either; in
fact, many women accommodate themselves to it, particularly women
for whom the monthly “curse” could be most bothersome: athletes,
travelers, and women who do strenuous work. Most professions
demand no more energy than women can provide. And in sports, the
goal is not to succeed independently of physical aptitudes: it is the
accomplishment of perfection proper to each organism; the
lightweight champion is as worthy as the heavyweight; a female ski
champion is no less a champion than the male who is more rapid than
she: they belong to two different categories. It is precisely athletes
who, positively concerned with their own accomplishments, feel the
least handicapped in comparison to men. But nonetheless her physical
weakness does not allow the woman to learn the lessons of violence:
if it were possible to assert herself in her body and be part of the
world in some other way, this deficiency would be easily
compensated. If she could swim, scale rocks, pilot a plane, battle the
elements, take risks, and venture out, she would not feel the timidity
toward the world that I spoke about. It is within the whole context of
a situation that leaves her few outlets that these singularities
take on
their importance, and not immediately but by confirming the
inferiority complex that was developed in her by her childhood.
It is this complex as well that will weigh on her intellectual
accomplishments. It has often been noted that from puberty, the girl
loses ground in intellectual and artistic fields. There are many reasons
for this. One of the most common is that the adolescent girl does not
receive the same encouragement accorded to her brothers; on the
contrary, she is expected to be a
woman as well
, and she must add to
her professional work the duties that femininity implies. The
headmistress of a professional school made these comments on the
subject:
The girl suddenly becomes a being who earns her living by
working. She has new desires that have nothing to do with the
family. It very often happens that she must make quite a
400

considerable effort … she gets home at night exhausted, her head
stuffed with the day’s events … How will she be received? Her
mother sends her right out to do an errand. There are home
chores left unfinished to do, and she still has to take care of her
own clothes. It is impossible to disconnect from the personal
thoughts that continue to preoccupy her. She feels unhappy and
compares her situation with that of her brother, who has no
duties at home, and she revolts.
1
Housework or everyday chores that the mother does not hesitate to
impose on the girl student or trainee completely exhaust her. During
the war I saw my students in Sèvres worn out by family tasks added
on top of their schoolwork: one developed Pott’s disease, the other
meningitis. Mothers—we will see—are blindly hostile to freeing their
daughters and, more or less deliberately, work at bullying them even
more; for the adolescent boy, his effort to become a man is respected,
and he is already granted great freedom. The girl is required to stay
home; her outside activities are watched over: she is never encouraged
to organize her own fun and pleasure. It is rare to see women organize
a long hike on their own, a walking or biking trip, or take part in
games such as billiards and bowling. Beyond a lack of initiative that
comes from their education, customs make their independence
difficult. If they wander the streets, they are stared at, accosted. I
know some girls, far from shy, who get no enjoyment strolling
through Paris alone because, incessantly bothered, they are
incessantly on their
guard: all their pleasure is ruined. If girl students
run through the streets in happy groups as boys do, they attract
attention; striding along, singing, talking, and laughing loudly or
eating an apple are provocations, and they will be insulted or followed
or approached. Lightheartedness immediately becomes a lack of
decorum. This self-control imposed on the woman becomes second
nature for “the well-bred girl” and kills spontaneity; lively exuberance
is crushed. The result is tension and boredom. This boredom is
contagious: girls tire of each other quickly; being in the same prison
does not create solidarity among them, and this is one of the reasons
the company of boys becomes so necessary. This inability to be self-
sufficient brings on a shyness that extends over their whole lives and
even marks their work. They think that brilliant triumphs are reserved
401

for men; they do not dare aim too high. It has already been observed
that fifteen-year-old girls, comparing themselves with boys, declare,
“Boys are better.” This conviction is debilitating. It encourages
laziness and mediocrity. A girl—who had no particular deference for
the stronger sex—reproached a man for his cowardice; when she was
told that she herself was a coward, she complacently declared: “Oh!
It’s not the same thing for a woman.”
The fundamental reason for this defeatism is that the adolescent girl
does not consider herself responsible for her future; she judges it
useless to demand much of herself since her lot in the end will not
depend on her. Far from destining herself to man because she thinks
she is inferior to him, it is because she is destined for him that, in
accepting the idea of her inferiority, she constitutes it.
In fact, she will gain value in the eyes of males not by increasing
her human worth but by modeling herself on their dreams. When she
is inexperienced, she is not always aware of this. She sometimes acts
as aggressively as boys; she tries to conquer them with a brusque
authority, a proud frankness: this attitude is almost surely doomed to
failure. From the most servile to the haughtiest, girls all learn that to
please, they must give in to them. Their mothers urge them not to treat
boys like companions, not to make advances to them, to assume a
passive role. If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, they should
carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative;
men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too
much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them. In
most novels, as George Eliot observes, it is the dumb, blond heroine
who outshines the virile brunette; and in
The Mill on the Floss
,
Maggie tries in vain to reverse the roles; in the end she dies and it is
blond Lucy who marries Stephen. In
The Last of the Mohicans
, vapid
Alice wins the hero’s heart and not valiant Cora; in
Little Women
kindly Jo is only
a childhood friend for Laurie; he vows his love to
curly-haired and insipid Amy. To be feminine is to show oneself as
weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to
primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and
substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder
sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her
seductiveness. A young man’s venture into existence is relatively
easy, as his vocations of human being and male are not contradictory;
402

his childhood already predicted this happy fate. It is in accomplishing
himself as independence and freedom that he acquires his social value
and, concurrently, his manly prestige: the ambitious man, like
Rastignac, targets money, glory, and women all at once; one of the
stereotypes that stimulates him is that of the powerful and famous
man adored by women. For the girl, on the contrary, there is a divorce
between her properly human condition and her feminine vocation.
This is why adolescence is such a difficult and decisive moment for
woman. Until then, she was an autonomous individual: she now has
to renounce her sovereignty. Not only is she torn like her brothers,
and more acutely, between past and future, but in addition a conflict
breaks out between her originary claim to be subject, activity, and
freedom, on the one hand and, on the other, her erotic tendencies and
the social pressure to assume herself as a passive object. She
spontaneously grasps herself as the essential: How will she decide to
become the inessential? If I can accomplish myself only as the
Other
,
how will I renounce my
Self?
Such is the agonizing dilemma the
woman-to-be must struggle with. Wavering from desire to disgust,
from hope to fear, rebuffing what she invites, she is still suspended
between the moment of childish independence and that of feminine
submission: this is the incertitude that, as she grows out of the
awkward age, gives her the bitter taste of unripe fruit.
The girl reacts to her situation differently depending on her earlier
choices. The “little woman,” the matron-to-be, can easily resign
herself to her metamorphosis; but she may also have drawn a taste for
authority from her condition as “little woman” that lets her rebel
against the masculine yoke: she is ready to establish a matriarchy, not
to become an erotic object and servant. This will often be the case of
those older sisters who took on important responsibilities at a young
age. The “tomboy,” upon becoming a woman, often feels a burning
disappointment that can drive her directly to homosexuality; but what
she was looking for in independence and intensity was to possess the
world: she may not want to renounce the power of her femininity, the
experiences of maternity, a whole part of her destiny. Generally, with
some resistance, the girl consents to her femininity: already at the
stage of childish coquetry, in front of her father, in her erotic
fantasies,
she understood the charm of passivity; she discovers the
power in it; vanity is soon mixed with the shame that her flesh
403

inspires. That hand that moves her, that glance that excites her, they
are an appeal, an invitation; her body seems endowed with magic
virtues; it is a treasure, a weapon; she is proud of it. Her coquetry,
which often has disappeared during her years of childhood autonomy,
is revived. She tries makeup, hairstyles; instead of hiding her breasts,
she massages them to make them bigger; she studies her smile in the
mirror. The link is so tight between arousal and seduction that in all
cases where erotic sensibility lies dormant, no desire to please is
observed in the subject. Experiments have shown that patients
suffering from a thyroid deficiency, and thus apathetic and sullen, can
be transformed by an injection of glandular extracts: they begin to
smile; they become gay and simpering. Psychologists imbued with
materialistic metaphysics have boldly declared flirtatiousness an
“instinct” secreted by the thyroid gland; but this obscure explanation
is no more valid here than for early childhood. The fact is that in all
cases of organic deficiency—lymphatism, anemia, and such—the
body is endured as a burden; foreign, hostile, it neither hopes for nor
promises anything; when it recovers its equilibrium and vitality, the
subject at once recognizes it as his, and through it he transcends
toward others.
For the girl, erotic transcendence consists in making herself prey in
order to make a catch. She becomes an object; and she grasps herself
as object; she is surprised to discover this new aspect of her being: it
seems to her that she has been doubled; instead of coinciding exactly
with her self, here she is existing
outside
of her self. Thus in
Rosamond Lehmann’s
Invitation to the Waltz
, Olivia discovers an
unknown face in the mirror: it is she-object suddenly rising up
opposite herself; she experiences a quickly fading but upsetting
emotion:
Nowadays a peculiar emotion accompanied the moment of
looking in the mirror: fitfully, rarely a stranger might emerge: a
new self.
It had happened two or three times already … She looked in
the glass and saw herself … Well, what was it?… But this was
something else. This was a mysterious face; both dark and
glowing; hair tumbling down, pushed back and upwards, as if in
currents of fierce energy. Was it the frock that did it? Her body
404

seemed to assemble itself harmoniously within it, to become
centralized, to expand, both static and fluid; alive. It was the
portrait of a young girl in pink. All the room’s reflected objects
seemed to frame, to present her, whispering: Here are You.
What astonishes Olivia are the promises she thinks she reads in this
image in which she recognizes her childish dreams and which is
herself; but the girl also cherishes in her carnal presence this body that
fascinates her as if it were someone else’s. She caresses herself, she
embraces the curve of her shoulder, the bend of her elbow, she
contemplates her bosom, her legs; solitary pleasure becomes a pretext
for reverie, in it she seeks a tender self-possession. For the boy
adolescent, there is an opposition between love of one’s self and the
erotic movement that thrusts him toward the object to be possessed:
his narcissism generally disappears at the moment of sexual maturity.
Instead of the woman being a passive object for the lover as for
herself, there is a primitive blurring in her eroticism. In one complex
step, she aims for her body’s glorification through the homage of men
for whom this body is intended; and it would be a simplification to
say that she wants to be beautiful in order to charm, or that she seeks
to charm to assure herself that she is beautiful: in the solitude of her
room, in salons where she tries to attract the gaze of others, she does
not separate man’s desire from the love of her own self. This
confusion is manifest in Marie Bashkirtseff.
*
It has already been seen
that late weaning disposed her more deeply than any other child to
wanting to be gazed at and valorized by others; from the age of five
until the end of adolescence, she devotes all her love to her image; she
madly admires her hands, her face, her grace, and she writes: “I am
my own heroine.” She wants to become an opera singer to be
gazed
at
by a dazzled public so as to
look back
with a proud gaze; but this
“autism” expresses itself through romantic dreams; from the age of
twelve, she is in love: she wants to be loved, and the adoration that
she seeks to inspire only confirms that which she devotes to herself.
She dreams that the Duke of H., with whom she is in love without
having ever spoken to him, prostrates himself at her feet: “You will be
dazzled by my splendor and you will love me … You are worthy only
of such a woman as I intend to be.” The same ambivalence is found in
Natasha in
War and Peace:
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“Even mama doesn’t understand. It’s astonishing how intelligent
I am and how … sweet she is,” she went on, speaking of herself
in the third person and imagining that it was some very
intelligent man saying it about her, the most intelligent and best
of men …
“There’s everything in her, everything,” this man went on,
“she’s
extraordinarily intelligent, sweet, and then, too, pretty,
extraordinarily pretty, nimble—she swims, she’s an excellent
horsewoman, and the voice! One may say, an astonishing
voice!” …
That morning she returned again to her favorite state of love
and admiration for herself. “How lovely that Natasha is!” she
said of herself again in the words of some collective male third
person. “Pretty, a good voice, young, and doesn’t bother
anybody, only leave her in peace.”
Katherine Mansfield (in “Prelude”) has also described, in the
character of Beryl, a case in which narcissism and the romantic desire
for a woman’s destiny are closely intermingled:
In the dining-room, by the flicker of a wood fire, Beryl sat on a
hassock playing the guitar … She played and sang half to
herself, for she was watching herself playing and singing. The
firelight gleamed on her shoes, on the ruddy belly of the guitar,
and on her white fingers …
“If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I
really would be rather struck,” thought she. Still more softly she
played the accompaniment—not singing now but listening …
“… The first time that I ever saw you, little girl—oh, you had
no idea that you were not alone—you were sitting with your little
feet upon a hassock, playing the guitar. God, I can never
forget …” Beryl flung up her head and began to sing again:

Even the moon is aweary …
But there came a loud bang at the door. The servant girl’s
crimson face popped through … But no, she could not stand that
fool of a girl. She ran into the dark drawing-room and began
406

walking up and down … Oh, she was restless, restless. There
was a mirror over the mantel. She leaned her arms along and
looked at her pale shadow in it. How beautiful she looked, but
there was nobody to see, nobody …
Beryl smiled, and really her smile
was
so adorable that she
smiled again.
This cult of the self is not only expressed by the girl as the
adoration of her physical person; she wishes to possess and praise her
entire self. This is the purpose of these diaries into which she freely
pours her whole soul:
Marie Bashkirtseff’s is famous, and it is a
model of the genre. The girl speaks to her notebook the way she used
to speak to her dolls, as a friend, a confidante, and addresses it as if it
were a person. Recorded in its pages is a truth hidden from parents,
friends, and teachers, and which enraptures the author when she is all
alone. A twelve-year-old girl, who kept a diary until she was twenty,
wrote the inscription:
I am the little notebook
Nice, pretty, and discreet
Tell me all your secrets
I am the little notebook
.
2
Others announce: “To be read after my death,” or “To be burned
when I die.” The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at
prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce
solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that
she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary
character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a
saint like Marie Lenéru, or simply that singular wonder that is herself.
There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the
objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also
convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself
becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her
isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the
future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From
this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. She has
always loved to dream: she gives herself up to this penchant more
407

than ever; she uses poetic clichés to mask a universe that intimidates
her, she sanctifies the male sex with moonlight, rose-colored clouds,
velvet nights; she turns her body into a marble, jasper, or mother-of-
pearl temple; she tells herself foolish fairy tales. She sinks so often
into such nonsense because she has no grasp on the world; if she had
to
act
, she would be forced to see clearly, whereas she can
wait
in the
fog. The young man dreams as well: he dreams especially of
adventures where he plays an active role. The girl prefers wonderment
to adventure; she spreads a vague magic light on things and people.
The idea of magic is that of a passive force; because she is doomed to
passivity and yet wants power, the adolescent girl must believe in
magic: her body’s magic that will bring men under her yoke, the
magic of destiny in general that will
fulfill her without her having
to
do
anything. As for the real world, she tries to forget it:
“In school I sometimes escape, I know not how, the subject
being explained and fly away to dreamland …,” writes a young
girl. “I am thus so absorbed in delightful chimeras that I
completely lose the notion of reality. I am nailed to my bench
and, when I awake, I am amazed to find myself within four
walls.”
“I like to daydream much more than doing my verses,” writes
another, “to dream up nice, nonsensical stories or make up fairy
tales when looking at mountains in the starlight. This is much
more lovely because it is
more vague
and leaves the impression
of repose, of refreshment.”
3
Daydreaming can take on a morbid form and invade the whole
existence, as in the following case:
Marie B.… an intelligent and dreamy child, entering puberty at
fourteen, had a psychic crisis with delusions of grandeur. “She
suddenly announces to her parents that she is the queen of Spain,
assumes haughty airs, wraps herself in a curtain, laughs, sings,
commands, and orders.” For two years, this state is repeated
during her periods, then for eight years she leads a normal life
but is dreamy, loves luxury, and often says bitterly, “I’m an
408

employee’s daughter.” Toward twenty-three she grows apathetic,
hateful of her surroundings, and manifests ambitious ideas; she
gets worse to the point of being interned in Sainte-Anne asylum,
where she spends eight months; she returns to her family, where,
for three years she remains in bed, “disagreeable, mean, violent,
capricious, unoccupied, and a burden to all those around her.”
She is taken back to Sainte-Anne for good and does not come
out again. She remains in bed, interested in nothing. At certain
periods—seeming to correspond to menstrual periods—she gets
up, drapes herself in her bedcovers, strikes theatrical attitudes,
poses, smiles at doctors, or looks at them ironically … Her
comments often express a certain eroticism, and her regal attitude
expresses megalomaniac concepts.
She sinks further and further into her dreamworld, where
smiles of satisfaction appear on her face; she is careless of her
appearance and even dirties her bed. “She adorns herself with
bizarre ornaments, shirtless, often naked, with a tinfoil diadem
on her head and string or ribbon bracelets on her arms, her
wrists, her shoulders, her ankles. Similar rings adorn her
fingers.” Yet at times she makes lucid comments on her
condition. “I recall the crisis I had before. I knew deep down that
it was not real. I was like a child who plays with dolls and who
knows that her doll is not alive but wants to convince
herself … I fixed my hair; I draped myself. I was having fun,
and then little by little, as if in spite of myself, I became
bewitched; it was like a dream I was living … I was like an
actress who would play a role. I was in an imaginary world. I
lived several lives at a time and
in each life, I was the principal
player …
Ah! I had so many different lives; once I married a
handsome American who wore golden glasses … We had a
grand hotel and a room for each of us. What parties I gave!… I
lived in the days of cavemen … I was wild in those days. I
couldn’t count how many men I slept with. Here people are a
little backward. They don’t understand why I go naked with a
gold bracelet on my thigh. I used to have friends that I liked a lot.
We had parties at my house. There were flowers, perfume,
ermine fur. My friends gave me art objects, statues,
cars … When I get into my sheets naked, it reminds me of old
409

times.
I admired myself in mirrors
, as an artist … In my
bewitched state, I was anything I wanted. I was even foolish. I
took morphine, cocaine. I had lovers … They came to my house
at night. They came two at a time. They brought hairdressers and
we looked at postcards.” She was also the mistress of two of her
doctors. She says she had a three-year-old daughter. She has
another six-year-old, very rich, who travels. Their father is a
very chic man. “There are ten other similar stories. Every one is a
feigned existence that she lives in her imagination.”
4
Clearly this morbid daydreaming was essentially to satiate the girl’s
narcissism, as she feels that her life was inadequate and is afraid to
confront the
reality of her existence. Marie B. merely carried to the
extreme a compensation process common to many adolescents.
Nonetheless, this self-provided solitary cult is not enough for the
girl. To fulfill herself, she needs to exist in another consciousness.
She often turns to her friends for help. When she was younger, her
best girlfriend provided support for her to escape the maternal circle,
to explore the world and in particular the sexual world; now her friend
is both an object wrenching her to the limits of her self and a witness
who restores that self to her. Some young girls exhibit their nudity to
each other, they compare their breasts: an example would be the scene
in
Girls in Uniform
that shows the daring games of boarding-school
girls;
*
they exchange random or particular caresses. As Colette
recounts in
Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School
) and Rosamond
Lehmann less frankly in
Dusty Answer
, nearly all girls have lesbian
tendencies; these tendencies are barely distinguishable from
narcissistic delights: in the other, it is the sweetness of her own skin,
the form of her own curves, that each of them covets; and vice versa,
implicit in her self-adoration is the cult of femininity in general.
Sexually, man is subject; men are thus normally separated by the
desire that drives them toward an object different from them selves;
but woman is an absolute object of desire; this is why “special
friendships” flourish in lycées, schools, boarding schools, and
workshops; some are purely spiritual and others deeply carnal. In the
first case, it is mainly a matter of friends opening their hearts to each
other, exchanging confidences; the most passionate proof of
confidence is to show one’s intimate diary to the chosen one; short of
410

sexual embraces, friends exchange extreme signs of tenderness and
often give to each other, in indirect ways, a physical token of their
feelings: thus Natasha burns her arm with a red-hot ruler to prove her
love for Sonya; mostly they call each other thousands of affectionate
names and exchange ardent letters. Here is an example of a letter
written by Emily Dickinson, a young New England puritan, to a
beloved female friend:
I think of you all day, and dreamed of you last night … I was
walking with you in the most wonderful garden, and helping you
pick roses, and although we gathered with all our might, the
basket was never full. And so all day I pray I may walk with
you, and gather roses again, and as night draws on, it pleases
me, and I count
impatiently the hours ’tween me and the
darkness, and the dream of you and the roses, and the basket
never full …
In his work on the adolescent girl’s soul, Mendousse cites a great
number of similar letters:
My Dear Suzanne … I would have liked to copy here a few
verses from Song of Songs: how beautiful you are, my friend,
how beautiful you are! Like the mystical bride, you were like the
rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley, and like her, you have been
for me more than an ordinary girl; you have been a symbol, the
symbol of all things beautiful and lofty … and because of this,
pure Suzanne, I love you with a pure and unselfish love that
hints of the religious.
Another confesses less lofty emotions in her diary:
I was there, my waist encircled by this little white hand, my hand
resting on her round shoulder, my arm on her bare, warm arm,
pressed against the softness of her breast, with her lovely mouth
before me, parted on her dainty teeth … I trembled and felt my
face burning.
5
In her book
The Adolescent Girl
, Mme Evard also collected a great
number of these intimate effusions:
411

To my beloved fairy, my dearest darling. My lovely fairy. Oh!
Tell me that you still love me, tell me that for you I am still the
devoted friend. I am sad, I love you so, oh my L.… and I cannot
speak to you, tell you enough of my affection for you; there are
no words to describe my love.
Idolize
is a poor way to say what
I feel; sometimes it seems that my heart will burst. To be loved
by you is too beautiful, I cannot believe it.
Oh my dear
, tell, will
you love me longer still?
It is easy to slip from these exalted affections into guilty juvenile
crushes; sometimes one of the two girlfriends dominates and
exercises her power sadistically over the other; but often, they are
reciprocal loves without humiliation or struggle; the pleasure given
and received remains as
innocent as it was at the time when each one
loved alone, without being doubled in a couple. But this very
innocence is bland; when the adolescent girl decides to enter into life
and becomes the Other, she hopes to rekindle the magic of the
paternal gaze to her advantage; she demands the love and caresses of a
divinity. She will turn to a woman less foreign and less fearsome than
the male, but one who will possess male prestige: a woman who has a
profession, who earns her living, who has a certain social base, will
easily be as fascinating as a man: we know how many “flames” are lit
in schoolgirls’ hearts for professors and tutors. In
Regiment of
Women
, Clemence Dane uses a chaste style to describe ardently
burning passions. Sometimes the girl confides her great passion to her
best friend; they even share it, adding spice to their experience. A
schoolgirl writes to her best friend:
I’m in bed with a cold, and can think only of Mlle X.… I never
loved a teacher to this point. I already loved her a lot in my first
year, but now it is real love. I think that I’m more passionate than
you. I imagine kissing her; I half faint and thrill at the idea of
seeing her when school begins.
6
More often, she even dares admit her feeling to her idol herself:
Dear Mademoiselle, I am in an indescribable state over you.
When I do not see you, I would give the world to meet you; I
412

think of you every moment. If I spot you, my eyes fill up with
tears, I want to hide; I am so small, so ignorant in front of you.
When you chat with me, I am embarrassed, moved, I seem to
hear the sweet voice of a fairy and the humming of loving things,
impossible to translate; I watch your slightest moves; I lose track
of the conversation and mumble something stupid: you must
admit, dear Mademoiselle, that this is all mixed up. I do see one
thing clearly, that I love you from the depths of my soul.
7
The headmistress of a professional school recounts:
I recall that in my own youth, we fought over one of our young
professors’ lunch papers and paid up to twenty pfennigs to have
it. Her used metro tickets were also objects of our collectors’
rage.
Since she must play a masculine role, it is preferable for the loved
woman not to be married; marriage does not always discourage the
young admirer, but it interferes; she detests the idea that the object of
her adoration could be under the control of a spouse or a lover. Her
passions often unfold in secret, or at least on a purely platonic level;
but the passage to a concrete eroticism is much easier here than if the
loved object is masculine; even if she has had difficult experiences
with friends her age, the feminine body does not frighten the girl; with
her sisters or her mother, she has often experienced an intimacy where
tenderness was subtly penetrated with sensuality, and when she is
with the loved one she admires, slipping from tenderness to pleasure
will take place just as subtly. When Dorothea Wieck kisses Herta
Thiele on the lips in
Girls in Uniform
, this kiss is both maternal and
sexual. Between women there is a complicity that disarms modesty;
the excitement one arouses in the other is generally without violence;
homosexual embraces involve neither defloration nor penetration: they
satisfy infantile clitoral eroticism without demanding new and
disquieting metamorphoses. The girl can realize her vocation as
passive object without feeling deeply alienated. This is what Renée
Vivien expresses in her verses, where she describes the relation of
“damned women” and their lovers:
413

Our bodies to theirs are a kindred mirror …
Our lunar kisses have a pallid softness
,
Our fingers do not ruffle the down on a cheek
,
And we are able, when the sash becomes untied
,
To be at the same time lovers and sisters
8
And in these verses:
For we love gracefulness and delicacy
,
And my possession does not bruise your breasts …
My mouth would not know how to bite your mouth roughly
.
My mouth will not bitterly bite your mouth
.
9
Through the poetic impropriety of the words “breasts” and
“mouth,” she clearly promises her friend not to brutalize her. And it is
in part out of
fear of violence and of rape that the adolescent girl often
gives her first love to an older girl rather than to a man. The masculine
woman reincarnates for her both the father and the mother: from the
father she has authority and transcendence, she is the source and
standard of values, she rises beyond the given world, she is divine;
but she remains woman: whether she was too abruptly weaned from
her mother’s caresses or if, on the contrary, her mother pampered her
too long, the adolescent girl, like her brothers, dreams of the warmth
of the breast; in this flesh similar to hers she loses herself again in that
immediate fusion with life that weaning destroyed; and through this
foreign enveloping gaze, she overcomes the separation that
individualizes her. Of course, all human relationships entail conflicts;
all love entails jealousies. But many of the difficulties that arise
between the virgin and her first male love are smoothed away here.
The homosexual experience can take the shape of a true love; it can
bring to the girl so happy a balance that she will want to continue it,
repeat it, and will keep a nostalgic memory of it; it can awaken or give
rise to a lesbian vocation.
10
But most often, it will only represent a
stage: its very facility condemns it. In the love that she declares to a
woman older than herself, the girl covets her own future: she is
identifying with an idol; unless this idol is exceptionally superior, she
loses her aura quickly; when she begins to assert herself, the younger
414

one judges and compares: the other, who was chosen precisely
because she was close and unintimidating, is not
other
enough to
impose herself for very long; the male gods are more firmly in place
because their heaven is more distant. Her curiosity and her sensuality
incite the girl to desire more aggressive embraces. Very often, she has
envisaged, from the start, a homosexual adventure just as a transition,
an initiation, a temporary situation; she acts out jealousy, anger, pride,
joy, and pain with the more or less admitted idea that she is imitating,
without great risk, the adventures of which she dreams but that she
does not yet dare, nor has had the occasion, to live. She is destined for
man, she knows it, and she wants a normal and complete woman’s
destiny.
Man dazzles yet frightens her. To reconcile the contradictory
feelings she has about him, she will dissociate in him the male that
frightens her from the shining divinity whom she piously adores.
Abrupt, awkward with her masculine acquaintances, she idolizes
distant Prince Charmings: movie actors whose pictures she pastes
over her bed, heroes, living or dead but inaccessible, an unknown
glimpsed by chance and whom she knows she
will never meet again.
Such loves raise no problems. Very often she approaches a socially
prestigious or intellectual man who is physically unexciting: for
example, an old, slightly ridiculous professor; these older men emerge
from a world beyond the world where the adolescent girl is enclosed,
and she can secretly devote herself to them, consecrate herself to them
as one consecrates oneself to God: such a gift is in no way
humiliating, it is freely given since the desire is not carnal. The
romantic woman in love freely accepts that the chosen one be
unassuming, ugly, a little foolish: she then feels all the more secure.
She pretends to deplore the obstacles that separate her from him; but
in reality she has chosen him precisely because no real rapport
between them is possible. Thus she can make of love an abstract and
purely subjective experience, unthreatening to her integrity; her heart
beats, she feels the pain of absence, the pangs of presence, vexation,
hope, bitterness, enthusiasm, but not authentically; no part of her is
engaged. It is amusing to observe that the idol chosen is all the more
dazzling the more distant it is: it is convenient for the everyday piano
teacher to be ridiculous and ugly; but if one falls in love with a
stranger who moves in inaccessible spheres, it is preferable that he be
415

handsome and masculine. The important thing is that, in one way or
another, the sexual issue not be raised. These make-believe loves
prolong and confirm the narcissistic attitude where eroticism appears
only in its immanence, without real presence of the Other. Finding a
pretext that permits her to elude concrete experiences, the adolescent
girl often develops an intense imaginary life. She chooses to confuse
her fantasies with reality. Among other examples, Helene Deutsch
describes a particularly significant one: a pretty and seductive girl,
who could have easily been courted, refused all relations with young
people around her; but at the age of thirteen, in her secret heart, she
had chosen to idolize a rather ugly seventeen-year-old boy who had
never spoken to her.
11
She got hold of a picture of him, wrote a
dedication to herself on it, and for three years kept a diary recounting
her imaginary experiences: they exchanged kisses and passionate
embraces; there were sometimes crying scenes where she left with her
eyes all red and swollen; then they were reconciled, and she sent
herself flowers, and so on. When a move separated her from him, she
wrote him letters she never sent him but that she answered herself.
This story was most obviously a defense against real experiences that
she feared.
This case is almost pathological. But it illustrates a normal process
by
magnifying it. Marie Bashkirtseff gives a gripping example of an
imaginary sentimental existence. The Duke of H., with whom she
claims to be in love, is someone to whom she has never spoken. What
she really desires is to exalt herself; but being a woman, and
especially in the period and class she belongs to, she had no chance of
achieving success through an independent existence. At eighteen
years of age, she lucidly notes: “I write to C. that I would like to be a
man. I know that I could be someone; but where can one go in skirts?
Marriage is women’s only career; men have thirty-six chances,
women have but one, zero, like in the bank.” She thus needs a man’s
love; but to be able to confer a sovereign value on her, he must
himself be a sovereign consciousness. “Never will a man beneath my
position be able to please me,” she writes. “A rich and independent
man carries pride and a certain comfortable air with him. Self-
assurance has a certain triumphant aura. I love H.’s capricious air,
conceited and cruel: something of Nero in him.” And further: “This
annihilation of the woman before the superiority of the loved man
416

must be the greatest thrill of self-love that the superior woman can
experience.” Thus narcissism leads to masochism: this liaison has
already been seen in the child who dreams of Bluebeard, of Griselda,
of the martyred saints. The self is constituted as for others, by others:
the more powerful others are, the more riches and power the self has;
captivating its master, it envelops in itself the virtues possessed by
him; loved by Nero, Marie Bashkirtseff
would be
Nero; to annihilate
oneself before others is to realize others at once in oneself and for
oneself; in reality this dream of nothingness is an arrogant will to be.
In fact, Bashkirtseff never met a man superb enough to alienate
herself through him. It is one thing to kneel before a far-off god
shaped by one’s self and another thing to give one’s self over to a
flesh-and-blood man. Many girls long persist in stubbornly following
their dream throughout the real world: they seek a male who seems
superior to all others in his position, his merits, his intelligence; they
want him to be older than themselves, already having carved out a
place for himself in the world, enjoying authority and prestige; fortune
and fame fascinate them: the chosen one appears as the absolute
Subject who by his love will convey to them his splendor and his
indispensability. His superiority idealizes the love that the girl brings
to him: it is not only because he is a male that she wants to give
herself to him, it is because he is
this
elite being. “I would like giants
and all I find is men,” a friend once said to me. In the name of these
high standards, the girl disdains too-ordinary suitors and eludes the
problem of sexuality. In her dreams and without risk, she cherishes an
image of herself that enchants her as an image, though she has no
intention of conforming to it. Thus,
Maria Le Hardouin explains that
she gets pleasure from seeing herself as a victim, ever devoted to a
man, when she is really authoritarian:
Out of a kind of modesty, I could never in reality express my
nature’s hidden tendencies that I lived so deeply in my dreams.
As I learned to know myself, I am in fact authoritarian, violent,
and deeply incapable of flexibility.
Always obeying a need to suppress myself, I sometimes
imagined that I was an admirable woman, living only by duty,
madly in love with a man whose every wish I endeavored to
anticipate. We struggled within an ugly world of needs. He killed
417

himself working and came home at night pale and undone. I lost
my sight mending his clothes next to a lightless window. In a
narrow smoky kitchen, I cooked some miserable meals. Sickness
ceaselessly threatened our only child with death. Yet a sweet,
crucified smile was always on my lips, and my eyes always
showed that unbearable expression of silent courage that in
reality I could never stand without disgust.
12
Beyond these narcissistic gratifications, some girls do concretely
find the need for a guide, a master. From the time they escape their
parents’ hold, they find themselves encumbered by an autonomy that
they are not used to; they only know how to make negative use of it;
they fall into caprice and extravagance; they want to give up their
freedom. The story of the young and capricious girl, rebellious and
spoiled, who is tamed by the love of a sensible man is a standard of
cheap literature and cinema: it is a cliché that flatters both men and
women. It is the story, among others, told by Mme de Ségur in
Quel
amour d’enfant! (Such an Adorable Child!
). As a child, Gisèle,
disappointed by her overly indulgent father, becomes attached to a
severe old aunt; as a girl, she comes under the influence of an irritable
young man, Julien, who judges her harshly, humiliates her, and tries
to reform her; she marries a rich, characterless duke with whom she is
extremely unhappy, and when, as a widow, she accepts the
demanding love of her mentor, she finally finds joy and wisdom. In
Louisa May Alcott’s
Good Wives
, independent Jo begins to fall in
love with her future husband because he seriously reproaches her for
an imprudent act; he also scolds her, and she rushes to excuse herself
and submit to him. In spite of the edgy pride of American women,
Hollywood films have hundreds of times
presented
enfants terribles
tamed by the healthy brutality of a lover or husband: a couple of slaps,
even a good spanking, seem to be a good means of seduction. But in
reality, the passage from ideal love to sexual love is not so simple.
Many women carefully avoid approaching the object of their passion
through more or less admitted fear of disappointment. If the hero, the
giant, or the demigod responds to the love he inspires and transforms
it into a real-life experience, the girl panics; her idol becomes a male
she shies away from, disgusted. There are flirtatious adolescents who
do everything in their power to seduce a seemingly “interesting” or
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“fascinating” man, but paradoxically they recoil if he manifests too
vivid an emotion in return; he was attractive because he seemed
inaccessible: in love, he becomes commonplace. “He’s just a man like
the others.” The young woman blames him for her disgrace; she uses
this pretext to refuse physical contacts that shock her virgin
sensibilities. If the girl gives in to her “Ideal one,” she remains
unmoved in his arms and “it happens,” says Stekel, “that obsessed
girls commit suicide after such scenes where the whole construction
of amorous imagination collapses because the Ideal one is seen in the
form of a ‘brutal animal.’ ”
13
The taste for the impossible often leads
the girl to fall in love with a man when he begins to court one of her
friends, and very often she chooses a married man. She is readily
fascinated by a Don Juan; she dreams of submitting and attaching
herself to this seducer that no woman has ever held on to, and she
kindles the hope of reforming him: but in fact, she knows she will fail
in her undertaking, and this is the reason for her choice. Some girls
end up forever incapable of knowing real and complete love. They
will search all their lives for an ideal impossible to reach.
But there is a conflict between the girl’s narcissism and the
experiences for which her sexuality destines her. The woman only
accepts herself as the inessential on the condition of finding herself
the essential once again by abdicating. In making herself object,
suddenly she has become an idol in which she proudly recognizes
herself; but she refuses the implacable dialectic that makes her return
to the inessential. She wants to be a fascinating treasure, not a thing to
be taken. She loves to seem like a marvelous fetish, charged with
magic emanations, not to see herself as flesh that lets herself be seen,
touched, bruised: thus man prizes the woman prey, but flees the
ogress Demeter.
Proud to capture masculine interest and to arouse admiration,
woman is revolted by being captured in return. With puberty she
learned shame:
and shame is mixed with her coquetry and vanity,
men’s gazes flatter and hurt her at the same time; she would only like
to be seen to the extent that she shows herself: eyes are always too
penetrating. Hence the inconsistency disconcerting to men: she
displays her décolletage and her legs, but she blushes and becomes
vexed when someone looks at her. She enjoys provoking the male,
but if she sees she has aroused his desire, she backs off in disgust:
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masculine desire is an offense as much as a tribute; insofar as she
feels responsible for her charm, as she feels she is using it freely, she
is enchanted with her victories: but while her features, her forms, her
flesh, are given and endured, she wants to keep them from this
foreign and indiscreet freedom that covets them. Here is the deep
meaning of this primal modesty, which interferes in a disconcerting
way with the boldest coquetry. A little girl can be surprisingly
audacious because she does not realize that her initiatives reveal her in
her passivity: as soon as she sees this, she becomes indignant and
angry. Nothing is more ambiguous than a look; it exists at a distance,
and that distance makes it seem respectable: but insidiously it takes
hold of the perceived image. The unripe woman struggles with these
traps. She begins to let herself go, but just as quickly she tenses up
and kills the desire in herself. In her as yet uncertain body, the caress
is felt at times as an unpleasant tickling, at times as a delicate pleasure;
a kiss moves her first, and then abruptly makes her laugh; she follows
each surrender with a revolt; she lets herself be kissed, but then she
wipes her mouth noticeably; she is smiling and caring, then suddenly
ironic and hostile; she makes promises and deliberately forgets them.
In such a way, Mathilde de la Mole is seduced by Julien’s beauty and
rare qualities, desirous to reach an exceptional destiny through her
love, but fiercely refusing the domination of her own senses and that
of a foreign consciousness; she goes from servility to arrogance, from
supplication to scorn; she demands an immediate payback for
everything she gives. Such is also Monique, whose profile is drawn
by Marcel Arland, who confuses excitement with sin, for whom love
is a shameful abdication, whose blood is hot but who detests this
ardor and who, while bridling, submits to it.
The “unripe fruit” defends herself against man by exhibiting a
childish and perverse nature. This is often how the girl has been
described: halfwild, half-dutiful. Colette, for one, depicted her in
Claudine at School
and also in
Le blé en herbe (Green Wheat
) in the
guise of the seductive Vinca. She maintains an interest in the world
around her, over which she reigns sovereign; but she is also curious
and feels a sensual and romantic desire for man. Vinca gets scratched
by brambles, fishes for shrimp, and climbs trees, and yet she quivers
when her friend Phil touches her hand; she knows the
agitation of the
body becoming flesh, the first revelation of woman as woman;
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aroused, she begins to want to be pretty: at times she does her hair,
she uses makeup, dresses in gauzy organdy, she takes pleasure in
appearing attractive and seductive; she also wants to exist
for herself
and not only
for others
, at other times, she throws on old formless
dresses, unbecoming trousers; there is a whole part of her that
criticizes seduction and considers it as giving in: so she purposely lets
herself be seen with ink-stained fingers, messy hair, dirty. This
rebelliousness gives her a clumsiness she resents: she is annoyed by
it, blushes, becomes even more awkward, and is horrified by these
aborted attempts at seduction. At this point, the girl no longer wants to
be a child, but she does not accept becoming an adult, and she blames
herself for her childishness and then for her female resignation. She is
in a state of constant denial.
This is the characteristic trait of the girl and gives the key to most of
her behavior; she does not accept the destiny nature and society assign
to her; and yet she does not actively repudiate it: she is too divided
internally to enter into combat with the world; she confines herself to
escaping reality or to contesting it symbolically. Each of her desires is
matched by an anxiety: she is eager to take possession of her future,
but she fears breaking with her past; she would like “to have” a man,
she balks at being his prey. And behind each fear hides a desire: rape
is abhorrent to her, but she aspires to passivity. Thus she is doomed
to bad faith and all its ruses; she is predisposed to all sorts of negative
obsessions that express the ambivalence of desire and anxiety.
One of the most common forms of adolescent contestation is
giggling. High school girls and shopgirls burst into laughter while
recounting love or risqué stories, while talking about their flirtations,
meeting men, or seeing lovers kiss; I have known schoolgirls going to
lovers’ lane in the Luxembourg Gardens just to laugh; and others
going to the Turkish baths to make fun of the fat women with sagging
stomachs and hanging breasts they saw there; scoffing at the female
body, ridiculing men, laughing at love, are ways of disavowing
sexuality: this laughter that defies adults is a way of overcoming one’s
own embarrassment; one plays with images and words to kill the
dangerous magic of them: for example, I saw twelve-year-old
students burst out laughing when they saw a Latin text with the word
femur
. If in addition the girl lets herself be kissed and petted, she will
get her revenge in laughing outright at her partner or with friends. I
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remember in a train compartment one night two girls being fondled
one after the other by a traveling salesman overjoyed with his good
luck: between each session they laughed hysterically, reverting to the
behavior of the awkward
age in a mixture of sexuality and shame.
Girls giggle and they also resort to language to help them: some use
words whose coarseness would make their brothers blush; half-
ignorant, they are even less shocked by those expressions that do not
evoke very precise images; the aim, of course, is to prevent these
images from taking shape, at least to defuse them; the dirty stories
high school girls tell each other are less to satisfy sexual instincts than
to deny sexuality: they only want to consider the humorous side, like
a mechanical or almost surgical operation. But like laughter, the use of
obscene language is not only a protest: it is also a defiance of adults, a
sort of sacrilege, a deliberately perverse kind of behavior. Rebuffing
nature and society, the girl nettles and challenges them by many
oddities. She often has food manias: she eats pencil lead, sealing wax,
bits of wood, live shrimp, she swallows dozens of aspirins at a time,
or she even ingests flies or spiders; I knew a girl—very obedient
otherwise—who made horrible mixtures of coffee and white wine that
she forced herself to swallow; other times she ate sugar soaked in
vinegar; I saw another chewing determinedly into a white worm
found in lettuce. All children endeavor to experience the world with
their eyes, their hands, and more intimately their mouths and
stomachs: but at the awkward age, the girl takes particular pleasure in
exploring what is indigestible and repugnant. Very often, she is
attracted by what is “disgusting.” One of them, quite pretty and
attractive when she wanted to be and carefully dressed, proved really
fascinated by everything that seemed “dirty” to her: she touched
insects, looked at dirty sanitary napkins, sucked the blood of her cuts.
Playing with dirty things is obviously a way of overcoming disgust;
this feeling becomes much more important at puberty: the girl is
disgusted by her too-carnal body, by menstrual blood, by adults’
sexual practices, by the male she is destined for; she denies it by
indulging herself specifically in the familiarity of everything that
disgusts her. “Since I have to bleed each month, I prove that my blood
does not scare me by drinking that of my cuts. Since I will have to
submit myself to a revolting test, why not eat a white worm?” This
attitude is affirmed more clearly in self-mutilation, so frequent at this
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age. The girl gashes her thigh with a razor, burns herself with
cigarettes, cuts and scratches herself; so as not to go to a boring
garden party, a girl during my youth cut her foot with an ax and had
to spend six weeks in bed. These sadomasochistic practices are both
an anticipation of the sexual experience and a revolt against it; girls
have to undergo these tests, hardening themselves to all possible
ordeals and rendering them harmless, including the wedding night.
When she puts a slug on her chest, when she swallows a bottle of
aspirin, when she wounds herself, the girl is defying her future
lover:
you will never inflict on me anything more horrible than I inflict on
myself. These are morose and haughty initiations in sexual adventure.
Destined to be a passive prey, she claims her freedom right up to
submitting to pain and disgust. When she inflicts the cut of the knife,
the burning of a coal on herself, she is protesting against the
penetration that deflowers her: she protests by nullifying it.
Masochistic, since she welcomes the pain caused by her behavior, she
is above all sadistic: as autonomous subject, she beats, scorns, and
tortures this dependent flesh, this flesh condemned to submission that
she detests but from which she does not want to separate herself.
Because, in all these situations, she does not choose authentically to
reject her destiny. Sadomasochistic crazes imply a fundamental bad
faith: if the girl indulges in them, it means she accepts, through her
rejections, her future as woman; she would not mutilate her flesh with
hatred if first she did not recognize herself as flesh. Even her violent
outbursts arise from a situation of resignation. When a boy revolts
against his father or against the world, he engages in effective
violence; he picks a quarrel with a friend, he fights, he affirms himself
as subject with his fists: he imposes himself on the world; he goes
beyond it. But affirming herself, imposing herself, are forbidden to
the adolescent girl, and that is what fills her heart with revolt: she
hopes neither to change the world nor to emerge from it; she knows
or at least believes, and perhaps even wishes, herself tied up: she can
only destroy; there is despair in her rage; during a frustrating evening,
she breaks glasses, windows, vases: it is not to overcome her lot; it is
only a symbolic protest. The girl rebels against her future enslavement
through her present powerlessness; and her vain outbursts, far from
freeing her from her bonds, often merely restrict her even more.
Violence against herself or the universe around her always has a
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negative character: it is more spectacular than effective. The boy who
climbs rocks or fights with his friends regards physical pain, the
injuries and the bumps, as an insignificant consequence of the positive
activities he indulges in; he neither seeks nor flees them for
themselves (except if an inferiority complex puts him in a situation
similar to women’s). The girl watches herself suffer: she seeks in her
own heart the taste of violence and revolt rather than being concerned
with their results. Her perversity stems from the fact that she remains
stuck in the childish universe from which she cannot or does not
really want to escape; she struggles in her cage rather than seeking to
get out of it; her attitudes are negative, reflexive, and symbolic. This
perversity can take disturbing forms. Many young virgins are
kleptomaniacs; kleptomania is a very ambiguous “sexual
sublimation”; the desire to transgress laws, to violate a taboo, the
giddiness of the dangerous and forbidden act, are certainly
essential in
the girl thief: but there is a double face. Taking objects without having
the right is affirming one’s autonomy arrogantly, it is putting oneself
forward as subject facing the things stolen and the society that
condemns stealing, and it is rejecting the established order as well as
defying its guardians; but this defiance also has a masochistic side; the
thief is fascinated by the risk she runs, by the abyss she will be
thrown into if she is caught; it is the danger of being caught that gives
such a voluptuous attraction to the act of taking; thus looked at with
blame, or with a hand placed on her shoulder in shame, she can realize
herself as object totally and without recourse. Taking without being
taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of
adolescent feminine sexuality. All perverse or illegal conduct found in
girls has the same meaning. Some specialize in sending anonymous
letters; others find pleasure in mystifying those around them: one
fourteen-year-old persuaded a whole village that a house was haunted
by spirits. They simultaneously enjoy the clandestine exercise of their
power, disobedience, defiance of society, and the risk of being
exposed; this is such an important element of their pleasure that they
often unmask themselves, and they even sometimes accuse
themselves of faults or crimes they have not committed. It is not
surprising that the refusal to become object leads to constituting
oneself as object: this process is common to all negative obsessions. It
is in a single movement that in a hysterical paralysis the ill person
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fears paralysis, desires it, and brings it on: he is cured from it only by
no longer thinking about it; likewise with psychasthenic tics. The
depth of the girl’s bad faith is what links her to these types of
neuroses: manias, tics, conspiracies, perversities; many neurotic
symptoms are found in her due to this ambivalence of desire and
anxiety that has been pointed out. It is quite common, for example, for
her to “run away”; she goes away at random, she wanders far from
her father’s house, and two or three days later she comes back by
herself. It is not a real departure or a real act of rupture with the
family; it is mere playacting, and the girl is often totally disconcerted if
it is suggested that she leave her circle definitively: she wants to leave
while not wanting to at the same time. Running away is sometimes
linked to fantasies of prostitution: the girl dreams she is a prostitute,
she plays this role more or less timidly; she wears excessive makeup,
she leans out the window and winks at passersby; in some cases, she
leaves the house and carries the drama so far that it becomes confused
with reality. Such conduct often expresses a disgust with sexual
desire, a feeling of guilt: since I have these thoughts, these appetites, I
am no better than a prostitute, I am one, thinks a girl. Sometimes, she
attempts to free herself: let’s get it over with, let’s go to the limit, she
says to herself;
she wants to prove to herself that sexuality is of little
importance by giving herself to the first one. At the same time, such
an attitude is often a manifestation of hostility to the mother, either that
the girl is horrified by her austere virtue or that she suspects her
mother of being, herself, of easy morality; or she holds a grudge
against her father who has shown himself too indifferent. In any case,
in this obsession—as in the fantasies of pregnancy about which we
have already spoken and that are often associated with it—there is the
meeting of this inextricable confusion of revolt and complicity,
characterized by psychasthenic dizziness. It is noteworthy that in all
these behaviors the girl does not seek to go beyond the natural and
social order, she does not attempt to push back the limits of the
possible or to effectuate a transmutation of values; she settles for
manifesting her revolt within an established world where boundaries
and laws are preserved; this is the often-defined “devilish” attitude,
implying a basic deception: the good is recognized so that it can be
trampled upon, the rule is set so that it can be violated, the sacred is
respected so that it is possible to perpetuate the sacrileges. The girl’s
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attitude is defined essentially by the fact that in the agonizing shadows
of bad faith, she refuses the world and her own destiny at the same
time as she accepts them.
However, she does not confine herself to contesting negatively the
situation imposed on her; she also tries to compensate for its
insufficiencies. Although the future frightens her, the present
dissatisfies her; she hesitates to become woman; she frets at still being
only a child; she has already left her past; she is not yet committed to a
new life. She is occupied, but she does not
do
anything; because she
does not do anything, she
has
nothing, she
is nothing
. She tries to fill
this void by playacting and mystifications. She is criticized for being
devious, a liar, and troublesome. The truth is she is doomed to secrets
and lies. At sixteen, a woman has already gone through disturbing
experiences: puberty, menstrual periods, awakening of sexuality, first
arousals, first passions, fears, disgust, and ambiguous experiences:
she has hidden all these things in her heart; she has learned to guard
her secrets preciously. The mere fact of having to hide her sanitary
napkins and of concealing her periods inclines her to lies. In the short
story “Old Mortality,” Katherine Anne Porter recounts that young
American women from the South, around 1900, made themselves ill
by swallowing mixtures of salt and lemon to stop their periods when
going to balls: they were afraid that the young men would recognize
their state by the bags under their eyes, by contact with their hands, by
a smell perhaps, and this idea upset them. It is difficult to play the
idol, the fairy, or the remote princess when one feels a bloody piece of
material between one’s legs and, more generally,
when one knows the
primal misery of being a body. Modesty, a spontaneous refusal to let
oneself be grasped as flesh, comes close to hypocrisy. But above all,
the adolescent girl is condemned to the lie of pretending to be object,
and a prestigious one, while she experiences herself as an uncertain,
dispersed existence, knowing her failings. Makeup, false curls,
corsets, padded bras, are lies; the face itself becomes a mask:
spontaneous expressions are produced artfully, a wondrous passivity
is imitated; there is nothing more surprising than suddenly
discovering in the exercise of one’s feminine functions a
physiognomy with which one is familiar; its transcendence denies
itself and imitates immanence; one’s eyes no longer perceive, they
reflect; one’s body no longer lives: it waits; every gesture and smile
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becomes an appeal; disarmed, available, the girl is nothing but a
flower offered, a fruit to be picked. Man encourages her in these lures
by demanding to be lured: then he gets irritated, he accuses. But for
the guileless girl, he has nothing but indifference and even hostility.
He is only seduced by the one who sets traps for him; offered, she is
still the one who stalks her prey; her passivity takes the form of an
undertaking, she makes her weakness a tool of her strength; since she
is forbidden to attack outright, she is reduced to maneuvers and
calculations; and it is in her interest to appear freely given; therefore,
she will be criticized for being perfidious and treacherous, and she is.
But it is true that she is obliged to offer man the myth of her
submission because he insists on dominating. And can one demand
that she stifle her most essential claims? Her complaisance can only be
perverted right from the outset. Besides, she cheats not only out of
concerted, deliberate ruse. Because all roads are barred to her, because
she cannot
do
, because she must
be
, a curse weighs on her. As a
child, she played at being a dancer or a saint; later, she plays at being
herself; what is really the truth? In the area in which she has been shut
up, this is a word without sense. Truth is reality unveiled, and
unveiling occurs through acts: but she does not act. The romances she
tells herself about herself—and that she also often tells others—seem
better ways of expressing the possibilities she feels in herself than the
plain account of her daily life. She is unable to take stock of herself:
so she consoles herself by playacting; she embodies a character she
seeks to give importance to; she tries to stand out by extravagant
behavior because she does not have the right to distinguish herself in
specific activities. She knows she is without responsibilities,
insignificant in this world of men: she makes trouble because she has
nothing else important to do. Giraudoux’s Electra is a woman who
makes trouble, because it is up to Orestes alone to accomplish a real
murder with a real sword. Like the child, the girl wears herself out in
scenes and rages, she
makes herself ill, she manifests signs of
hysteria to try to attract attention and be someone who
counts
. She
interferes in the destiny of others so that she can count; she uses any
weapon she can; she tells secrets, she invents others, she betrays, she
calumniates; she needs tragedy around her to feel alive since she finds
no support in her own life. She is unpredictable for the same reason;
the fantasies we form and the images by which we are lulled are
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contradictory: only action unifies the diversity of time. The girl does
not have a real will but has desires, and she jumps from one to the
other at random. What makes her flightiness sometimes dangerous is
that at every moment, committing herself in dream only, she commits
herself wholly. She puts herself on a level of intransigence and
perfection; she has a taste for the definitive and absolute: if she cannot
control the future, she wants to attain the eternal. “I will never give up.
I want everything always. I need to prefer my life in order to accept
it,” writes Marie Lenéru. So echoes Anouilh’s Antigone: “I want
everything, immediately.” This childish imperialism can only be found
in an individual who dreams his destiny: dreams abolish time and
obstacles, they need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small
amount of reality; whoever has authentic projects knows a finitude
that is the gauge of one’s concrete power. The girl wants to receive
everything
because there is
nothing
that depends on her. That is where
her character of
enfant terrible
comes from, faced with adults and man
in particular. She does not accept the limitations an individual’s
insertion in the real world imposes; she defies him to go beyond them.
Thus Hilda expects Solness to give her a kingdom: as she is not the
one who has to conquer it, she wants it without limits; she demands
that he build the highest tower ever built and that he “climb as high as
he builds”: he hesitates to climb, because he is afraid of heights; she
who remains on the ground and looks on denies contingency and
human weakness; she does not accept that reality imposes a limit on
her dreams of grandeur.
14
Adults always seem mean and cautious to
the girl who stops at nothing because she has nothing to lose;
imagining herself taking the boldest risks, she dares them to match her
in reality. Unable to put herself to the test, she invests herself with the
most astonishing qualities without fear of being contradicted.
However, her uncertainty also stems from this lack of control; she
dreams she is infinite; she is nevertheless alienated in the character she
offers for the admiration of others; it depends on these foreign
consciousnesses:
this double she identifies with herself but to whose
presence she passively submits is dangerous for her. This explains
why she is touchy and vain. The slightest criticism or gibe destabilizes
her. Her worth does not derive from her own effort but from a fickle
approbation. This is not defined by individual activities but by general
reputation; it seems to be quantitatively measurable; the price of
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merchandise decreases when it becomes too common: thus the girl is
only rare, exceptional, remarkable, or extraordinary if no other one is.
Her female companions are rivals or enemies; she tries to denigrate, to
deny them; she is jealous and hostile.
It is clear that all the faults for which the adolescent girl is
reproached merely express her situation. It is a painful condition to
know one is passive and dependent at the age of hope and ambition, at
the age when the will to live and to take a place in the world
intensifies; woman learns at this conquering age that no conquest is
allowed her, that she must disavow herself, that her future depends on
men’s good offices. New social and sexual aspirations are awakened,
but they are condemned to remain unsatisfied; all her vital or spiritual
impulses are immediately barred. It is understandable that she should
have trouble establishing her balance. Her erratic mood, her tears, and
her nervous crises are less the result of a physiological fragility than
the sign of her deep maladjustment.
However, this situation that the girl flees by a thousand inauthentic
paths is also one that she sometimes assumes authentically. Her
shortcomings make her irritating: but her unique virtues sometimes
make her astonishing. Both have the same origin. From her rejection
of the world, from her unsettled waiting, and from her nothingness,
she can create a springboard for herself and emerge then in her
solitude and her freedom.
The girl is secretive, tormented, in the throes of difficult conflicts.
This complexity enriches her; her interior life develops more deeply
than her brothers’; she is more attentive to her heart’s desires that thus
become more subtle, more varied; she has more psychological sense
than boys turned toward external goals. She is able to give weight to
these revolts that oppose her to the world. She avoids the traps of
seriousness and conformism. The concerted lies of her circle meet
with her irony and clearsightedness. She tests her situation’s
ambiguity on a daily basis: beyond sterile protest, she can have the
courage to throw into question established optimism, preconceived
values, and hypocritical and reassuring morality. Such is Maggie, the
moving example given in
The Mill on the Floss
, in which George
Eliot embodied the doubts and courageous rebellions of her youth
against Victorian England; the heroes—particularly Tom, Maggie’s
brother—stubbornly affirm conventional wisdom, immobilizing
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morality
in formal rules: Maggie tries to reintroduce a breath of life,
she overturns them, she goes to the limits of her solitude and emerges
as a pure freedom beyond the fossilized male universe.
The adolescent girl barely finds anything but a negative use of this
freedom. But her openness can engender a precious faculty of
receptivity; she will prove to be devoted, attentive, understanding, and
loving. Rosamond Lehmann’s heroines are marked by this docile
generosity. In
Invitation to the Waltz
, Olivia, still shy and gauche, and
barely interested in her appearance, is seen scrutinizing this world she
will enter tomorrow with excited curiosity. She listens with all her
heart to her succession of dancers, she endeavors to answer them
according to their wishes, she is their echo, she vibrates, she accepts
everything that is offered. Judy, the heroine of
Dusty Answer
, has the
same endearing quality. She has not relinquished childhood joys; she
likes to bathe naked at night in the park river; she loves nature, books,
beauty, and life; she does not cultivate a narcissistic cult; without lies,
without egotism, she does not look for an exaltation of self through
men: her love is a gift. She bestows it on any being who seduces her,
man or woman, Jennifer or Roddy. She gives herself without losing
herself: she leads an independent student life; she has her own world,
her own projects. But what distinguishes her from a boy is her
attitude of expectation, her tender docility. In a subtle way, she is, in
spite of everything, destined to the Other: the Other has a marvelous
dimension in her eyes to the point that she is in love with all the
young men of the neighboring family, their house, their sister, and
their universe, all at the same time; it is not as a friend, it is as Other
that Jennifer fascinates her. And she charms Roddy and his cousins
by her capacity to yield to them, to shape herself to their desires; she
is patience, sweetness, acceptance, and silent suffering.
Different but also captivating in the way she welcomes into her
heart those she cherishes, Tessa, in Margaret Kennedy’s
The
Constant Nymph
, is simultaneously spontaneous, wild, and giving.
She refuses to abdicate anything of herself: finery, makeup, disguises,
hypocrisy, acquired charms, caution, and female submission are
repugnant to her; she desires to be loved but not behind a mask; she
yields to Lewis’s moods, but without servility; she understands him,
she vibrates in unison with him; but if they ever argue, Lewis knows
that caresses will not subdue her: while authoritarian and vain
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Florence lets herself be conquered by kisses, Tessa succeeds in the
extraordinary accomplishment of remaining free in her love, allowing
her to love without either hostility or pride. Her nature has all the lures
of artifice; to please, she never degrades herself, never lowers herself
or locks herself in as object. Surrounded by artists who have
committed their whole existence to musical creation, she does not feel
this devouring demon within her; she wholly endeavors to love,
understand, and help them: she does it effortlessly, out of a tender and
spontaneous generosity, which is why she remains perfectly
autonomous even in the instances in which she forgets herself in
favor of others. Thanks to this pure authenticity, she is spared the
conflicts of adolescence; she can suffer from the world’s harshness,
she is not divided within herself; she is harmonious both as a carefree
child and as a very wise woman. The sensitive and generous girl,
receptive and ardent, is very ready to become a great lover.
When not encountering love, she may encounter poetry. Because
she does not act, she watches, she feels, she records; she responds
deeply to a color or a smile; because her destiny is scattered outside
her, in cities already built, on mature men’s faces, she touches and
tastes both passionately and more gratuitously than the young man.
As she is poorly integrated into the human universe, and has trouble
adapting to it, she is, like the child, able to see it; instead of being
interested only in her grasp of things, she focuses on their meaning;
she perceives particular profiles, unexpected metamorphoses. She
rarely feels a creative urge, and all too often she lacks the techniques
that would allow her to express herself; but in conversations, letters,
literary essays, and rough drafts, she does show an original
sensibility. The girl throws herself passionately into things, because
she is not yet mutilated in her transcendence; and the fact that she does
not accomplish anything, that she is nothing, will make her drive even
more fervent: empty and unlimited, what she will seek to reach from
within her nothingness is All. That is why she will devote a special
love to Nature: more than the adolescent boy, she worships it.
Untamed and inhuman, Nature encompasses most obviously the
totality of what is. The adolescent girl has not yet annexed any part of
the universe: thanks to this impoverishment, the whole universe is her
kingdom; when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes
possession of herself. Colette often recounted these youthful orgies:
431

For even then I so loved the dawn that my mother granted it to
me as a reward. She used to agree to wake me at half-past three
and off I would go, an empty basket on each arm, towards the
kitchen-gardens that sheltered in the narrow bend of the river, in
search of strawberries, black-currants, and hairy gooseberries.
At half-past three everything slumbered still in a primal blue,
blurred and dewy, and as I went down the sandy road the mist,
grounded by its own weight, bathed first my legs, then my well-
built little body, reaching at last to my mouth and ears, and
finally to that most sensitive part of all, my nostrils … It was on
that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own
self, experienced an inexpressible state of grace, and felt one
with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun
so newly born that it still looked not quite round … I came back
when the bell rang for the first Mass. But not before I had eaten
my fill, not before I had described a great circle in the woods,
like a dog out hunting on its own, and tasted the water of the two
hidden springs which I worshipped.
15
Mary Webb describes in
The House in Dormer Forest
the intense
joys a girl can know in communion with a familiar landscape:
When the atmosphere of the house became too thunderous and
Amber’s nerves were strained to breaking-point, she crept away
to the upper woods … It seemed to her that while Dormer lived
by law, the forest lived by impulse. Through a gradual
awakening to natural beauty, she reached a perception of beauty
peculiar to herself. She began to perceive analogies. Nature
became for her, not a fortuitous assemblage of pretty things, but
a harmony, a poem solemn and austere … Beauty breathed there,
light shone there that was not of the flower or the star. A tremor,
mysterious and thrilling, seemed to run with the light … through
the whispering forest … So her going out into the green world
had in it something of a religious rite … On a still
morning … she went up to the Birds’ Orchard. She often did
this before the day of petty irritation began … she found some
comfort in the inconsequence of the bird people … she came at
last to the upper wood, and was instantly at grips with beauty.
432

There was for her literally something of wrestling, of the mood
which says: “I will not let thee go until thou bless me”…
Leaning against a wild pear tree, she was aware, by her inward
hearing, of the tidal wave of sap that rose so full and strong that
she could almost imagine it roaring like the sea. Then a tremor of
wind shook the flowering tree-tops, and she awoke again to the
senses, to the strangeness of these utterances of the
leaves … Every petal, every leaf, seemed to be conning some
memory of profundities whence it had come. Every curving
flower seemed full of echoes too majestic for its fragility … A
breath of scented air came from the hilltops and stole among the
branches. That which had form, and knew the mortality which is
in form, trembled before that which passed, formless and
immortal … Because of it the place became no mere
congregation of trees, but a thing fierce as stellar space … For it
possesses itself forever in a vitality withheld, immutable. It was
this that drew Amber with breathless curiosity into the secret
haunts of nature. It was this that struck her now into a kind of
ecstasy …
Women as different as Emily Brontë and Anna de Noailles
experienced similar fervor in their youth—and it continued throughout
their lives.
The texts I have cited convincingly show the comfort the adolescent
girl finds in fields and woods. In the paternal house reign mother,
laws, custom, and routine, and she wants to wrest herself from this
past; she wants to become a sovereign subject in her own turn: but
socially she only accedes to her adult life by becoming woman; she
pays for her liberation with an abdication; but in the midst of plants
and animals she is a human being; a subject, a freedom, she is freed
both from her family and from males. She finds an image of the
solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests and the tangible figure of
transcendence in the vast horizons of the plains; she is herself this
limitless land, this summit jutting toward the sky; she can follow, she
will follow, these roads that leave for an unknown future; sitting on
the hilltop, she dominates the riches of the world spread out at her
feet, given to her; through the water’s palpitations, the shimmering of
the light, she anticipates the joys, tears, and ecstasies that she does not
433

yet know; the adventures of her own heart are confusedly promised
her by ripples on the pond and patches of sun. Smells and colors
speak a mysterious language, but one word stands out with
triumphant clarity: “life.” Existence is not only an abstract destiny
inscribed in town hall registers; it is future and carnal richness.
Having a body no longer seems like a shameful failing; in these
desires that the adolescent girl repudiates under the maternal gaze, she
recognizes the sap mounting in the trees; she is no longer cursed, she
proudly claims her kinship with leaves and flowers; she rumples a
corolla, and she knows that a living prey will fill her empty hands one
day. Flesh is no longer filth: it is joy and beauty. Merged with sky
and heath, the girl is this vague breath that stirs up and kindles the
universe, and she is every sprig of heather; an individual rooted in the
soil and infinite
consciousness, she is both spirit and life; her presence
is imperious and triumphant like that of the earth itself.
Beyond Nature she sometimes seeks an even more remote and
stunning reality; she is willing to lose herself in mystical ecstasies; in
periods of faith many young female souls demanded that God fill the
emptiness of their being; the vocations of Catherine of Siena and
Teresa of Avila were revealed to them at a young age.
16
Joan of Arc
was a girl. In other periods, humanity appears the supreme end; so the
mystical impulse flows into defined projects; but it is also a youthful
desire for the absolute that gave birth to the flame that nourished the
life of Mme Roland or Rosa Luxemburg. From her subjugation, her
impoverishment, and the depths of her refusal, the girl can extract the
most daring courage. She finds poetry; she finds heroism too. One of
the ways of assuming the fact that she is poorly integrated into society
is to go beyond its restricting horizons.
The richness and strength of their nature and fortunate
circumstances have enabled some women to continue in their adult
lives their passionate projects from adolescence. But these are
exceptions. George Eliot had Maggie Tulliver and Margaret Kennedy
had Tessa die for good reason. It was a bitter destiny that the Brontë
sisters had. The girl is touching because she rises up against the
world, weak and alone; but the world is too powerful; she persists in
refusing it, she is broken. Belle de Zuylen, who overwhelmed all of
Europe with her mind’s originality and caustic power, frightened all
her suitors: her refusal to make concessions condemned her to long
434

years of celibacy that weighed on her since she declared that the
expression “virgin and martyr” was a pleonasm. This stubbornness is
rare. In the immense majority of cases, the girl is aware that the fight
is much too unequal, and she ends up yielding. “You will all die at
fifteen,” writes Diderot to Sophie Volland. When the fight has only
been—as happens most often—a symbolic revolt, defeat is certain.
Demanding in dreams, full of hope but passive, the girl makes adults
smile with pity; they doom her to resignation. And in fact, the
rebellious and eccentric girl that we left is found two years later,
calmer, ready to consent to her woman’s life. This is the future Colette
predicted for Vinca; this is how the heroines of Mauriac’s early
novels appear. The adolescent crisis is a type of “work” similar to
what Dr. Lagache calls “the work of mourning.” The girl buries her
childhood slowly—this autonomous and imperious individual she has
been—and she enters adult existence submissively.
Of course, it is not possible to establish defined categories based on
age alone. Some women remain infantile their whole lives; the
behaviors we have described are sometimes perpetuated to an
advanced age. Nevertheless, on the whole, there is a big difference
between the girlish fifteen-year-old and an older girl. The latter is
adapted to reality; she scarcely advances on the imaginary level; she is
less divided within herself than before. At about eighteen, Marie
Bashkirtseff writes:
The more I advance in age towards the end of my youth, the
more I am covered with indifference. Little agitates me and
everything used to agitate me.
Irène Reweliotty comments:
To be accepted by men, you have to think and act like them; if
you don’t, they treat you like a black sheep, and solitude
becomes your lot. And I, now, I’m fed up with solitude, and I
want people not only around me but with me … Living now and
no longer existing and waiting and dreaming and telling yourself
everything within yourself, your mouth shut and your body
motionless.
435

And further along:
With so much flattery, wooing, and such, I become terribly
ambitious. This is no longer the trembling, marvelous happiness
of the fifteen-year-old. It is a kind of cold and hard intoxication
to take my revenge on life, to climb. I flirt; I play at loving. I do
not love … I gain in intelligence, in sangfroid, in ordinary
lucidity. I lose my heart. It was as if it cracked … In two months,
I left childhood behind.
Approximately the same sound comes from these secrets of a
nineteen-year-old girl:
In the old days Oh! What a conflict against a mentality that
seemed incompatible with this century and the appeals of this
century itself! I now have a peaceful feeling. Each new big idea
that enters me, instead of provoking a painful upheaval, a
destruction, and an incessant reconstruction, adapts marvelously
to what is already in
me … Now I go seamlessly from theoretical
thinking to daily life without attempting continuity.
17
The girl—unless she is particularly graceless—accepts her
femininity in the end; and she is often happy to enjoy gratuitously the
pleasures and triumphs she gets from settling definitively into her
destiny; as she is not yet bound to any duty, irresponsible, available,
for her the present seems neither empty nor disappointing since it is
just one step; dressing and flirting still have the lightness of a game,
and her dreams of the future disguise their futility. This is how
Virginia Woolf describes the impressions of a young coquette during
a party:
I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk
legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on
my throat … I am arrayed, I am prepared … My hair is swept in
one curve. My lips are precisely red. I am ready now to join men
and women on the stairs, my peers. I pass them, exposed to their
gaze, as they are to mine … I now begin to unfurl, in this scent,
in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl … I feel a
436

thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid,
melancholy by turns; I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing
that way, I say to this one, “Come”… He approaches. He makes
towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever
known. I flutter. I ripple … Are we not lovely sitting together
here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers may look at
me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one
of you. This is my world … The door opens. The door goes on
opening. Now I think, next time it opens the whole of my life
will be changed … The door opens. Come, I say to this one,
rippling gold from head to heels. “Come,” and he comes towards
me.
18
But the more the girl matures, the more maternal authority weighs
on her. If she leads a housekeeper’s life at home, she suffers from
being only an assistant; she would like to devote her work to her own
home, to her own children. Often the rivalry with her mother
worsens: in particular, the older daughter is irritated if younger
brothers and sisters are born; she
feels her mother “has done her
time,” and it is up to her now to bear children, to reign. If she works
outside the house, she suffers when she returns home from still being
treated as a simple member of the family and not as an autonomous
individual.
Less romantic than before, she begins to think much more of
marriage than love. She no longer embellishes her future spouse with
a prestigious halo: what she wishes for is to have a stable position in
this world and to begin to lead her life as a woman. This is how
Virginia Woolf describes the imaginings of a rich country girl:
For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum round the
hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar
tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has
formed in me I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have
maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring
the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and
the onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue
apron locking up the cupboards.
437

A similar dream dwells in poor Prue Sarn:
It seemed such a terrible thing never to marry. All girls got
married … And when girls got married, they had a cottage, and a
lamp, maybe, to light when their man came home, or if it was
only candles it was all one, for they could put them in the
window, and he’d think “There’s my missus now, lit the
candles!” And then one day Mrs. Beguildy would be making a
cot of rushes for ’em, and one day there’d be a babe in it, grand
and solemn, and bidding letters sent round for the christening,
and the neighbours coming round the babe’s mother like bees
round the queen. Often when things went wrong, I’d say to
myself, “Ne’er mind, Prue Sarn! There’ll come a day when
you’ll be queen in your own skep.”
19
For most older girls, whether they have a laborious or frivolous
life, whether they be confined to the paternal household or partially
get away from it, the conquest of a husband—or at the least a serious
lover—turns into a more and more pressing enterprise. This concern
is often harmful for feminine friendships. The “best friend” loses her
privileged place. The
girl sees rivals more than partners in her
companions. I knew one such girl, intelligent and talented but who
had chosen to think herself a “faraway princess”: this is how she
described herself in poems and literary essays; she sincerely admitted
she did not remain attached to her childhood friends: if they were ugly
and stupid, she did not like them; if seductive, she feared them. The
impatient wait for a man, often involving maneuvers, ruses, and
humiliations, blocks the girl’s horizon; she becomes egotistical and
hard. And if Prince Charming takes his time appearing, disgust and
bitterness set in.
The girl’s character and behavior express her situation: if it
changes, the adolescent girl’s attitude also changes. Today, it is
becoming possible for her to take her future in her hands, instead of
putting it in those of the man. If she is absorbed by studies, sports, a
professional training, or a social and political activity, she frees herself
from the male obsession; she is less preoccupied by love and sexual
conflicts. However, she has a harder time than the young man in
accomplishing herself as an autonomous individual. I have said that
438

neither her family nor customs assist her attempts. Besides, even if
she chooses independence, she still makes a place in her life for the
man, for love. She will often be afraid of missing her destiny as a
woman if she gives herself over entirely to any undertaking. She does
not admit this feeling to herself: but it is there, it distorts all her best
efforts, it sets up limits. In any case, the woman who works wants to
reconcile her success with purely feminine successes; that not only
requires devoting considerable time to her appearance and beauty but
also, what is more serious, implies that her vital interests are divided.
Outside of his regular studies, the male student amuses himself by
freely exercising his mind, and from there emerge his best
discoveries; the woman’s daydreams are oriented in a different
direction: she will think of her physical appearance, of man, of love,
she will give the bare minimum to her studies to her career, whereas
in these areas nothing is as necessary as the superfluous. It is not a
question of mental weakness, of a lack of concentration, but of a split
in her interests that do not coincide well. A vicious circle is knotted
here: people are often surprised to see how easily a woman gives up
music, studies, or a job as soon as she has found a husband; this is
because she had committed too little of herself to her projects to derive
benefit from their accomplishment. Everything converges to hold back
her personal ambition while enormous social pressure encourages her
to find a social position and justification in marriage. It is natural that
she should not seek to create her place in this world by and for herself
or that she should seek it timidly. As long as perfect economic
equality is not realized in society and as long as customs
allow the
woman to profit as wife and mistress from the privileges held by
certain men, the dream of passive success will be maintained in her
and will hold back her own accomplishments.
However the girl approaches her existence as an adult, her
apprenticeship is not yet over. By small increments or bluntly, she has
to undergo her sexual initiation. There are girls who refuse. If
sexually difficult incidents marked their childhood, if an awkward
upbringing has gradually rooted a horror of sexuality in them, they
carry over their adolescent repugnance of men. There are also
circumstances that cause some women to have an extended virginity
in spite of themselves. But in most cases, the girl accomplishes her
sexual destiny at a more or less advanced age. How she braves it is
439

obviously closely linked to her whole past. But this is also a novel
experience that presents itself in unforeseen circumstances and to
which she freely reacts. This is the new stage we must now consider.
1.
Cited by Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
*

I Am the Most Interesting Book of All
.—T
RANS
.
2.
Cited by Debesse,
La crise d’originalité juvénile
(The Adolescent Identity Crisis).
3.
Cited by Marguerite Evard,
L’adolescente
(The Adolescent Girl).
4.
From Borel and Robin,
Les reveries morbides
. Cited by Minkowski in
La
schizophrénie
. [Borel and Robin wrote
Les rêveurs éveillés
(Daydreamers). Minkowski
wrote an article, “De la rêverie morbide au délire d’influence” (“From Morbid Reverie
to Delusions of Grandeur”).
—TRANS.]
*
A reference to the 1931 German film
Mädchen in Uniform
.—T
RANS
.
5.
Cited by Mendousse,
L’âme de l’adolescente
(The Adolescent Girl’s Soul).
6.
Cited by Marguerite Evard,
The Adolescent Girl
.
7.
Ibid.
8.

A l’heure des mains jointes (At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand
). [“Psappha revit,”
trans. Gillian Spraggs.—T
RANS
.]
9.

Sillages
(Sea Wakes). [“Pareilles,” trans. Gillian Spraggs.—T
RANS
.]
10.
See
Chapter 4
of this volume.
11.

Psychology of Women
.
12.

The Black Sail
.
13.

Frigidity in Woman
.
14.
See Ibsen,
The Master Builder
.
15.

Sido
.
16.
We will return to the specific characteristics of the feminine mystic.
17.
Cited by Debesse in
Adolescent Identity Crisis
.
18.

The Waves
.
19.
Mary Webb,
Precious Bane
.
440

|
CHAPTER 3
|
Sexual Initiation
In a sense, woman’s sexual initiation, like man’s, begins in infancy.
There is a theoretical and practical initiation period that follows
continuously from the oral, anal, and genital phases up to adulthood.
But the young girl’s erotic experiences are not a simple extension of
her previous sexual activities; they are very often unexpected and
brutal; they always constitute a new occurrence that creates a rupture
with the past. While she is going through them, all the problems the
young girl faces are concentrated in an urgent and acute form. In some
cases, the crisis is easily resolved; there are tragic situations where the
crisis can only be resolved through suicide or madness. In any case,
the way woman reacts to the experiences strongly affects her destiny.
All psychiatrists agree on the extreme importance her erotic
beginnings have for her: their repercussions will be felt for the rest of
her life.
The situation is profoundly different here for man and woman from
the biological, social, and psychological points of view. For man, the
passage from childhood sexuality to maturity is relatively simple:
erotic pleasure is objectified; now, instead of being realized in his
immanent presence, this erotic pleasure is intended for a transcendent
being. The erection is the expression of this need; with penis, hands,
mouth, with his whole body, the man reaches out to his partner, but
he remains at the heart of this activity, as the subject generally does
before the objects he perceives and the instruments he manipulates; he
projects himself toward the other without losing his autonomy;
feminine flesh is a prey for him, and he seizes in woman the attributes
his sensuality requires of any object; of course he does not succeed in
appropriating them: at least he holds them; the embrace and the kiss
imply a partial failure: but this very failure is a stimulant and a joy.
The act of love finds its unity in its natural culmination: orgasm.
Coitus has a specific physiological aim; in ejaculation the male
441

releases burdensome secretions; after orgasm, the male feels complete
relief regularly accompanied
by pleasure. And, of course, pleasure is
not the only aim; it is often followed by disappointment: the need has
disappeared rather than having been satisfied. In any case, a definite
act is consummated, and the man’s body remains intact: the service he
has rendered to the species becomes one with his own pleasure.
Woman’s eroticism is far more complex and reflects the complexity of
her situation. It has been seen that instead of integrating forces of the
species into her individual life, the female is prey to the species,
whose interests diverge from her own ends;
1
this antinomy reaches its
height in woman; one of its manifestations is the opposition of two
organs: the clitoris and the vagina. At the infant stage, the former is
the center of feminine eroticism: some psychiatrists uphold the
existence of vaginal sensitivity in little girls, but this is a very
inaccurate opinion; at any rate, it would have only secondary
importance. The clitoral system does not change with adulthood,
2
and
woman preserves this erotic autonomy her whole life; like the male
orgasm, the clitoral spasm is a kind of detumescence that occurs
quasi-mechanically; but it is only indirectly linked to normal coitus, it
plays no role whatsoever in procreation. The woman is penetrated and
impregnated through the vagina; it becomes an erotic center uniquely
through the intervention of the male, and this always constitutes a
kind of rape. In the past, a woman was snatched from her childhood
universe and thrown into her life as a wife by a real or simulated rape;
this was an act of violence that changed the girl into a woman: it is
also referred to as “ravishing” a girl’s virginity or “taking” her flower.
This deflowering is not the harmonious outcome of a continuous
development; it is an abrupt rupture with the past, the beginning of a
new cycle. Pleasure is then reached by contractions of the inside
surface of the vagina; do these contractions result in a precise and
definitive orgasm? This point is still being debated. The anatomical
data are vague. “There is a great deal of anatomic and clinical evidence
that most of the interior of the vagina is without nerves,” states,
among other things, the Kinsey Report. “A considerable amount of
surgery may be performed inside the vagina without need for
anesthetics. Nerves have been demonstrated inside the vagina only in
an area in the anterior wall, proximate to the base of the clitoris.”
However, in addition to the stimulation of this innervated zone, “the
442

female may be conscious of the intrusion of an object into the vagina,
particularly if vaginal muscles are tightened; but the satisfaction so
obtained is probably related more to muscle tonus than it is to erotic
nerve
stimulation.”
*
Yet it is beyond doubt that vaginal pleasure exists; and even vaginal
masturbation—for adult women—seems to be more widespread than
Kinsey says.
3
But what is certain is that the vaginal reaction is very
complex and can be qualified as psychophysiological because it not
only concerns the entire nervous system but also depends on the
whole situation lived by the subject: it requires profound consent of
the individual as a whole; to establish itself, the new erotic cycle
launched by the first coitus demands a kind of “preparation” of the
nervous system, the elaboration of a totally new form that has to
include the clitoral system as well; it takes a long time to be put in
place, and sometimes it never succeeds in being created. It is striking
that woman has the choice between two cycles, one of which
perpetuates youthful independence, while the other destines her to
man and children. The normal sexual act effectively makes woman
dependent on the male and the species. It is he—as for most animals
—who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace.
Ordinarily, she can be taken at any time by man, while he can take her
only when he is in the state of erection; feminine refusal can be
overcome except in the case of a rejection as profound as vaginismus,
sealing woman more securely than the hymen; still vaginismus leaves
the male means to relieve himself on a body that his muscular force
permits him to reduce to his mercy. Since she is object, her inertia
does not profoundly alter her natural role: to the extent that many men
are not interested in whether the woman who shares their bed wants
coitus or only submits to it. One can even go to bed with a dead
woman. Coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male
satisfaction is its natural end result. Fertilization can occur without the
woman deriving any pleasure. On the other hand, fertilization is far
from representing the completion of the sexual process for her; by
contrast, it is at this
moment that the service demanded of her by the
species begins: it takes place slowly and painfully in pregnancy, birth,
and breast-feeding.
Man’s “anatomical destiny” is profoundly different from woman’s.
Their moral and social situations are no less different. Patriarchal
443

civilization condemned woman to chastity; the right of man to relieve
his sexual desires is more or less openly recognized, whereas woman
is confined within marriage: for her the act of the flesh, if not
sanctified by the code, by a sacrament, is a fault, a fall, a defeat, a
weakness; she is obliged to defend her virtue, her honor; if she “gives
in” or if she “falls,” she arouses disdain, whereas even the blame
inflicted on her vanquisher brings him admiration. From primitive
civilizations to our times, the bed has always been accepted as a
“service” for a woman for which the male thanks her with gifts or
guarantees her keep: but to serve is to give herself up to a master;
there is no reciprocity at all in this relationship. The marriage
structure, like the existence of prostitutes, proves it: the woman
gives
herself;
the man remunerates her and takes her. Nothing forbids the
male to act the master, to take inferior creatures: ancillary loves have
always been tolerated, whereas the bourgeois woman who gives
herself to a chauffeur or a gardener is socially degraded. Fiercely
racist American men in the South have always been permitted by
custom to sleep with black women, before the Civil War as today, and
they exploit this right with a lordly arrogance; a white woman who
had relations with a black man in the time of slavery would have been
put to death, and today she would be lynched. To say he slept with a
woman, a man says he “possessed” her, that he “had” her; on the
contrary, “to have” someone is sometimes vulgarly expressed as “to
fuck someone”; the Greeks called a woman who did not have sexual
relations with the male
Parthenos adamatos
, an untaken virgin; the
Romans called Messalina
invicta
because none of her lovers gave her
satisfaction. So for the male lover, the love act is conquest and
victory. While, in another man, the erection often seems like a
ridiculous parody of voluntary action, each one nonetheless considers
it in his own case with a certain pride. Males’ erotic vocabulary is
inspired by military vocabulary: the lover has the ardor of a soldier,
his sexual organ stiffens like a bow, when he ejaculates, he
“discharges,” it is a machine gun, a cannon; he speaks of attack,
assault, of victory. In his arousal there is a certain flavor of the heroic.
“The generative act, consisting of the occupation of one being by
another,” writes Benda, “imposes, on the one hand, the idea of a
conqueror, on the other of something conquered. Thus when they
refer to their most civilized love relationships, they talk of conquest,
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attack, assault, siege and defense, defeat, and capitulation, clearly
copying the idea of love from that of war. This act, involving
the
pollution of one being by another, imposes a certain pride on the
polluter and some humiliation on the polluted, even when she is
consenting.”
4
This last phrase introduces a new myth: that man
inflicts a stain on woman. In fact, sperm is not excrement; one speaks
of “nocturnal pollution” because the sperm does not serve its natural
purpose; while coffee can stain a light-colored dress, it is not said to
be waste that defiles the stomach. Other men maintain, by contrast,
that woman is impure because it is she who is “soiled by discharges”
and that she pollutes the male. In any case, being the one who pollutes
confers a dubious superiority. In fact, man’s privileged situation
comes from the integration of his biologically aggressive role into his
social function of chief and master; it is through this function that
physiological differences take on all their full meaning. Because man
is sovereign in this world, he claims the violence of his desires as a
sign of his sovereignty; it is said of a man endowed with great erotic
capacities that he is strong and powerful: epithets that describe him as
an activity and a transcendence; on the contrary, woman being only an
object is considered
hot
or
cold;
that is, she will never manifest any
qualities other than passive ones.
So the climate in which feminine sexuality awakens is nothing like
the one surrounding the adolescent boy. Besides, when woman faces
the male for the first time, her erotic attitude is very complex. It is not
true, as has been held at times, that the virgin does not know desire
and that the male awakens her sensuality; this legend once again
betrays the male’s taste for domination, never wanting his companion
to be autonomous, even in the desire that she has for him; in fact, for
man as well, desire is often aroused through contact with woman,
and, on the contrary, most young girls feverishly long for caresses
before a hand ever touches them. Isadora Duncan in
My Life
says,
My hips, which had been like a boy’s, took on another
undulation, and through my whole being I felt one great surging,
longing, unmistakable urge, so that I could no longer sleep at
night, but tossed and turned in feverish, painful unrest.
In a long confession of her life to Stekel, a young woman recounts:
445

I began vigorously to flirt. I had to have “my nerves tickler
(sic).” I was a passionate dancer, and while dancing I always
shut my eyes
the better to enjoy it … During dancing, I was
somewhat exhibitionistic; my sensuality seemed to overcome my
feeling of shame. During the first year, I danced with avidity and
great enjoyment. I slept many hours, masturbated daily, often
keeping it up for an hour … I masturbated often until I was
covered with sweat, too fatigued to continue, I fell asleep … I
was burning and I would have taken anyone who would relieve
me. I wasn’t looking for a person, just a man.
5
The issue here is rather that virginal agitation is not expressed as a
precise need: the virgin does not know exactly what she wants.
Aggressive childhood eroticism still survives in her; her first impulses
were prehensile, and she still has the desire to embrace, to possess;
she wants the prey that she covets to be endowed with the qualities
which through taste, smell, and touch have been shown to her as
values; for sexuality is not an isolated domain, it extends the dreams
and joys of sensuality; children and adolescents of both sexes like
what is smooth, creamy, satiny, soft, elastic: that which yields to
pressure without collapsing or decomposing and slips under the gaze
or the fingers; like man, woman is charmed by the warm softness of
sand dunes, so often compared to breasts, or the light touch of silk, of
the fluffy softness of an eiderdown, the velvet feeling of a flower or
fruit; and the young girl especially cherishes the pale colors of pastels,
froths of tulle and muslin. She has no taste for rough fabrics, gravel,
rocks, bitter flavors, acrid odors; like her brothers, it was her mother’s
flesh that she first caressed and cherished; in her narcissism, in her
diffuse or precise homosexual experiences, she posited herself as a
subject and she sought the possession of a female body. When she
faces the male, she has, in the palms of her hands and on her lips, the
desire to actively caress a prey. But man, with his hard muscles, his
scratchy and often hairy skin, his crude odor, and his coarse features,
does not seem desirable to her, and he even stirs her repulsion. Renée
Vivien expresses it this way:
I am a woman, I have no right to beauty
They have condemned me to the ugliness of men …
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They have forbidden me your hair, your eyes
Because your hair is long and scented with odors
*
If the prehensile, possessive tendency exists in woman more
strongly, her orientation, like that of Renée Vivien, will be toward
homosexuality. Or she will become attached only to males she can
treat like women: thus the heroine of Rachilde’s
Monsieur V’nus
buys
herself a young lover whom she enjoys caressing passionately, but
will not let herself be deflowered by him. There are women who love
to caress young boys of thirteen or fourteen years old or even
children, and who reject grown men. But we have seen that passive
sexuality has also been developed since childhood in the majority of
women: the woman loves to be hugged and caressed, and especially
from puberty she wishes to be flesh in the arms of a man; the role of
subject is normally his; she knows it; “A man does not need to be
handsome,” she has been told over and over; she should not look for
the inert qualities of an object in him but for strength and virile force.
She thus becomes divided within herself: she wants a strong embrace
that will turn her into a trembling thing; but brutality and force are also
hostile obstacles that wound her. Her sensuality is located both in her
skin and in her hand: and their exigencies are in opposition to each
other. Whenever possible, she chooses a compromise; she gives
herself to a man who is virile but young and seductive enough to be
an object of desire; she will be able to find all the traits she desires in a
handsome adolescent; in the Song of Songs, there is a symmetry
between the delights of the wife and those of the husband; she grasps
in him what he seeks in her: earthly fauna and flora, precious stones,
streams, stars. But she does not have the means to
take
these
treasures; her anatomy condemns her to remaining awkward and
impotent, like a eunuch: the desire for possession is thwarted for lack
of an organ to incarnate it. And man refuses the passive role. Often,
besides, circumstances lead the young girl to become the prey of a
male whose caresses move her, but whom she has no pleasure to look
at or caress in return. Not enough has been said not only about the
fear of masculine aggressiveness but also about a deep feeling of
frustration at the disgust that is mixed with her desires: sexual
satisfaction must be achieved against the spontaneous thrust of her
sensuality, while for the man the joy of touching and seeing merges
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with the sexual experience as such.
Even the elements of passive eroticism are ambiguous. Nothing is
murkier than
contact
. Many men who triturate all sorts of material in
their hands without disgust hate it when grass or animals touch them;
women’s flesh can tremble pleasantly or bristle at the touch of silk or
velvet: I recall a childhood friend who had gooseflesh simply at the
sight of a peach; the transition is easy from agitation to titillation, from
irritation to pleasure; arms enlacing a body can be a refuge and
protection, but they also imprison
and suffocate. For the virgin, this
ambiguity is perpetuated because of her paradoxical situation: the
organ that will bring about her metamorphosis is sealed. Her flesh’s
uncertain and burning longing spreads through her whole body except
in the very place where coitus should occur. No organ permits the
virgin to satisfy her active eroticism; and she does not have the lived
experience of he who dooms her to passivity.
However, this passivity is not pure inertia. For the woman to be
aroused, positive phenomena must be produced in her organism:
stimulation in erogenous zones, swelling of certain erectile tissue,
secretions, temperature rise, pulse, and breathing acceleration. Desire
and sexual pleasure demand a vital expenditure for her as for the male;
receptive, the female need is in one sense active and is manifested in
an increase of nervous and muscular energy. Apathetic and languid
women are always cold; there is a question as to whether
constitutional frigidity exists, and surely psychic factors play a
preponderant role in the erotic capacities of woman; but it is certain
that physiological insufficiencies and a depleted vitality are manifested
in part by sexual indifference. If, on the other hand, vital energy is
spent in voluntary activities—sports, for example—it is not invested
in sex. Scandinavians are healthy, strong, and cold. “Fiery” women
are those who combine their languor with “fire,” like Italian or
Spanish women, that is to say, women whose ardent vitality flows
from their flesh. To
make
oneself object, to
make
oneself passive, is
very different from
being
a passive object: a woman in love is neither
asleep nor a corpse; there is a surge in her that ceaselessly falls and
rises: it is this surge that creates the spell that perpetuates desire. But
the balance between ardor and abandon is easy to destroy. Male desire
is tension; it can invade a body where nerves and muscles are taut:
positions and movements that demand a voluntary participation of the
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organism do not work against it, and instead often serve it. On the
contrary, every voluntary effort keeps female flesh from being
“taken”; this is why the woman spontaneously refuses forms of coitus
that demand work and tension from her;
6
too many and too abrupt
changes in position, the demands of consciously directed activities—
actions or words—break the spell. The violence of uncontrolled
tendencies can bring about tightening, contraction, or tension: some
women scratch or bite, their bodies arching, infused with an
unaccustomed force; but these phenomena are only produced when a
certain paroxysm is attained, and it is attained only if first the absence
of all inhibition—physical as well as moral—permits a
concentration
of all living energy into the sexual act. This means that it is not
enough for the young girl to
let it happen;
if she is docile, languid, or
removed, she satisfies neither her partner nor herself. She must
participate actively in an adventure that neither her virgin body nor her
consciousness—laden with taboos, prohibitions, prejudices, and
exigencies—desires positively.
In the conditions just described, it is understandable that woman’s
erotic beginnings are not easy. Quite frequently, incidents that occur
in childhood and youth provoke deep resistance in her, as has been
seen; sometimes it is insurmountable; most often, the young girl tries
to overcome it, but violent conflicts build up in her. Her strict
education, the fear of sinning, and feelings of guilt toward her mother
all create powerful blocks. Virginity is valued so highly in many
circles that to lose it outside marriage seems a veritable disaster. The
young girl who surrenders by coercion or by surprise thinks she
dishonors herself. The “wedding night,” which delivers the virgin to a
man whom she has ordinarily not even chosen, and which attempts to
condense into a few hours—or instants—the entire sexual initiation, is
not a simple experience. In general, any “passage” is distressing
because of its definitive and irreversible character: becoming a woman
is breaking with the past, without recourse; but this particular passage
is more dramatic than any other; it creates not only a hiatus between
yesterday and tomorrow; it tears the young girl from the imaginary
world where a great part of her existence took place and hurls her into
the real world. By analogy with a bullfight, Michel Leiris calls the
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nuptial bed “a moment of truth”; for the virgin, this expression takes
on its fullest and most fearsome meaning. During the engagement,
dating, or courtship period, however basic it may have been, she
continued to live in her familiar universe of ceremony and dreams; the
suitor spoke a romantic, or at least courteous, language; it was still
possible to make believe. And suddenly there she is, gazed upon by
real eyes, handled by real hands: it is the implacable reality of this
gazing and grasping that terrifies her.
Both anatomy and customs confer the role of initiator on the man.
Without doubt, for the young male virgin, his first mistress also
provides his initiation; but he possesses an erotic autonomy clearly
manifested in the erection; his mistress only delivers to him the object
in its reality that he already desires: a woman’s body. The young girl
needs a man to make her discover her own body: her dependence is
much greater. From his very first experiences, man is ordinarily active
and decisive, whether he pays his partner or courts and solicits her.
By contrast, in most cases, the young girl
is
courted and solicited;
even if it is she who first flirts with the man, he is the one who takes
their relationship in hand; he is often older and more experienced, and
it is accepted that he has the responsibility for this adventure that is
new for her; his desire is more aggressive and imperious. Lover or
husband, he is the one who leads her to the bed, where her only
choice is to let go of herself and obey. Even if she had accepted this
authority in her mind, she is panic-stricken the moment she must
concretely submit to it. She first of all fears this gaze that engulfs her.
Her modesty may have been taught her, but it has deep roots; men and
women all know the shame of their flesh; in its pure, immobile
presence, its unjustified immanence, the flesh exists in the gaze of
another as the absurd contingence of facticity, and yet flesh is
oneself:
we want to prevent it from existing for others; we want to deny it.
There are men who say they cannot stand to be naked in front of a
woman, except in the state of erection; through the erection, the flesh
becomes activity, force, the penis is no longer an inert object but, like
the hand or the face, the imperious expression of a subjectivity. This
is one reason why modesty paralyzes young men much less than
young women; their aggressive role exposes them less to being gazed
at; and if they are, they do not fear being judged, because it is not inert
qualities that their mistresses demand of them: it is rather their
450

amorous potency and their skill at giving pleasure that will give rise to
complexes; at least they can defend themselves and try to win their
match. Woman does not have the option of transforming her flesh into
will: when she stops hiding it, she gives it up without defenses; even
if she longs for caresses, she recoils from the idea of being seen and
felt; all the more so as her breasts and buttocks are particularly fleshy;
many adult women cannot bear to be seen from the rear even when
they are dressed; imagine the resistance a naive girl in love has to
overcome to consent to showing herself. A Phryne undoubtedly does
not fear being gazed at; she bares herself, on the contrary, superbly.
Her beauty clothes her. But even if she is the equal of Phryne, a
young girl never feels it with certainty; she cannot have arrogant pride
in her body as long as male approval has not confirmed her young
vanity. And this is just what frightens her; the lover is even more
terrifying than a gaze: he is a judge; he is going to reveal her to herself
in her truth; even passionately taken with her own image, every young
girl doubts herself at the moment of the masculine verdict; this is why
she demands darkness, she hides in the sheets; when she admired
herself in the mirror, she was only dreaming: she was dreaming
through man’s eyes; now the eyes are really there; impossible to
cheat; impossible to fight: a mysterious freedom decides, and this
decision is final. In the real ordeal of the erotic experience, the
obsessions of childhood and
adolescence will finally fade or be
confirmed forever; many young girls suffer from muscular calves,
breasts that are too little or too big, narrow hips, a wart; or else they
fear some secret malformation. Stekel writes:
Every young girl carries in her all sorts of ridiculous fears that
she barely dares to admit to herself. One would not believe how
many young girls suffer from the obsession of being physically
abnormal and torment themselves secretly because they cannot
be sure of being normally constructed. One young girl, for
example, believed that her “lower opening” was not in the right
place. She thought that sexual intercourse took place through the
navel. She was unhappy because her navel was closed and she
could not stick her finger in it. Another thought she was a
hermaphrodite. And another thought she was crippled and would
never be able to have sexual relations.
7
451

Even if they are unfamiliar with these obsessions, they are terrified
by the idea that certain regions of their bodies that did not exist for
them or for anyone, that absolutely did not exist, will suddenly be
seen. Will this unknown figure that the young girl must assume as her
own provoke disgust? Indifference? Irony? She can only submit to
male judgment: the die is cast. This is why man’s attitude will have
such deep resonance. His ardor and tenderness can give woman a
confidence in herself that will stand up to every rejection: until she is
eighty years old, she will believe she is this flower, this exotic bird
that made man’s desire bloom one night. On the contrary, if the lover
or husband is clumsy, he will arouse an inferiority complex in her that
is sometimes compounded by long-lasting neuroses; and she will hold
a grudge that will be expressed in a stubborn frigidity. Stekel
describes striking examples:
A woman of 36 years of age suffers from such back pain across
“the small of her back” for the past 14 years. These pains are so
unbearable that she is forced to stay in bed for weeks … she felt
the great pains for the first time during her wedding night. On
that occasion, during the defloration, which caused her
considerable pain, her husband exclaimed: “You have deceived
me! You are not a virgin!” Her pains in the back represent the
fixation of this painful episode. Her illness is her vengeance on
the man. The various cures have cost
him considerable money
for her innumerable treatments … This woman was anaesthetic
during her wedding night and she remained in this condition
throughout her marital experience … The wedding night was for
her a terrible mental shock that has influenced her whole life.
A woman consults me for various nervous troubles and
particularly on account of her complete sexual
frigidity … During her wedding night, her husband, after
uncovering her, exclaimed: “Oh, how stubby and thick your
limbs are!” Then he tried to carry out intercourse. She felt only
pain and remained wholly frigid … She knows very well that the
slightest remark he made about her during the wedding night
was responsible for her sexual frigidity.
Another frigid woman says that “during her wedding night,
her husband deeply insulted her” seeing her get undressed, he
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allegedly said: “My God, how thin you are!” Then he
nevertheless decided to caress her. For her this moment was
unforgettable and horrible. What brutality!
Mrs. Z.W. is also completely frigid. The great traumatism of
her wedding night was that her husband supposedly said after
the first intercourse: “You have a big hole, you tricked me.”
The gaze is danger; hands are another threat. Woman does not
usually have access to the universe of violence; she has never gone
through the ordeal the young man overcame in childhood and
adolescent fights: to be a thing of flesh on which others have a hold;
and now that she is grasped, she is swept away in a body-to-body
clasp where man is the stronger; she is no longer free to dream, to
withdraw, to maneuver: she is given over to the male; he disposes of
her. These wrestling-like embraces terrorize her, she who has never
wrestled. She had let herself go to the caresses of a fiancé, a fellow
student, a colleague, a civilized and courteous man: but he has
assumed an unfamiliar, selfish, and stubborn attitude; she no longer
has recourse against this stranger. It is not uncommon that the young
girl’s first experience is a real rape and that man’s behavior is
odiously brutal; particularly in the countryside, where customs are
harsh, it often happens that a young peasant woman, half-consenting,
half-outraged, in shame and fright, loses her virginity at the bottom of
some ditch. What is in any case extremely frequent in all societies and
classes is that the virgin is rushed by an egotistical lover seeking his
own pleasure quickly, or by a husband convinced of his conjugal
rights who takes his wife’s resistance as an insult, to the point of
becoming furious if the defloration is difficult.
In any case, however deferential and courteous a man might be, the
first penetration is always a rape. While she desires caresses on her
lips and breasts and perhaps yearns for a familiar or anticipated
orgasm, here is a male sex organ tearing the young girl and
introducing itself into regions where it was not invited. The painful
surprise of a swooning virgin—who thinks she has finally reached
the accomplishment of her voluptuous dreams and who feels in the
secret of her sex an unexpected pain—in a husband’s or lover’s arms
has often been described; the dreams faint away, the excitement
dissipates, and love takes on the appearance of a surgical operation.
453

In the confessions gathered by Dr. Liepmann, there is the following
and typical account. It concerns a very sexually unaware girl from a
modest background:
“I often imagined that one could have a child just by the
exchange of a kiss. During my eighteenth year, I made the
acquaintance of a man with whom I really fell madly in love.”
She often went out with him, and during their conversations he
explained to her that when a young girl loves a man, she must
give herself to him because men cannot live without sexual
relations and that as long as they cannot afford to get married,
they have to have relations with young girls. She resisted. One
day, he organized an excursion so that they could spend the night
together. She wrote him a letter to repeat that “it would harm her
too much.” The morning of the arranged day, she gave him the
letter, but he put it in his pocket without reading it and took her
to the hotel; he dominated her morally, she loved him, she
followed him. “I was as if hypnotized. As we were going along,
I begged him to spare me … How I arrived at the hotel, I do not
know at all. The only memory that remained is that my whole
body trembled violently. My companion tried to calm me; but he
succeeded only after much resistance. I was no longer mistress
of my will, and in spite of myself I let myself go. When I found
myself later in the street, it seemed to me that everything had
only been a dream I had just awakened from.” She refused to
repeat the experience and for nine years did not have sexual
relations with any other man. She then met one who asked her to
marry him and she agreed.
8
In this case, the defloration was a kind of rape. But even if it is
consensual, it can be painful. Look at the fevers that tormented young
Isadora Duncan. She met an admirably handsome actor with whom
she fell in love at first sight and who courted her ardently:
I myself felt ill and dizzy, while an irresistible longing to press
him closer and closer surged in me, until, losing all control and
falling into a fury, he carried me into the room. Frightened but
ecstatic, the realisation was made clear to me. I confess my first
454

impressions were a horrible fright, but a great pity for what he
seemed to be suffering prevented me from running away from
what was at first sheer torture… [The next day], what had been
for me only a painful experience began again amid my martyr’s
sobs and cries.
9
She was soon to know the paradise she lyrically described, first with
this lover and then with others.
However, in actual experience, as previously in one’s virginal
imagination, it is not pain that plays the greatest role: the fact of
penetration counts far more. In intercourse the man introduces only an
exterior organ: woman is affected in her deepest interior.
Undoubtedly, there are many young men who tread with anguish in
the secret darkness of woman; their childhood terrors resurface at the
threshold of caves and graves, and so does their fright in front of
jaws, scythes, and wolf traps: they imagine that their swollen penis
will be caught in the mucous sheath; the woman, once penetrated,
does not have this feeling of danger; but she does feel carnally
alienated. The property owner affirms his rights over his lands, the
housewife over her house by proclaiming “no trespassing”; because
of their frustrated transcendence, women, in particular, jealously
defend their privacy: their room, their wardrobe, and their chests are
sacred. Colette tells of an old prostitute who told her one day: “In my
room, Madame, no man has ever set foot; for what I have to do with
men, Paris is quite big enough.” If not her body, at least she
possessed a plot of land where entry was prohibited. The young girl,
though, possesses little of her own except her body: it is her most
precious treasure; the man who enters her
takes
it from her; the
familiar word is confirmed by her lived experience. She experiences
concretely the humiliation she had felt: she is dominated, subjugated,
conquered. Like almost all females, she is
under
the man during
intercourse.
10

Adler emphasized the feeling of inferiority resulting
from this. Right from infancy, the notions of superior and inferior are
extremely important; climbing trees is a prestigious act; heaven is
above the earth; hell is underneath; to fall or to descend is to degrade
oneself, and to climb is to exalt oneself; in wrestling, victory belongs
to the one who pins his opponent down, whereas the woman lies on
the bed in a position of defeat; it is even worse if the man straddles
455

her like an animal subjugated by reins and a bit. In any case, she feels
passive: she
is
caressed, penetrated; she undergoes intercourse,
whereas the man spends himself actively. It is true that the male sex
organ is not a striated muscle commanded by will; it is neither
plowshare nor sword but merely flesh; but it is a voluntary movement
that man imprints on her; he goes, he comes, stops, resumes, while
the woman receives him submissively; it is the man—especially when
the woman is a novice—who chooses the amorous positions, who
decides the length and frequency of intercourse. She feels herself to
be an instrument: all the freedom is in the other. This is what is
poetically expressed by saying that woman is comparable to a violin
and man to the bow that makes her vibrate. “In love,” says Balzac,
“leaving the soul out of consideration, woman is a lyre which only
yields up its secrets to the man who can play upon it skilfully.”
11
He
takes
his pleasure with her; he
gives
her pleasure; the words
themselves do not imply reciprocity. Woman is imbued with collective
images of the glorious aura of masculine sexual excitement that make
feminine arousal a shameful abdication: her intimate experience
confirms this asymmetry. It must not be forgotten that boy and girl
adolescents experience their bodies differently: the former tranquilly
takes his body for granted and proudly takes charge of his desires; for
the latter, in spite of her narcissism, it is a strange and disturbing
burden. Man’s sex organ is neat and simple, like a finger; it can be
innocently exhibited, and boys often show it off to their friends
proudly and defiantly; the feminine sex organ is mysterious to the
woman herself, hidden, tormented, mucous, and humid; it bleeds each
month, it is sometimes soiled with bodily fluids, it has a secret and
dangerous life. It is largely because woman does not recognize herself
in it that she does not recognize her own desires. They are expressed
in a
shameful manner. While the man has a “hard-on,” the woman
“gets wet”; there is in the very word infantile memories of the wet
bed, of the guilty and involuntary desire to urinate; man has the same
disgust for his nocturnal unconscious wet dreams; projecting a liquid,
urine or sperm, is not humiliating: it is an active operation; but there is
humiliation if the liquid escapes passively since the body then is no
longer an organism, muscles, sphincters, and nerves, commanded by
the brain and expressing the conscious subject, but a vase, a receptacle
made of inert matter, and the plaything of mechanical caprices. If the
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flesh oozes—like an old wall or a dead body—it does not seem to be
emitting liquid but deliquescing: a decomposition process that
horrifies. Feminine heat is the flaccid palpitation of a shellfish; where
man has impetuousness, woman merely has impatience; her desire can
become ardent without ceasing to be passive; the man dives on his
prey like the eagle and the hawk; she, like a carnivorous plant, waits
for and watches the swamp where insects and children bog down; she
is sucking, suction, sniffer, she is pitch and glue, immobile appeal,
insinuating, and viscous: at least this is the way she indefinably feels.
Thus, there is not only resistance against the male who attempts to
subjugate her but also internal conflict. Superimposed on the taboos
and inhibitions that arise from her education and society are disgust
and refusals that stem from the erotic experience itself: they all
reinforce each other to such an extent that often after the first coitus
the woman is more in revolt against her sexual destiny than before.
Lastly, there is another factor that often gives man a hostile look
and changes the sexual act into a grave danger: the danger of a child.
An illegitimate child in most civilizations is such a social and
economic handicap for the unmarried woman that one sees young
girls committing suicide when they know they are pregnant and
unwed mothers cutting the throats of their newborns; such a risk
constitutes a quite powerful sexual brake, making many young girls
observe the prenuptial chastity prescribed by customs. When the
brake is insufficient, the young girl, while yielding to the lover, is
horrified by the terrible danger he possesses in his loins. Stekel cites,
among others, a young girl who for the entire duration of intercourse
shouted: “Don’t let anything happen! Don’t let anything happen!”
Even in marriage, the woman often does not want a child, her health is
not good enough, or a child would be too great a burden on the young
household. Whether he is lover or husband, if she does not have
absolute confidence in her partner, her eroticism will be paralyzed by
caution. Either she will anxiously watch the man’s behavior, or else,
once intercourse is over, she will run to the bathroom to chase the
living germ from her belly, put there in
spite of herself. This hygienic
operation brutally contradicts the sensual magic of the caresses; she
undergoes an absolute separation of the bodies that were merged in
one single joy; thus the male sperm becomes a harmful germ, a
soiling; she cleans herself as one cleans a dirty vase, while the man
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reclines on his bed in his superb wholeness. A young divorcée told
me how horrified she was when—after a dubiously pleasurable
wedding night—she had to shut herself in the bathroom and her
husband nonchalantly lit a cigarette: it seems that the ruin of the
couple was decided at that instant. The repugnance of the douche, the
beaker, and the bidet is one of the frequent causes of feminine
frigidity. The existence of surer and more convenient contraceptive
devices is helping woman’s sexual freedom a great deal; in a country
like America where these practices are widespread, the number of
young girls still virgins at marriage is much lower than in France;
such practices make for far greater abandon during the love act. But
there again, the young woman has to overcome her repugnance before
treating her body as a thing: she can no more resign herself to being
“corked” to satisfy a man’s desires than she can to being “pierced” by
him. Whether she has her uterus sealed or introduces some sperm-
killing tampon, a woman who is conscious of the ambiguities of the
body and sex will be bridled by cold premeditation; besides, many
men consider the use of condoms repugnant. It is sexual behavior as a
whole that justifies its various moments: conduct that when analyzed
would seem repugnant seems natural when bodies are transfigured by
the erotic virtues they possess; but inversely, when bodies and
behaviors are decomposed into separate elements and deprived of
meaning, these elements become disgusting and obscene. The surgical
and dirty perception that penetration had in the eyes of the child
returns if it is not carried out with the arousal, desire, and pleasure a
woman in love will joyfully experience as union and fusion with the
beloved: this is what happens with the concerted use of prophylactics.
In any case, these precautions are not at the disposal of all women;
many young girls do not know of any defense against the threats of
pregnancy, and they feel great anguish that their lot depends on the
goodwill of the man they give themselves up to.
It is understandable that an ordeal experienced through so much
resistance, fraught with such weighty implications, often creates
serious traumas. A latent precocious dementia has often been revealed
by the first experience. Stekel gives several examples:
Miss M.G.… suddenly developed an acute delirium in her 19th
year. I found her storming in her room, shouting repeatedly: “I
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won’t! No! I won’t!” She tore off her clothes and wanted to flee
into the street naked … she had to be taken to the psychiatric
clinic. There her delirium gradually abated and she passed into a
catatonic state … This girl … was a clerk in an office, in love
with the head clerk in the company … She had gone to the
country with a girl friend … and a couple of young men who
worked in the same office … she went to her room with one of
the men [who] promised not to touch her and that “it was merely
a prank.” He roused her to slight tenderness for three nights
without touching her virginity … She apparently remained “as
cold as a dog’s muzzle” and declared that it was disgraceful. For
a few fleeting minutes her mind seemed confused and she
exclaimed: “Alfred, Alfred.” (Alfred was the head clerk’s first
name.) She was reproaching herself for what she had done
(What would mother say about this if she knew?). Once she
returned home, she took to her bed, complaining of a migraine.
Miss L.X.
*
… very depressed … She cried often and could not
sleep; she had begun to have hallucinations and failed to
recognize her environment. She had jumped to the windows and
tried to throw herself out … She was taken to the sanitarium. I
found this twenty-three-year-old girl sitting up in bed; she paid
no attention to me when I entered … Her face depicted abject
fear and horror; her limbs were crossed and they twitched
vigorously. She was shouting. “No! No! No! You villain! Men
such as you ought to be locked up! It hurts! Oh!” Then there
followed some unintelligible mumbling. Suddenly her whole
facial expression changed. Her eyes lit up, her lips pursed in the
manner of kissing someone, her limbs ceased twitching and she
gave forth outcries which suggested delight and rapture and
love … Finally the attack ended in a subdued but persistent
weeping … The patient kept pushing down her nightgown as if
it were a dress, at the same time continually repeating the
exclamation, “Don’t!” It was known that a married colleague had
often come to see her when she was ill, that she was first happy
about it, but that later on she had had hallucinations and
attempted suicide.
†
She got better but keeps all men at a distance
and has rejected an earnest marriage offer.
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In other cases the illness triggered is less serious. Here is an
example where regret for lost virginity plays the main role in the
problems following the first coitus:
A young twenty-three-year-old girl suffers from various
phobias. The illness began at Franzensbad out of fear of catching
a pregnancy by a kiss or a contact in a toilet … Perhaps a man
had left some sperm in the water after masturbation; she insisted
that the bathtub be cleaned three times in her presence and did
not dare to move her bowels in the normal position. Some time
afterwards she developed a phobia of tearing her hymen, she did
not dare to dance, jump, cross a fence, or even walk except with
very little steps; if she saw a post, she feared being deflowered
by a clumsy movement and went around it, trembling all the
way. Another of her phobias in a train or in the middle of a
crowd was that a man could introduce his member from behind,
deflower her, and provoke a pregnancy … During the last phase
of the illness, she feared finding pins in her bed or on her shirt
that could enter her vagina. Each evening the sick girl stayed
naked in the middle of her room while her unfortunate mother
was forced to go through a difficult examination of the
bedclothes … She had always affirmed her love for her fiancé.
An examination revealed that she was no longer a virgin and was
putting off marriage because she feared her fiance’s disastrous
observations. She admitted to him that she had been seduced by
a tenor, married him, and was cured.
12
In another case, remorse—uncompensated by voluptuous
satisfaction—provoked psychic troubles:
Miss H.B., twenty years old, after a trip to Italy with a girl
friend, went into a serious depression. She refused to leave her
room and did not utter one word. She was taken to a nursing
home, where her situation got worse. She heard voices that were
insulting her, everyone made fun of her, etc. She was brought
back to her parents’ where she stayed in a corner without
moving. She asked the doctor: “Why didn’t I come before the
crime was committed?” She was dead. Everything was killed,
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destroyed. She was dirty. She could not
sing one note, bridges
with the world were burnt … The fiancé admitted having
followed her to Rome where she gave herself to him after
resisting a long time; she had crying fits … She admitted never
having pleasure with her fiancé. She was cured when she found
a lover who satisfied her and married her.
The “sweet Viennese girl” whose childish confessions I
summarized also gave a detailed and gripping account of her first
adult experiences. It will be noticed that—in spite of the very
advanced nature of her previous adventures—her “initiation” still has
an absolutely new character:
“At sixteen, I began working in an office. At seventeen and a
half, I had my first holiday; it was a great period for me. I was
courted on all sides … I was in love with a young office
colleague … We went to the park. It was 15 April 1909. He
made me sit next to him on a bench. He kissed me, begging me:
open your lips; but I closed them convulsively. Then he began to
unbutton my jacket. I would have let him when I remembered
that I did not have any breasts; I gave up the voluptuous
sensation I would have had if he had touched me … On 7 April
a married colleague invited me to go to an exhibition with him.
We drank wine at dinner. I lost some of my reserve and began
telling him some ambiguous jokes. In spite of my begging, he
hailed a cab, pushed me into it, and hardly had the horses started
than he kissed me. He became more and more intimate, he
pushed his hand farther and farther; I defended myself with all
my strength and I do not remember if he got his way. The next
day I went to the office rather flustered. He showed me his
hands covered with the scratches I had given him … He asked
me to come see him more often … I yielded, not very
comfortable but still full of curiosity … As soon as he came near
my sex I pulled away and returned to my place; but once, more
clever than I, he overcame me and probably put his finger into
my vagina. I cried with pain. It was June 1909 and I left on
vacation. I took a trip with my girl friend. Two tourists arrived.
They invited us to accompany them. My companion wanted to
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kiss my friend, she punched him. He came towards, grabbed me
from behind, bent me to him, and kissed me. I did not
resist … He invited me to come with him. I gave him my hand
and we went into the middle of the forest. He kissed me … he
kissed my sex, to my great indignation. I said to him: ‘How can
you do such a disgusting thing?’ He put his penis in my
hand … I
caressed it … all of a sudden he pulled away my hand
and threw a handkerchief over it to keep me from seeing what
was happening … Two days later we went to Liesing. All of a
sudden in a deserted field he took off his coat and put it on the
grass … he threw me down in such a way that one of his legs
was placed between mine. I still did not think how serious the
situation was. I begged him to kill me rather than deprive me of
‘my most beautiful finery.’ He became very rough, swore at me,
and threatened me with the police. He covered my mouth with
his hand and introduced his penis. I thought my last hour had
arrived. I had the feeling my stomach was turning. When he was
finally finished, I began to be able to put up with him. He had to
pick me up because I was still stretched out. He covered my eyes
and face with kisses. I did not see or hear anything. If he had not
held me back, I would have fallen blindly in front of the
traffic … We were alone in a second-class compartment; he
opened his trousers again to come towards me. I screamed and
ran quickly through the whole train until the last running
board … Finally he left me with a vulgar and strident laugh that I
will never forget, calling me a stupid goose who does not know
what is good. He let me return to Vienna alone. I went quickly to
the bathroom because I had felt something warm running along
my thigh. Frightened, I saw traces of blood. How could I hide
this at home? I went to bed as early as possible and cried for
hours. I still felt the pressure on my stomach caused by the
pushing of his penis. My strange attitude and lack of appetite
told my mother something had happened. I admitted everything
to her. She did not see anything so terrible in it … My colleague
did what he could to console me. He took advantage of dark
evenings to take walks with me in the park and caress me under
my skirts. I let him; but as soon as I felt my vagina become wet I
pulled myself away because I was terribly ashamed.”
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She goes to a hotel with him sometimes but without sleeping
with him. She makes the acquaintance of a very rich young man
that she would like to marry. She sleeps with him but without
feeling anything and with disgust. She resumes her relations
with her colleague but she misses the other one and begins to be
cross-eyed and to lose weight. She is sent to a sanitarium where
she almost sleeps with a young Russian, but she chases him
from her bed at the last minute. She begins affairs with a doctor
and an officer but without consenting to complete sexual
relations. Then she became mortally ill and
decided to go to a
doctor. After her treatment she consented to give herself to a man
who loved her and then married her. In marriage her frigidity
disappeared.
In these few examples chosen from many similar ones, the
partner’s brutality or at least the abruptness of the event is the
determining factor in the traumatism or disgust. The best situation for
sexual initiation is one in which the girl learns to overcome her
modesty, to get to know her partner, and to enjoy his caresses without
violence or surprise, without fixed rules or a precise time frame. In
this respect, the freedom of behavior appreciated by young American
girls and more and more by French girls today can only be endorsed:
they slip almost without noticing from necking and petting to
complete sexual relations. The less tabooed it is, the smoother the
initiation, and the freer the girl feels with her partner and the more the
domination aspect of the male fades; if her lover is also young, a
novice, shy, and an equal, the girl’s defenses are not as strong; but her
metamorphosis into a woman will also be less of a transformation. In
Green Wheat
, Colette’s Vinca, the day after a rather brutal defloration,
displays surprising placidity to her friend Phil: she did not feel
“possessed”; on the contrary, she took pride in freeing herself of her
virginity; she did not feel an overwhelming mental turmoil; in truth,
Phil is wrong to be surprised as his girlfriend did not really know the
male. Claudine was less unaffected after a turn on the dance floor in
Renaud’s arms. I was told of a French high school student still stuck
in the “green fruit” stage who, having spent a night with a male school
friend, ran to a girlfriend’s the next morning to announce: “I slept
with C.… it was a lot of fun.” An American high school teacher told
463

me his students stopped being virgins long before becoming women;
their partners respect them too much to offend their modesty; the boys
themselves are too young and too prudish to awaken any demon in
the girls. There are girls who throw themselves into many erotic
experiences in order to escape sexual anxiety; they hope to rid
themselves of their curiosity and obsessions, but their acts often have
a theoretical cast, rendering such behavior as unreal as the fantasies
through which others anticipate the future. Giving oneself out of
defiance, fear, or puritan rationalism is not achieving an authentic
erotic experience: one merely reaches a pseudo-experience without
danger and without much flavor; the sexual act is not accompanied by
either anguish or shame, because arousal remains superficial and
pleasure has not permeated the flesh. These deflowered virgins are
still young girls; and it is likely that the day they find themselves in
the grip of a sensual and imperious man, they will put up virginal
resistance
to him. Meanwhile, they remain in a kind of awkward age;
caresses tickle them, kisses sometimes make them laugh: they look on
physical love as a game, and if they are not in the mood to have fun,
the lover’s demands quickly seem importunate and abusive; they hold
on to the disgusts, phobias, and prudishness of the adolescent girl. If
they never go beyond this stage—which is, according to American
males, the case with many American girls—they spend their lives in a
state of semi-frigidity. Real sexual maturity for the woman who
consents to becoming flesh can only occur in arousal and pleasure.
But it must not be thought that all difficulties subside in women
with a passionate temperament. On the contrary, they sometimes
worsen. Feminine arousal can reach an intensity unknown by man.
Male desire is violent but localized, and he comes out of it—except
perhaps in the instant of ejaculation—conscious of himself; woman,
by contrast, undergoes a real alienation; for many, this metamorphosis
is the most voluptuous and definitive moment of love; but it also has a
magical and frightening side. The woman he is holding in his arms
appears so absent from herself, so much in the throes of turmoil, that
the man may feel afraid of her. The upheaval she feels is a far more
radical transmutation than the male’s aggressive frenzy. This fever
frees her from shame; but when she awakes, it in turn makes her feel
ashamed and horrified; for her to accept it happily—or even proudly
—she has at least to be sexually and sensually fulfilled; she can admit
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to her desires if she has gloriously satisfied them: if not, she
repudiates them angrily.
Here we reach the crucial problem of feminine eroticism: at the
beginning of her erotic life, woman’s abdication is not rewarded by a
wild and confident sensual pleasure. She would readily sacrifice
modesty and pride if it meant opening up the gates of paradise. But it
has been seen that defloration is not a successful accomplishment of
youthful eroticism; it is on the contrary an unusual phenomenon;
vaginal pleasure is not attained immediately; according to Stekel’s
statistics—confirmed by many sexologists and psychologists—barely
4 percent of women experience pleasure at the first coitus; 50 percent
do not reach vaginal pleasure for weeks, months, or even years.
Psychic factors play an essential role in this. Woman’s body is
singularly “hysterical” in that there is often no distance between
conscious facts and their organic expression; her moral inhibitions
prevent the emergence of pleasure; as they are not counterbalanced by
anything, they are often perpetuated and form a more and more
powerful barrier. In many cases, a vicious circle is created: the lover’s
first clumsiness—a word, an awkward gesture, or an arrogant smile
—will resonate throughout the whole honeymoon
or even married
life; disappointed by not experiencing pleasure immediately, the
young woman feels a resentment that badly prepares her for a happier
experience. It is true that if the man cannot give her normal
satisfaction, he can always give her clitoral pleasure that, in spite of
moralizing legends, can provide her with relaxation and contentment.
But many women reject it because it seems to be
inflicted
even more
than vaginal pleasure; because if women suffer from the egotism of
men concerned only with their own satisfaction, they are also
offended by too obvious a determination to give them pleasure.
“Making the other come,” says Stekel, “means dominating him;
giving oneself to someone is abdicating one’s will.” Woman will
accept pleasure more easily if it seems to flow naturally from man’s
own pleasure, as happens in normal and successful coitus. “Women
submit themselves joyously as soon as they understand that the
partner does not
want
to subjugate them,” continues Stekel; inversely,
if they feel this desire, they resist. Many shy away from being
caressed by the hand because it is an instrument that does not
participate in the pleasure it gives, it is activity and not flesh; and if
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sex itself does not come across as flesh penetrated with desire but as a
cleverly used tool, woman will feel the same repulsion. Besides,
anything else will seem to confirm the woman’s failure to experience
a normal woman’s feelings. Stekel notes, after many, many
observations, that all the desire of so-called frigid women aims at the
norm. “They want to reach orgasm like a normal woman; no other
process satisfies them morally.”
Man’s attitude is thus of extreme importance. If his desire is violent
and brutal, his partner feels changed into a mere thing in his arms; but
if he is too self-controlled, too detached, he does not constitute
himself as flesh; he asks woman to make herself object without her
being able to have a hold on him in return. In both cases, her pride
rebels; to reconcile her metamorphosis into a carnal object with the
demands of her subjectivity, she must make him her prey as she
makes herself his. This is often why the woman obstinately remains
frigid. If the lover lacks seductive techniques, if he is cold, negligent,
or clumsy, he fails to awaken her sexuality, or he leaves her
unsatisfied; but if he is virile and skillful, he can provoke reactions of
rejection; woman fears his domination: some can find pleasure only
with timid, inept, or even almost impotent men, ones who do not scare
them away. It is easy for a man to awaken hostility and resentment in
his mistress. Resentment is the most common source of feminine
frigidity; in bed, the woman makes the male pay for all the affronts
she considers she has been subjected to by an insulting coldness; her
attitude is often one of an aggressive inferiority complex: since you do
not love me, since I have flaws preventing me from being liked, and
since I am despicable, I will not surrender to love,
desire, and pleasure
either. This is how she exacts vengeance both on him and on herself if
he has humiliated her by his negligence, if he has aroused her
jealousy, if he has declared himself too slowly, if he has made her his
mistress when she desired marriage; the complaint can appear
suddenly and set off this reaction even during a relationship that
began happily. The man who caused this hostility can rarely succeed
in undoing it: a persuasive testimony of love or appreciation may,
however, sometimes modify the situation. It also happens that women
who are defiant or stiff in their lovers’ arms can be transformed by a
ring on their finger: happy, flattered, their conscience at peace, they let
all their defenses fall. But a newcomer, respectful, in love, and
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delicate, can best transform the disenchanted woman into a happy
mistress or wife; if he frees her from her inferiority complex, she will
give herself to him ardently.
Stekel’s work
Frigidity in Woman
essentially focuses on
demonstrating the role of psychic factors in feminine frigidity. The
following examples clearly show that it is often an act of resentment
of the husband or lover:
Miss G.S.… had given herself to a man while waiting for him to
marry her, while insisting on the fact “that she did not care about
marriage,” that she did not want “to be attached.” She played the
free woman. In truth, she was a slave to morality like her whole
family. But her lover believed her and never spoke of marriage.
Her stubbornness increased more and more until she became
apathetic. When he finally did ask her to marry him, she took her
revenge by admitting her numbness and no longer wanting to
hear anything about a union. She no longer wanted to be happy.
She had waited too long … She was consumed by jealousy and
waited anxiously for the day he proposed so she could refuse it
proudly. Then she wanted to commit suicide just to punish her
lover in style.
A very jealous woman who until then had found pleasure with
her husband imagines that her husband is cheating on her while
she was ill. Coming home, she decides to be cold to her
husband. She would never be aroused by him again because he
did not appreciate her and used her only when in need. Since her
return she has been frigid. At first she used little tricks not to be
aroused. She pictured to herself that her husband was flirting
with her girl friend. But soon orgasm was replaced by pain.
A young seventeen-year-old had an affair with a man and
derived intense pleasure from it. Pregnant at nineteen, she asked
her lover to marry her; he was ambivalent and advised her to get
an abortion,
which she refused to do. Three weeks later, he
declared he was ready to marry her and she became his wife. But
she never forgave those three tormented weeks and became
frigid. Later on, a talk with her husband overcame her frigidity.
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Mrs. N.M.… learns that two days after the wedding, her
husband went to see a former mistress. The orgasm she had had
previously disappeared forever. She was obsessed by the
thought that she no longer pleased her husband whom she
thought she had disappointed; that is the cause of frigidity for
her.
Even when a woman overcomes her resistance and eventually
experiences vaginal pleasure, not all her problems are eliminated: the
rhythm of her sexuality and that of the male do not coincide. She is
much slower to reach orgasm than the man. The Kinsey Report states:
For perhaps three-quarters of all males, orgasm is reached within
two minutes after the initiation of the sexual
relation … Considering the many upper level females who are so
adversely conditioned to sexual situations that they may require
ten to fifteen minutes of the most careful stimulation to bring
them to climax, and considering the fair number of females who
never come to climax in their whole lives, it is, of course,
demanding that the male be quite abnormal in his ability to
prolong sexual activity without ejaculation if he is required to
match the female partner.
It is said that in India the husband, while fulfilling his conjugal
duties, smokes his pipe to distract himself from his own pleasure and
to make his wife’s last; in the West, it is more the number of “times”
that a Casanova boasts of; and his supreme pride is to have a woman
beg for mercy: according to erotic tradition, this is not often a
successful feat; men often complain of their partners’ exacting
demands: she is a wild uterus, an ogre, insatiable; she is never
assuaged. Montaigne demonstrates this point of view in the third
book of his
Essays:
They are incomparably more capable and ardent than we in the
acts of love—and that priest of antiquity so testified, who had
been once a man and then a woman … and besides, we have
learned from their own mouth the proof that was once given in
different centuries
by an emperor and an empress of Rome,
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master workmen and famous in this task: he indeed deflowered
in one night ten captive Sarmatian virgins; but she actually in one
night was good for twenty-five encounters, changing company
according to her need and liking,
Adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine vulvo
Et lassata viris, necdum satiata recessite
.
13
We know about the dispute that occurred in Catalonia from a
woman complaining of the over-assiduous efforts of her
husband: not so much, in my opinion, that she was bothered by
them (for I believe in miracles only in matters of faith)… There
intervened that notable sentence of the Queen of Aragon, by
which, after mature deliberation with her council, this good
queen … ordained as the legitimate and necessary limit the
number of six a day, relinquishing and giving up much of the
need and desire of her sex, in order, she said, to establish an easy
and consequently permanent and immutable formula.
It is true that sexual pleasure for woman is not at all the same as for
man. I have already said that it is not known exactly if vaginal
pleasure ever results in a definite orgasm: feminine confidences on
this point are rare, and even when they try to be precise, they remain
extremely vague; reactions seem to vary greatly according to the
subject. What is certain is that coitus for man has a precise biological
end: ejaculation. And certainly many other very complex intentions
are involved in aiming at this end; but once obtained, it is seen as an
achievement, and if not as the satisfaction of desire, at least as its
suppression. On the other hand, the aim for woman is uncertain in the
beginning and more psychic than physiological; she desires arousal
and sexual pleasure in general, but her body does not project any clear
conclusion of the love act: and thus for her coitus is never fully
completed: it does not include any finality. Male pleasure soars; when
it reaches a certain threshold, it fulfills itself and dies abruptly in the
orgasm; the structure of the sexual act is finite and discontinuous.
Feminine pleasure radiates through the whole body; it is not always
centered in the genital
system; vaginal contractions then even more
than a true orgasm constitute a system of undulations that
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rhythmically arise, subside, re-form, reach for some instants a
paroxysm, then blur and dissolve without ever completely dying.
Because no fixed goal is assigned to it, pleasure aims at infinity:
nervous or cardiac fatigue or psychic satiety often limits the woman’s
erotic possibilities rather than precise satisfaction; even fully fulfilled,
even exhausted, she is never totally released:
“Lassata necdum
satiata,”
according to Juvenal.
Man commits a grave error when he attempts to impose his own
rhythm on his partner and when he is determined to give her an
orgasm: often he only manages to destroy the form of pleasure she
was experiencing in her own way.
14
This form is malleable enough to
give itself a conclusion: spasms localized in the vagina or in the whole
genital system or coming from the whole body can constitute a
resolution; for certain women, they are produced fairly regularly and
with sufficient violence to be likened to an orgasm; but a woman lover
can also find a conclusion in the masculine orgasm that calms and
satisfies her. And it is also possible that in a gradual and gentle way,
the erotic phase dissolves calmly. Success requires not a mathematical
synchronization of pleasure, whatever many meticulous but simplistic
men believe, but the establishment of a complex erotic form. Many
think that “making a woman come” is a question of time and
technique, therefore of violence; they disregard the extent to which
woman’s sexuality is conditioned by the situation as a whole. Sexual
pleasure for her, we have said, is a kind of spell; it demands total
abandon; if words or gestures contest the magic of caresses, the spell
vanishes. This is one of the reasons that the woman often closes her
eyes: physiologically there is a reflex that compensates for the dilation
of the pupil; but even in the dark she still lowers her eyelids; she
wants to do away with the setting, the singularity of the moment,
herself and her lover; she wants to lose herself within the carnal night
as indistinct as the maternal breast. And even more particularly, she
wants to abolish this separation that sets the male in front of her; she
wants to merge with him. We have said already that she desires to
remain a subject while making herself an object. More deeply
alienated than man, as her whole body is desire and arousal, she
remains a
subject only through union with her partner; receiving and
giving have to merge for both of them; if the man just takes without
giving or if he gives pleasure without taking, she feels used; as soon
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as she realizes herself as Other, she is the inessential other; she has to
invalidate alterity. Thus the moment of the separation of bodies is
almost always painful for her. Man, after coitus, whether he feels sad
or joyous, duped by nature or conqueror of woman, whatever the
case, he repudiates the flesh; he becomes a whole body; he wants to
sleep, take a bath, smoke a cigarette, get a breath of fresh air. She
would like to prolong the bodily contact until the spell that made her
flesh dissipates completely; separation is a painful wrenching like a
new weaning; she resents the lover who pulls away from her too
abruptly. But what wounds her even more are the words that contest
the fusion in which she believed for a moment. The “wife of Gilles,”
whose story Madeleine Bourdouxhe told, pulls back when her
husband asks her: “Did you come?” She puts her hand on his mouth;
many women hate this word because it reduces the pleasure to an
immanent and separated sensation. “Is it enough? Do you want more?
Was it good?” The very fact of asking the question points out the
separation and changes the love act into a mechanical operation
assumed and controlled by the male. And this is precisely the reason
he asks it. Much more than fusion and reciprocity, he seeks
domination; when the unity of the couple is undone, he becomes the
sole subject: a great deal of love or generosity is necessary to give up
this privilege; he likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in
spite of herself; he always wants to take her a little more than she
gives herself. Woman would be spared many difficulties were man
not to trail behind him so many complexes making him consider the
love act a battle: then it would be possible for her not to consider the
bed as an arena.
However, along with narcissism and pride, one observes in the
young girl a desire to be dominated. According to some
psychoanalysts, masochism is a characteristic of women, by means of
which they can adapt to their erotic destiny. But the notion of
masochism is very confused and has to be considered attentively.
Freudian psychoanalysts distinguish three forms of masochism:
one is the link between pain and sexual pleasure, another is the
feminine acceptance of erotic dependence, and the last resides in a
mechanism of self-punishment. Woman is masochistic because
pleasure and pain in her are linked through defloration and birth, and
because she consents to her passive role.
471

It must first be pointed out that attributing erotic value to pain does
not in any way constitute behavior of passive submission. Pain often
serves to
raise the tonus of the individual who experiences it, to
awaken a sensitivity numbed by the very violence of arousal and
pleasure; it is a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night, it removes
the lover from the limbo where he is swooning so that he might once
more be thrown into it. Pain is normally part of erotic frenzy; bodies
that delight in being bodies for their reciprocal joy seek to find each
other, unite with each other, and confront each other in every possible
way. There is a wrenching from oneself in eroticism, a transport, an
ecstasy: suffering also destroys the limits of the self, it is a going
beyond and a paroxysm; pain has always played a big role in orgies;
and it is well-known that the exquisite and the painful converge: a
caress can become torture; torment gives pleasure. Embracing easily
leads to biting, pinching, scratching; such behavior is not generally
sadistic; it expresses a desire to merge and not to destroy; and the
subject that submits to it does not seek to disavow and humiliate
himself but to unite; besides, it is far from being specifically
masculine. In fact, pain has a masochistic meaning only when it is
grasped and desired as the manifestation of enslavement. As for the
pain of defloration, it is specifically not accompanied by pleasure; and
all women fear the suffering of giving birth, and they are happy that
modern methods free them from it. Pain has neither more nor less
place in their sexuality than in that of man.
Feminine docility is, moreover, a very equivocal notion. We have
seen that most of the time the young girl accepts in her
imagination
the domination of a demigod, a hero, a male, but it is still only a
narcissistic game. She is in no way disposed to submit to the carnal
expression of this authority in reality. By contrast, she often refuses to
give herself to a man she admires and respects, giving herself to an
ordinary man instead. It is an error to seek the key to concrete
behavior in fantasy, because fantasies are created and cherished as
fantasies. The little girl who dreams of rape with a mixture of horror
and complicity does not
desire
to be raped, and the event, if it
occurred, would be a loathsome catastrophe. We have already seen in
Maria Le Hardouin a typical example of this dissociation. She writes:
But there remained an area on the path of abolition that I only
472

entered with pinched nostrils and a beating heart. This was the
path that beyond amorous sensuality led me to sensuality
itself … there was no deceitful infamy that I did not commit in
dreams. I suffered from the need to affirm myself in every
possible way.
15
The case of Marie Bashkirtseff should also be
recalled:
All my life I have tried to place myself
voluntarily
under some
kind of
illusory domination
, but all the people I tried were so
ordinary in comparison with me that all I felt for them was
disgust.
Moreover, it is true that the woman’s sexual role is largely passive;
but to live this passive situation in its immediacy is no more
masochistic than the male’s normal aggressiveness is sadistic; woman
can transcend caresses, arousal, and penetration toward achieving her
own pleasure, thus maintaining the affirmation of her subjectivity; she
can also seek union with the lover and give herself to him, which
signifies a surpassing of herself and not an abdication. Masochism
exists when the individual chooses to constitute himself as a pure
thing through the consciousness of the other, to represent oneself to
oneself as a thing, to play at being a thing. “Masochism is an attempt
not to fascinate the other by my objectivity but to make myself be
fascinated by my objectivity for others.”
16
Sade’s Juliette or the
young virgin from
La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the
Boudoir
), who both give themselves to the male in all possible ways,
but for their own pleasure, are not in any way masochists. Lady
Chatterley and Kate, in the total abandon they consent to, are not
masochists. To speak of masochism, one has to posit the
self
and this
alienated double has to be considered as founded on the other’s
freedom.
In this sense, true masochism can be found in some women. The
young girl is susceptible to it since she is easily narcissistic and
narcissism consists in alienating one’s self in one’s ego. If she
experienced arousal and violent desire right from the beginning of her
erotic initiation, she would live her experiences authentically and stop
projecting them toward this ideal pole that she calls self; but in
frigidity, the self continues to affirm itself; making it the thing of a
473

male seems then like a fault. But “masochism, like sadism, is the
assumption of guilt. I am guilty due to the very fact that I am an
object.” This idea of Sartre’s fits in with the Freudian notion of self-
punishment. The young girl considers herself guilty of delivering her
self to another, and she punishes herself for it by willingly increasing
humiliation and subjugation; we have seen that virgins defied their
future lovers and punished themselves for their future submission by
inflicting various tortures on themselves. When the lover is real and
present, they persist in
this attitude. Frigidity itself can be seen as a
punishment that woman imposes as much on herself as on her
partner: wounded in her vanity, she resents him and herself, and she
does not permit herself pleasure. In masochism, she will wildly
enslave herself to the male, she will tell him words of adoration, she
will wish to be humiliated, beaten; she will alienate herself more and
more deeply out of fury for having agreed to the alienation. This is
quite obviously Mathilde de la Mole’s behavior, for example; she
regrets having given herself to Julien, which is why she sometimes
falls at his feet, bends over backward to indulge each of his whims,
sacrifices her hair; but at the same time, she is in revolt against him as
much as against herself; one imagines that she is icy in his arms. The
fake abandon of the masochistic woman creates new barriers that keep
her from pleasure; and at the same time, she is taking vengeance
against herself for this inability to experience pleasure. The vicious
circle from frigidity to masochism can establish itself forever,
bringing sadistic behavior along with it as compensation. Becoming
erotically mature can also deliver woman from her frigidity and her
narcissism, and assuming her sexual passivity, she lives it
immediately instead of playing the role. Because the paradox of
masochism is that the subject reaffirms itself constantly even in its
attempt to abdicate itself, it is in the gratuitous gift, in the spontaneous
movement toward the other, that he succeeds in forgetting himself. It
is thus true that woman will be more prone than man to masochistic
temptation; her erotic situation as passive object commits her to
playing passivity; this game is the self-punishment to which her
narcissistic revolts and consequent frigidity lead her; the fact is that
many women and in particular young girls are masochists. Colette,
speaking of her first amorous experiences, confides to us in
Mes
apprentissages (My Apprenticeships):
474

Ridden by youth and ignorance, I had known intoxication—a
guilty rapture, an atrocious, impure, adolescent impulse. There
are many scarcely nubile girls who dream of becoming the show,
the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged
man. It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfillment, a
morbid thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating
chalk and coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books
and sticking pins into the palm of the hand.
This perfectly expresses the fact that masochism is part of juvenile
perversions, that it is not an authentic solution of the conflict created
by woman’s sexual destiny, but a way of escaping it by wallowing in
it. In no way does it represent the normal and happy blossoming of
feminine eroticism.
This blossoming supposes that—in love, tenderness, and sensuality
—woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and establishing a
relationship of reciprocity with her partner. The asymmetry of male
and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a
battle of the sexes; they can easily be settled when a woman feels both
desire and respect in a man; if he covets her in her flesh while
recognizing her freedom, she recovers her essentialness at the moment
she becomes object, she remains free in the submission to which she
consents. Thus, the lovers can experience shared pleasure in their own
way; each partner feels pleasure as being his own while at the same
time having its source in the other. The words “receive” and “give”
exchange meanings, joy is gratitude, pleasure is tenderness. In a
concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the
other is accomplished in the keenest consciousness of the other and
the self. Some women say they feel the masculine sex organ in
themselves as a part of their own body; some men think they
are
the
woman they penetrate; these expressions are obviously inaccurate; the
dimension of the
other
remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer
has a hostile character; this consciousness of the union of the bodies
in their separation is what makes the sexual act moving; it is all the
more overwhelming that the two beings who together passionately
negate and affirm their limits are fellow creatures and yet are different.
This difference that all too often isolates them becomes the source of
their marveling when they join together; woman recognizes the virile
475

passion in man’s force as the reverse of the fever that burns within
her, and this is the power she wields over him; this sex organ swollen
with life belongs to her just as her smile belongs to the man who
gives her pleasure. All the treasures of virility and femininity
reflecting off and reappropriating each other make a moving and
ecstatic unity. What is necessary for such harmony are not technical
refinements but rather, on the basis of an immediate erotic attraction, a
reciprocal generosity of body and soul.
This generosity is often hampered in man by his vanity and in
woman by her timidity; if she does not overcome her inhibitions, she
will not be able to make it thrive. This is why full sexual blossoming
in woman arrives rather late: she reaches her erotic peak at about
thirty-five. Unfortunately, if she is married, her husband is too used to
her frigidity; she can still seduce new lovers, but she is beginning to
fade: time is running out. At the very moment they cease to be
desirable, many women finally decide to assume their desires.
The conditions under which woman’s sexual life unfolds depend
not only on these facts but also on her whole social and economic
situation. It would be too vague to attempt to study this further
without this context.
But several generally valid conclusions emerge
from our examination. The erotic experience is one that most
poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they
experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject. Woman
experiences this conflict at its most dramatic because she assumes
herself first as object and does not immediately find a confident
autonomy in pleasure; she has to reconquer her dignity as
transcendent and free subject while assuming her carnal condition:
this is a delicate and risky enterprise that often fails. But the very
difficulty of her situation protects her from the mystifications by
which the male lets himself be duped; he is easily deceived by the
fallacious privileges that his aggressive role and satisfied solitude of
orgasm imply; he hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh. Woman
has a more authentic experience of herself.
Even if woman accommodates herself more or less exactly to her
passive role, she is still frustrated as an active individual. She does not
envy man his organ of possession: she envies in him his prey. It is a
curious paradox that man lives in a sensual world of sweetness,
tenderness, softness—a feminine world—while woman moves in the
476

hard and harsh male universe; her hands still long for the embrace of
smooth skin and soft flesh: adolescent boy, woman, flowers, furs,
child; a whole part of herself remains available and wishes to possess
a treasure similar to the one she gives the male. This explains why
there subsists in many women, in a more or less latent form, a
tendency toward homosexuality. For a set of complex reasons, there
are those for whom this tendency asserts itself with particular
authority. Not all women agree to give their sexual problems the one
classic solution officially accepted by society. Thus must we envisage
those who choose forbidden paths.
1.
See Volume I,
Chapter 1
. [In Part One, “Destiny.”—T
RANS
.]
2.
Unless excision is practiced, which is the rule in some primitive cultures.
*
The Kinsey Reports are two books on human sexual behavior:
Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male
(1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953), by Alfred
Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and others.—T
RANS
.
3.
“The use of an artificial penis in solitary sexual gratification may be traced down
from classic times, and doubtless prevailed in the very earliest human
civilization … In more recent years the following are a few of the objects found in the
vagina or bladder whence they could only be removed by surgical interference:
Pencils, sticks of sealing-wax, cotton-reels, hair-pins (and in Italy very commonly the
bone-pins used in the hair), bodkins, knitting-needles, crochet-needles, needle-cases,
compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, tooth-picks, toothbrushes,
pomade-pots (in a case recorded by Schroeder with a cockchafer inside, a makeshift
substitute for the Japanese
rin-no-tama
), while in one recent English case a full-sized
hen’s egg was removed from the vagina of a middle-aged married woman … the large
objects, naturally, are found chiefly in the vagina, and in married women” (Havelock
Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, Volume I).
4.

Uriel’s Report
.
5.

Frigidity in Woman
.
*

At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand
, trans. Gillian Spraggs.—T
RANS
.
6.
We will see further on that there can be psychological reasons that modify her
immediate attitude.
7.

Frigidity in Woman
.
8.
Published in French under the title
Jeunesse et sexualité
(Youth and Sexuality).
9.

My Life
.
477

10.
The position can undoubtedly be reversed. But in the first experiences, it is
extremely rare for the man not to practice the so-called normal coitus.
11.

Physiology of Marriage
. In
Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental (A Ritual for
Married Lovers
), Jules Guyot also says of the husband: “He is the minstrel who
produces harmony or cacophony with his hand and bow. From this point of view
woman is really a many-stringed instrument producing harmonious or discordant
sounds depending on how she is tuned.”
*

Frigidity in Woman
. Discrepancy in initials: “K.L.” in the English translation of
Stekel’s German text.—T
RANS
.
†
Not in the English translation of Stekel’s German text.—T
RANS
.
12.

Frigidity in Woman
.
13.
Juvenal. [“Her secret parts burning are tense with lust, / And, tired by men, but far
from sated, she withdrew.”—T
RANS
.]
14.
Lawrence clearly saw the opposition of these two erotic forms. But it is arbitrary to
declare as he does that the woman
must
not experience orgasm. It might be an error to
try to provoke it at all costs, but it is also an error to reject it in all cases, as Don
Cipriano does in
The Plumed Serpent
.
15.

The Black Sail
.
16.
J.-P. Sartre,
Being and Nothingness
.
478

|
CHAPTER 4
|
The Lesbian
People are always ready to see the lesbian as wearing a felt hat, her
hair short, and a necktie; her mannishness is seen as an abnormality
indicating a hormonal imbalance. Nothing could be more erroneous
than this confusion of the homosexual and the virago. There are many
homosexual women among odalisques, courtesans, and the most
deliberately “feminine” women; by contrast, a great number of
“masculine” women are heterosexual. Sexologists and psychiatrists
confirm what ordinary observation suggests: the immense majority of
“cursed women” are constituted exactly like other women. Their
sexuality is not determined by anatomical “destiny.”
There are certainly cases where physiological givens create
particular situations. There is no rigorous biological distinction
between the two sexes; an identical soma is modified by hormonal
activity whose orientation is genotypically defined, but can be diverted
in the course of the fetus’s development; this results in individuals
halfway between male and female. Some men take on a feminine
appearance because of late development of their male organs, and
sometimes girls as well—athletic ones in particular—change into
boys. Helene Deutsch tells of a young girl who ardently courted a
married woman, wanted to run off and live with her: she realized one
day that she was in fact a man, so she was able to marry her beloved
and have children. But it must not be concluded that every
homosexual woman is a “hidden man” in false guise. The
hermaphrodite who has elements of two genital systems often has a
female sexuality: I knew of one, exiled by the Nazis from Vienna,
who greatly regretted her inability to appeal to either heterosexuals or
homosexuals as she loved only men. Under the influence of male
hormones, “viriloid” women present masculine secondary sexual
characteristics; in infantile women, female hormones are deficient, and
their development remains incomplete. These particularities can more
479

or less directly trigger a lesbian orientation. A person
with a vigorous,
aggressive, and exuberant vitality wishes to exert himself actively and
usually rejects passivity; an unattractive and malformed woman may
try to compensate for her inferiority by acquiring virile attributes; if
her erogenous sensitivity is undeveloped, she does not desire
masculine caresses. But anatomy and hormones never define anything
but a situation and do not posit the object toward which the situation
will be transcended. Deutsch also cites the case of a wounded Polish
legionnaire she treated during World War I who was, in fact, a young
girl with marked viriloid characteristics; she had joined the army as a
nurse, then succeeded in wearing the uniform; she nevertheless fell in
love with a soldier—whom she later married—which caused her to be
regarded as a male homosexual. Her masculine behavior did not
contradict a feminine type of eroticism. Man himself does not
exclusively desire woman; the fact that the male homosexual body can
be perfectly virile implies that a woman’s virility does not necessarily
destine her to homosexuality.
Even in women physiologically normal themselves, it has
sometimes been asserted that there is a distinction between “clitoral”
and “vaginal” women, the former being destined to sapphic love; but
it has been seen that all childhood eroticism is clitoral; whether it
remains fixed at this stage or is transformed has nothing to do with
anatomical facts; nor is it true, as has often been maintained, that
infant masturbation explains the ulterior primacy of the clitoral
system: a child’s masturbation is recognized today by sexologists as
an absolutely normal and generally widespread phenomenon. The
development of feminine eroticism is—we have seen—a
psychological situation in which physiological factors are included,
but which depends on the subject’s overall attitude to existence.
Marañón considered sexuality to be “one-way,” and that man attains a
completed form of it, while for woman it remains “halfway”; only the
lesbian could possess a libido as rich as a male’s and would thus be a
“superior” feminine type. In fact, feminine sexuality has its own
structure, and the idea of a hierarchy in male and female libidos is
absurd; the choice of sexual object in no way depends on the amount
of energy woman might have.
Psychoanalysts have had the great merit of seeing a psychic
phenomenon and not an organic one in inversion; to them,
480

nonetheless, it still seems determined by external circumstances. But
in fact they have not studied it very much. According to Freud, female
erotic maturation requires the passage from the clitoral to the vaginal
stage, symmetrical with the change transferring the love the little girl
felt first for her mother to her father; various factors may hinder this
development; the woman is not resigned to castration, hides the
absence of the penis from herself, or remains fixated
on her mother,
for whom she seeks substitutes. For Adler, this fixation is not a
passively endured accident: it is desired by the subject who, in her
will for power, deliberately denies her mutilation and seeks to identify
with the man whose domination she refuses. Whether from infantile
fixation or masculine protest, homosexuality would appear in any case
as unfinished development. In truth, the lesbian is no more a “failed”
woman than a “superior” woman. The individual’s history is not an
inevitable progression: at every step, the past is grasped anew by a
new choice, and the “normality” of the choice confers no privileged
value on it: it must be judged by its authenticity. Homosexuality can
be a way for woman to flee her condition or a way to assume it.
Psychoanalysts’ great error, through moralizing conformity, is that
they never envisage it as anything but an inauthentic attitude.
Woman is an existent who is asked to make herself object; as
subject she has an aggressive sensuality that does not find satisfaction
in the masculine body: from this are born the conflicts her eroticism
must overcome. The system is considered normal that, delivering her
as prey to a male, restores her sovereignty by putting a baby in her
arms: but this “naturalism” is determined by a more or less well
understood social interest. Even heterosexuality permits other
solutions. Homosexuality for woman is one attempt among others to
reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh. And if nature
is invoked, it could be said that every woman is naturally homosexual.
The lesbian is characterized simply by her refusal of the male and her
preference for feminine flesh; but every adolescent female fears
penetration and masculine domination, and she feels a certain
repulsion for the man’s body; on the contrary, the feminine body is
for her, as for man, an object of desire. As I have already said: men
posit themselves as subjects, and at the same time they posit
themselves as separate; to consider the other as a thing to take is to
attack the virile ideal in the other and thus jointly in one’s self as well;
481

by contrast, the woman who regards herself as object sees herself and
her fellow creatures as prey. The homosexual man inspires hostility
from male and female heterosexuals as they both demand that man be
a dominating subject;
1
by contrast, both sexes spontaneously view
lesbians with indulgence. “I swear,” says the comte de Tilly, “it is a
rivalry that in no way bothers me; on the contrary, I find it amusing
and I
am immoral enough to laugh at it.” Colette attributed this same
amused indifference to Renaud faced with the couple Claudine and
Rézi.
2
A man is more irritated by an active and autonomous
heterosexual woman than by a nonaggressive homosexual one; only
the former challenges masculine prerogatives; sapphic loves in no
way contradict the traditional model of the division of the sexes: in
most cases, they are an assumption of femininity and not a rejection of
it. We have seen that they often appear in the adolescent girl as an
ersatz form of heterosexual relations she has not yet had the
opportunity or the audacity to experience: it is a stage, an
apprenticeship, and the one who most ardently engages in such loves
may tomorrow be the most ardent of wives, lovers, and mothers.
What must be explained in the female homosexual is thus not the
positive aspect of her choice but the negative side: she is not
characterized by her preference for women but by the exclusiveness
of this preference.
According to Jones and Hesnard, lesbians mostly fall into two
categories: “masculine lesbians,” who “try to act like men,” and
“feminine” ones, who “are afraid of men.” It is a fact that one can, on
the whole, observe two tendencies in homosexual women; some
refuse passivity, while others choose to lose themselves passively in
feminine arms; but these two attitudes react upon each other
reciprocally; relations to the chosen object and to the rejected one are
explained by each other reciprocally. For numerous reasons, as we
shall see, the distinction given seems quite arbitrary.
To define the lesbian as “virile” because of her desire to “imitate
man” is to doom her to inauthenticity. I have already said how
psychoanalysts create ambiguities by accepting masculine-feminine
categories as currently defined by society. Thus, man today represents
the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—
while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she
behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the
482

male. Her sports, her political and intellectual activities, and her desire
for other women are interpreted as “masculine protest”; there is a
refusal to take into account the values toward which she is
transcending, which inevitably leads to the belief that she is making
the inauthentic choice of a subjective attitude. The great
misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to
hold that it is
natural
for the human female to make a
feminine
woman
of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to
realize this ideal; the “real
woman” is an artificial product that
civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past;
these supposed “instincts” of coquetry or docility are inculcated in her
just as phallic pride is for man; he does not always accept his virile
vocation; she has good reasons to accept even less docilely the
vocation assigned to her. The notions of inferiority complex and
masculinity complex remind me of the anecdote that Denis de
Rougemont recounts in
La part du diable (The Devil’s Share):
a
woman imagined that birds were attacking her when she went
walking in the country; after several months of psychoanalytical
treatment that failed to cure her of her obsession, the doctor
accompanied her to the clinic garden and realized that
the birds were
attacking her
. Woman feels undermined because in fact the
restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses
to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the
world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility,
it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation.
Homosexuals’ confessions collected by Havelock Ellis and Stekel—
platonic in the first case and openly declared in the second—clearly
show that feminine
specificity
is what outrages the two subjects:
Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of
myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the
real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself
that, whatever anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was
not a girl … I regarded the conformation of my body as a
mysterious accident … When I could only crawl my absorbing
interest was hammers and carpet-nails. Before I could walk I
begged to be put on horses’ backs … By the time I was 7 it
seemed to me that everything I liked was called wrong for a
483

girl … I was not at all a happy little child and often cried and was
made irritable; I was so confused by the talk about boys and
girls … Every half-holiday I went out with the boys from my
brothers’ school … When I was about 11 my parents got more
mortified at my behavior and perpetually threatened me with a
boarding-school … My going was finally announced to me as a
punishment to me for being what I was … In whatever direction
my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from the point of view
of a boy … A consideration of social matters led me to feel very
sorry for women, whom I regarded as made by a deliberate
process of manufacture into the fools I thought they were, and
by the same process that I myself was being made one. I felt
more and more that men were to be envied and women pitied. I
lay
stress on this for it started in me a deliberate interest in
women as women, I began to feel protective and kindly toward
women.
As for Stekel’s transvestite:
Until her sixth year, in spite of assertions of those around her,
she thought she was a boy, dressed like a girl for reasons
unknown to her … At 6, she told herself, “I’ll be a lieutenant,
and if God wills it, a marshal.” She often dreamed of mounting a
horse and riding out of town at the head of an army. Though
very intelligent, she was miserable to be transferred from an
ordinary school to a lycée
… she was afraid of becoming
effeminate
.
This revolt by no means implies a sapphic predestination; most little
girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the
accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and
aspirations; Colette Audry angrily discovered at the age of twelve that
she could never become a sailor;
3
the future woman naturally feels
indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her. The question
is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand
why she accepts them. Her conformism comes from her docility and
timidity; but this resignation will easily turn to revolt if society’s
compensations are judged inadequate. This is what will happen in
484

cases where the adolescent girl feels unattractive as a woman:
anatomical configurations become particularly important when this
happens; if she is, or believes she is, ugly or has a bad figure, woman
rejects a feminine destiny for which she feels ill adapted; but it would
be wrong to say that she acquires a mannish attitude to compensate
for a lack of femininity: rather, the opportunities offered to the
adolescent girl in exchange for the masculine advantages she is asked
to sacrifice seem too meager to her. All little girls envy boys’ practical
clothes; it is their reflection in the mirror and the promises of things to
come that make their furbelows little by little all the more precious; if
the mirror harshly reflects an ordinary face, if it offers no promise,
then lace and ribbons are an embarrassing, even ridiculous, livery, and
the “tomboy” obstinately wishes to remain a boy.
Even if she has a good figure and is pretty, the woman who is
involved in her own projects or who claims her freedom in general
refuses to abdicate in favor of another human being; she recognizes
herself in her acts,
not in her immanent presence: male desire reducing
her to the limits of her body shocks her as much as it shocks a young
boy; she feels the same disgust for her submissive female companions
as the virile man feels for the passive homosexual. She adopts a
masculine attitude in part to repudiate any involvement with them; she
disguises her clothes, her looks, and her language, she forms a couple
with a female friend where she assumes the male role: this playacting
is in fact a “masculine protest”; but it is a secondary phenomenon;
what is spontaneous is the conquering and sovereign subject’s shame
at the idea of changing into a carnal prey. Many women athletes are
homosexual; they do not perceive this body that is muscle, movement,
extension, and momentum as passive flesh; it does not magically
beckon caresses, it is a hold on the world, not a thing of the world: the
gap between the body for-itself and the body for-others seems in this
case to be unbreachable. Analogous resistance is found in women of
action, “brainy” types for whom even carnal submission is
impossible. Were equality of the sexes concretely realized, this
obstacle would be in large part eradicated; but man is still imbued with
his own sense of superiority, which is a disturbing conviction for the
woman who does not share it. It should be noted, however, that the
most willful and domineering women seldom hesitate to confront the
male: the woman considered “virile” is often clearly heterosexual. She
485

does not want to renounce her claims as a human being; but she has
no intention of mutilating her femininity either; she chooses to enter
the masculine world, even to annex it for herself. Her robust
sensuality has no fear of male roughness; she has fewer defenses to
overcome than the timid virgin in finding joy in a man’s body. A rude
and animal nature will not feel the humiliation of coitus; an intellectual
with an intrepid mind will challenge it; sure of herself and in a
fighting mood, a woman will gladly engage in a duel she is sure to
win. George Sand had a predilection for young and “feminine” men;
but Mme de Staël looked for youth and beauty only in her later life:
dominating men by her sharp mind and proudly accepting their
admiration, she could hardly have felt a prey in their arms. A
sovereign such as Catherine the Great could even allow herself
masochistic ecstasies: she alone remained the master in these games.
Isabelle Eberhardt, who dressed as a man and traversed the Sahara on
horseback, felt no less diminished when she gave herself to some
vigorous sharpshooter. The woman who refuses to be the man’s
vassal is far from always fleeing him; rather she tries to make him the
instrument of her pleasure. In certain favorable circumstances—
mainly dependent on her partner—the very notion of competition will
disappear, and she will enjoy experiencing her woman’s condition
just as man experiences his.
But this arrangement between her active personality and her role as
passive female is nevertheless more difficult for her than for man;
rather than wear themselves out in this effort, many women will give
up trying. There are numerous lesbians among women artists and
writers. It is not because their sexual specificity is the source of
creative energy or a manifestation of the existence of this superior
energy; it is rather that being absorbed in serious work, they do not
intend to waste their time playing the woman’s role or struggling
against men. Not admitting male superiority, they do not wish to
pretend to accept it or tire themselves contesting it; they seek release,
peace, and diversion in sexual pleasure: they could spend their time
more profitably without a partner who acts like an adversary; and so
they free themselves from the chains attached to femininity. Of
course, the nature of her heterosexual experiences will often lead the
“virile” woman to choose between assuming or repudiating her sex.
Masculine disdain confirms the feeling of unattractiveness in an ugly
486

woman; a lover’s arrogance will wound a proud woman. All the
motives for frigidity we have envisaged are found here: resentment,
spite, fear of pregnancy, abortion trauma, and so on. They become all
the weightier the more woman defies man.
However, homosexuality is not always an entirely satisfactory
solution for a domineering woman; since she seeks to affirm herself,
it vexes her not to fully realize her feminine possibilities; heterosexual
relations seem to her at once an impoverishment and an enrichment; in
repudiating the limitations implied by her sex, she may limit herself in
another way. Just as the frigid woman desires pleasure even while
rejecting it, the lesbian would often like to be a normal and complete
woman while at the same time not wanting it. This hesitation is
evident in the case of the transvestite studied by Stekel:
We have seen that she was only comfortable with boys and did
not want to “become effeminate.” At sixteen years of age, she
formed her first relations with young girls; she had a profound
contempt for them, which gave her eroticism a sadistic quality;
she ardently, but platonically, courted a friend she respected: she
felt disgust for those she possessed. She threw herself fiercely
into difficult studies. Disappointed by her first serious Sapphic
love affair, she frenetically indulged in purely sensual
experiences and began to drink. At seventeen, she met the young
man she married: but she thought of him as her wife; she dressed
in a masculine way, and she continued to drink and study. At
first she only had vaginismus and intercourse
never produced an
orgasm. She considered her position “humiliating”; she was
always the one to take the aggressive and active role. She left her
husband even while being “madly in love with him” and took up
relations with women again. She met a male artist to whom she
gave herself, but still without an orgasm. Her life was divided
into clearly defined periods; for a while she wrote, worked
creatively, and felt completely male; she episodically and
sadistically slept with women during these periods. Then she
would have a female period. She underwent analysis because she
wanted to reach orgasm.
The lesbian would easily be able to consent to the loss of her
487

femininity if in doing so she gained triumphant masculinity. But no.
She obviously remains deprived of the virile organ; she can deflower
her girlfriend with her hand or use an artificial penis to imitate
possession; but she is still a eunuch. She may suffer acutely from this.
Because she is incomplete as a woman, impotent as a man, her
malaise sometimes manifests itself in psychoses. A patient told
Roland Dalbiez, “It would be better if I had a thing to penetrate
with.”
4
Another wished that her breasts were rigid. The lesbian will
often try to compensate for her virile inferiority by arrogance or
exhibitionism, which in fact reveals inner imbalance. Sometimes, also,
she will succeed in establishing with other women a type of relation
completely analogous to those a “feminine” man or an adolescent still
unsure of his virility might have with them. A striking case of such a
destiny is that of Sandor reported by Krafft-Ebing. She used this
means to attain a perfect balance destroyed only by the intervention of
society:
Sarolta came of a titled Hungarian family known for its
eccentricities. Her father had her reared as a boy, calling her
Sandor; she rode horseback, hunted, and so on. She was under
such influences until, at thirteen, she was placed in an institution.
A little later she fell in love with an English girl, pretending to be
a boy, and ran away with her. At home again, she resumed the
name Sandor and wore boy’s clothing, while being carefully
educated. She went on long trips with her father, always in male
attire; she was addicted to sports, drank, and visited brothels.
She felt particularly drawn toward actresses and other such
detached women, preferably not too young but “feminine
in
nature.” “It delighted me,” she related “if the passion of a lady
was disclosed under a poetic veil. All immodesty in a woman
was disgusting to me. I had an indescribable aversion to female
attire—indeed, for everything feminine. But only insofar as it
concerned me; for, on the other hand, I was all enthusiasm for
the beautiful Sex.” She had numerous affairs with women and
spent a good deal of money on them. At the same time, she was
a valued contributor to two important journals.
She lived for three years in “marriage” with a woman ten
years older than herself, from whom she broke away only with
488

great difficulty. She was able to inspire violent passions. Falling
in love with a young teacher, she was married to her in an
elaborate ceremony, the girl and her family believing her to be a
man; her father-in-law on one occasion noticed what seemed to
be an erection (probably a priapus); she shaved as a matter of
form, but servants in the hotel room suspected the truth from
seeing blood on her bedclothes and from spying through the
keyhole.
Thus unmasked, Sandor was put in prison and later acquitted,
after thorough investigation. She was greatly saddened by her
enforced separation from her beloved Marie, to whom she wrote
long and impassioned letters from her cell.
The examination showed that her conformation was not
wholly feminine: her pelvis was small, and she had no waist.
Her breasts were developed, her sexual parts quite feminine but
not maturely formed. Her menstruation appeared late, at
seventeen, and she felt a profound horror of the function. She
was equally horrified at the thought of sexual relations with the
male; her sense of modesty was developed only in regard to
women and to the point that she would feel less shyness in going
to bed with a man than with a woman. It was very embarrassing
for her to be treated as a woman, and she was truly in anguish at
having to wear feminine clothes. She felt that she was “drawn as
by a magnetic force toward women of twenty-four to thirty.” She
found sexual satisfaction exclusively in caressing her loved one,
never in being caressed. At times she made use of a stocking
stuffed with oakum as a priapus. She detested men. She was
very sensitive to the moral esteem of others, and she had much
literary talent, wide culture, and a colossal memory.
*
Sandor was not psychoanalyzed but several salient points emerge just
from the presentation of the facts. It seems that most spontaneously
and “without a masculine protest,” she always thought of herself as a
man, thanks to the way she was brought up and her body’s
constitution; the way her father included her in his trips and his life
obviously had a decisive influence on her; her virility was so
confirmed that she did not show the slightest ambivalence toward
women: she loved them like a man, without feeling compromised by
489

them; she loved them in a purely dominating and active way, without
accepting reciprocity. However, it is striking that she “detested men”
and that she particularly cherished older women. This suggests that
Sandor had a
masculine
Oedipus complex vis-à-vis her mother; she
perpetuated the infantile attitude of the very young girl who, forming a
couple with her mother, nourished the hope of one day protecting and
dominating her. Very often the maternal tenderness a child has been
deprived of haunts her whole adult life: raised by her father, Sandor
must have dreamed of a loving and treasured mother, whom she
sought afterward in other women; this explains her deep jealousy of
other men, linked to her respect and “poetic” love for “isolated” and
older women who were endowed in her eyes with a sacred quality.
Her attitude was exactly that of Rousseau with Mme de Warens and
the young Benjamin Constant concerning Mme de Charrière:
sensitive, “feminine” adolescent boys also turn to maternal mistresses.
This type of lesbian is found in more or less pronounced forms, one
who has never identified with her mother—because she either
admired her or detested her too much—but who, refusing to be a
woman, desires the softness of feminine protection around her. From
the bosom of this warm womb she can emerge into the world with
boyish daring; she acts like a man, but as a man she has a fragility that
makes her desire the love of an older mistress; the couple will
reproduce the classic heterosexual couple: matron and adolescent boy.
Psychoanalysts have clearly noted the importance of the
relationship a homosexual woman had earlier with her mother. There
are two cases where the adolescent girl has difficulty escaping her
influence: if she has been overly protected by an anxious mother; or if
she was mistreated by a “bad mother” who inculcated a deep feeling
of guilt in her. In the first case, their relations often bordered on
homosexuality: they slept together, caressed, or kissed each other’s
breasts; the young girl will seek this same pleasure in new arms. In
the second case, she will feel an ardent need of a “good mother” who
protects her against her own mother, who removes the curse she feels
weighing on her. One of the stories Havelock Ellis recounts concerns
a subject who detested her mother throughout her childhood; she
describes the love she felt at sixteen for an older woman:
I felt like an orphan child who had suddenly acquired a mother,
490

and through her I began to feel less antagonistic to grown people
and to feel … respect [for them]… My love for her was perfectly
pure, and I thought of hers as simply maternal … I liked her to
touch me and she sometimes held me in her arms or let me sit on
her lap. At bedtime she used to come and say good-night and
kiss me upon the mouth.
*
If the older woman is willing, the younger one will joyfully
abandon herself to more ardent embraces. She will usually assume the
passive role because she desires to be dominated, protected, rocked,
and caressed like a child. Whether these relations remain platonic or
become carnal, they often have the characteristics of a truly passionate
love. However, the very fact that they appear as a classic stage in the
adolescent girl’s development means that they cannot suffice to
explain a determined choice of homosexuality. The young girl seeks
in it both a liberation and a security she can also find in masculine
arms. Once the period of amorous enthusiasm has passed, the
younger one often experiences the ambivalent feeling for her older
partner she felt toward her mother; she falls under her influence while
at the same time wishing to extricate herself from it; if the other
persists in holding her back, she will remain her “prisoner” for a
time;
5
but either in violent scenes or amicably, she will manage to
escape; having succeeded in expunging her adolescence, she feels
ready to face a normal woman’s life. For her lesbian vocation to
affirm itself, either she has to reject her femininity—like Sandor—or
her femininity has to flourish more happily in feminine arms. Thus,
fixation on the mother is clearly not enough to explain homosexuality.
And it can be chosen for completely different reasons. A woman may
discover or sense through complete or tentative experiences that she
will not derive pleasure from heterosexual relations, that only another
woman is able to satisfy her: in particular, for the woman who
worships her femininity, the sapphic embrace turns out to be the most
satisfying.
It is very important to emphasize this: the refusal to make oneself
an object is not always what leads a woman to homosexuality; most
lesbians, on the contrary, seek to claim the treasures of their
femininity. Consenting to metamorphose oneself into a passive thing
does not mean renouncing all claims to subjectivity: the woman
491

thereby hopes to realize herself as the in-itself;
but she will then seek
to grasp herself in her alterity. Alone, she does not succeed in
separating herself in reality; she might caress her breasts, but she does
not know how they would seem to a foreign hand, nor how they
would come to life under the foreign hand; a man can reveal to her the
existence
for itself
of her flesh, but not what it is
for an other
. It is
only when her fingers caress a woman’s body whose fingers in turn
caress her body that the miracle of the mirror takes place. Between
man and woman love is an act; each one torn from self becomes other:
what delights the woman in love is that the passive listlessness of her
flesh is reflected in the man’s ardor; but the narcissistic woman is
clearly baffled by the charms of the erect sex. Between women, love
is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than
to re-create oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there
is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and
object, sovereign and slave in exact reciprocity; this duality is
complicity. “The close resemblance,” says Colette, “validates even
sensual pleasure. The woman friend basks in the certitude of
caressing a body whose secrets she knows and whose own body tells
her what she prefers.”
6
And Renée Vivien:
Our heart is alike in our woman’s breast
,
*
Dearest! Our body is identically formed
.
The same heavy fate was laid on our soul
I translate your smile and the shadow on your face
.
My softness is equal to your immense softness
,
At times it even seems we are of the same race
I love in you my child, my friend, and my sister
.
†
This uncoupling can occur in a maternal form; the mother who
recognizes and alienates herself in her daughter often has a sexual
attachment to her; the desire to protect and rock in her arms a soft
object made of flesh is shared with the lesbian. Colette emphasizes
this analogy, writing in
Les vrilles de la vigne
(
The Tender Shoot):
“You will give me pleasure, bent over me, your eyes full of maternal
concern, you who seek, through your passionate woman friend, the
child you never had.”
492

And Renée Vivien expresses the same feeling:
Come, I shall carry you off like a child who is sick
,
Like a child who is plaintive and fearful and sick
.
Within my firm arms I clasp your slight body
,
You shall see that I know how to heal and protect
,
And my arms are strong, the better to protect you
.
7
And again:
I love you to be weak and calm in my arms …
Like a warm cradle where you will take your rest
.
*
In all love—sexual or maternal—there is both greed and generosity,
the desire to possess the other and to give the other everything; but
when both women are narcissists, caressing an extension of
themselves or their reflection in the child or the lover, the mother and
the lesbian are notably similar.
However, narcissism does not always lead to homosexuality either,
as Marie Bashkirtseff’s example shows; there is not the slightest trace
of affection for women in her writings; intellectual rather than sensual,
extremely vain, she dreams from childhood of being validated by
man: nothing interests her unless it contributes to her glory. A woman
who idolizes only herself and who strives for abstract success is
incapable of a warm complicity with other women; for her, they are
only rivals and enemies.
In truth, there is never only one determining factor; it is always a
question of a choice made from a complex whole, contingent on a free
decision; no sexual destiny governs an individual’s life: on the
contrary, his eroticism expresses his general attitude to existence.
Circumstances, however, also have an important part in this choice.
Today, the two sexes still live mostly separated: in boarding schools
and in girls’ schools the passage from intimacy to sexuality is quick;
there are far fewer lesbians in circles where girl and boy camaraderie
encourages heterosexual experiences. Many women who work
among women in workshops and offices and who have little
opportunity to be around men will
form amorous friendships with
women: it will be materially and morally practical to join their lives.
493

The absence or failure of heterosexual relations will destine them to
inversion. It is difficult to determine the boundary between resignation
and predilection: a woman can devote herself to women because a
man has disappointed her, but sometimes he disappoints her because
she was looking for a woman in him. For all these reasons, it is
wrong to establish a radical distinction between heterosexual and
homosexual. Once the indecisive time of adolescence has passed, the
normal male no longer allows himself homosexual peccadilloes; but
the normal woman often returns to the loves—platonic or not—that
enchanted her youth. Disappointed by men, she will seek in feminine
arms the male lover who betrayed her; in
The Vagabond
, Colette
wrote about this consoling role that forbidden sexual pleasures often
play in the lives of women: some of them can spend their whole
existence consoling each other. Even a woman fulfilled by male
embraces might not refuse calmer sexual pleasures. Passive and
sensual, a woman friend’s caresses will not shock her since all she
has to do is let herself go, let herself be fulfilled. Active and ardent,
she will seem “androgynous,” not because of a mysterious
combination of hormones, but simply because aggressiveness and the
taste for possession are looked on as virile attributes; Claudine in love
with Renaud still covets Rézi’s charms; as fully woman as she is, she
still continues to desire to take and caress. Of course, these “perverse”
desires are carefully repressed in “nice women”; they nonetheless
manifest themselves as pure but passionate friendships or in the guise
of maternal tenderness; sometimes they are suddenly revealed during
a psychosis or a menopausal crisis.
So it is all the more useless to try to place lesbians in two definitive
categories. Because social role-playing is sometimes superimposed on
their real relations—taking pleasure in imitating a bisexual couple—
they themselves suggest the division into virile and feminine. But the
fact that one wears an austere suit and the other a flowing dress must
not create an illusion. Looking more closely, one can ascertain—
except in special cases—that their sexuality is ambiguous. A woman
who becomes lesbian because she rejects male domination often
experiences the joy of recognizing the same proud Amazon in
another; not long ago many guilty loves flourished among the women
students of Sèvres who lived together far from men; they were proud
to belong to a feminine elite and wanted to remain autonomous
494

subjects; this complexity that united them against the privileged caste
enabled each one to admire in a friend this prestigious being she
cherished in herself; embracing each other, each one was both man
and woman and was enchanted with the other’s androgynous virtues.
Inversely, a woman who wants to enjoy the pleasures of her
femininity in feminine arms also knows the pride of obeying no
master. Renée Vivien ardently loved feminine beauty, and she wanted
to be beautiful; she took great care of her appearance, she was proud
of her long hair; but she also liked to feel free and intact; in her poems
she expresses scorn for those women who through marriage consent
to become serfs of a male. Her taste for hard liquor and her sometimes
obscene language manifested her desire for virility. The truth is that
for most couples caresses are reciprocal. Thus it follows that the roles
are distributed in very uncertain ways: the most infantile woman can
play an adolescent boy toward a protective matron, or a mistress
leaning on her lover’s arm. They can love each other as equals.
Because her partners are counterparts, all combinations,
transpositions, exchanges, and scenarios are possible. Relations
balance each other out depending on the psychological tendencies of
each woman friend and on the situation as a whole. If there is one
who helps or keeps the other, she assumes the male’s functions:
tyrannical protector, exploited dupe, respected lord, or even
sometimes a pimp; a moral, social, and intellectual superiority will
often confer authority on her; however, the one more loved will enjoy
the privileges that the more loving one’s passionate attachment invests
her with. Like that of a man and a woman, the association of two
women can take many different forms; it is based on feeling, interest,
or habit; it is conjugal or romantic; it has room for sadism,
masochism, generosity, faithfulness, devotion, caprice, egotism, and
betrayal; there are prostitutes as well as great lovers among lesbians.
There are, however, certain circumstances that give these relations
particular characteristics. They are not established by an institution or
customs, nor regulated by conventions: they are lived more sincerely
because of this. Men and women—even husband and wife—more or
less play roles with each other, and woman, on whom the male
always imposes some kind of directive, does so even more:
exemplary virtue, charm, coquetry, childishness, or austerity; never in
the presence of the husband and the lover does she feel fully herself;
495

she does not show off to a woman friend, she has nothing to feign,
they are too similar not to show themselves as they are. This similarity
gives rise to the most complete intimacy. Eroticism often has only a
very small part in these unions; sexual pleasure has a less striking
character, less dizzying than between man and woman, it does not
lead to such overwhelming metamorphoses; but when male and
female lovers have separated into their individual flesh, they become
strangers again; and even the male body is repulsive to the woman;
and the man sometimes feels a kind of bland distaste for the woman’s
body; between women, carnal tenderness
is more equal, continuous,
they are not transported in frenetic ecstasy, but they never fall into
hostile indifference; seeing and touching each other are calm pleasures
discreetly prolonging those of the bed. Sarah Posonby’s union with
her beloved lasted for almost fifty years without a cloud: they seem to
have been able to create a peaceful Eden on the fringes of the world.
But sincerity also has a price. Because they show themselves freely,
without caring either to hide or to control themselves, women incite
each other to incredible violence. Man and women intimidate each
other because they are different: he feels pity and apprehension
toward her; he strives to treat her courteously, indulgently, and
circumspectly; she respects him and somewhat fears him, she tries to
control herself in front of him; each one tries to spare the mysterious
other whose feelings and reactions are hard to discern. Women among
themselves are pitiless; they foil, provoke, chase, attack, and lead each
other on to the limits of abjection. Masculine calm—be it indifference
or self-control—is a barrier feminine emotions come up against: but
between two women friends, there is escalation of tears and
convulsions; their patience in endlessly going over criticisms and
explanations is insatiable. Demands, recriminations, jealousy, tyranny
—all these plagues of conjugal life pour out in heightened form. If
such love is often stormy, it is also usually more threatened than
heterosexual love. It is criticized by the society into which it cannot
always integrate. A woman who assumes the masculine attitude—by
her character, situation, and the force of her passion—will regret not
giving her woman friend a normal and respectable life, not being able
to marry her, leading her along unusual paths: these are the feelings
Radclyffe Hall attributes to her heroine in
The Well of Loneliness;
this
remorse is conveyed by a morbid anxiety and an even greater
496

torturous jealousy. The more passive or less infatuated woman will
suffer from society’s censure; she will think herself degraded,
perverted, frustrated, she will resent the one who has imposed this lot
on her. It might be that one of the two women desires a child; either
she sadly resigns herself to her childlessness or both adopt a child or
the one who desires motherhood asks a man for his services; the child
is sometimes a link, sometimes also a new source of friction.
What gives women enclosed in homosexuality a masculine
character is not their erotic life, which, on the contrary, confines them
to a feminine universe: it is all the responsibilities they have to assume
because they do without men. Their situation is the opposite of that of
the courtesan who sometimes has a male mind by dint of living
among males—like Ninon de Lenclos—but who depends on them.
The particular atmosphere around lesbians stems from the contrast
between the gynaeceum character of their
private life and the
masculine independence of their public existence. They behave like
men in a world without men. A woman alone always seems a little
unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other
through their women—wives, mistresses, “kept” women; when
masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed
before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an
“erotic perversion,” feminine homosexuality elicits smiles; but
inasmuch as it implies a way of life, it provokes scorn or scandal. If
there is an affectation in lesbians’ attitudes, it is because they have no
way of living their situation naturally: natural implies that one does
not reflect on self, that one acts without representing one’s acts to
oneself; but people’s behavior constantly makes the lesbian conscious
of herself. She can only follow her path with calm indifference if she
is older or secure in her social prestige.
It is difficult to determine, for example, if it is by taste or by
defense mechanism that she so often dresses in a masculine way. It
certainly comes in large part from a spontaneous choice. Nothing is
less
natural
than dressing like a woman; no doubt masculine clothes
are also artificial, but they are more comfortable and simple and made
to favor action rather than impede it; George Sand and Isabelle
Eberhardt wore men’s suits; Thyde Monnier in her last book spoke of
her predilection for wearing trousers;
8
all active women like flat shoes
and sturdy clothes. The meaning of feminine attire is clear: it is a
497

question of decoration, and decorating oneself is offering oneself;
heterosexual feminists were formerly as intransigent as lesbians on
this point: they refused to make themselves merchandise on display,
they wore suits and felt hats; fancy low-cut dresses seemed to them
the symbol of the social order they were fighting. Today they have
succeeded in mastering reality, and the symbolic has less importance
in their eyes. But it remains for the lesbian insofar as she must still
assert her claim. It might also be—if physical particularities have
motivated her vocation—that austere clothes suit her better. It must be
added that one of the roles clothing plays is to gratify woman’s tactile
sensuality; but the lesbian disdains the consolations of velvet and silk:
like Sandor she will appreciate them on her woman friend, or her
friend’s body may even replace them. This is why a lesbian often
likes hard liquor, smokes strong tobacco, uses rough language, and
imposes rigorous exercise on herself: erotically, she shares in
feminine softness; by contrast, she likes an intense environment. This
aspect can make her enjoy men’s company. But a new factor enters
here:
the often ambiguous relationship she has with them. A woman
who is very sure of her masculinity will want only men as friends and
associates: this assurance is rarely seen except in a woman who
shares interests with men, who—in business, action, or art—works
and succeeds like a man. When Gertrude Stein entertained, she only
talked with the men and left to Alice Toklas the job of talking with
their women companions.
9
It is toward women that the very
masculine homosexual woman will have an ambivalent attitude: she
scorns them, but she has an inferiority complex in relation to them
both as a woman and as a man; she fears being perceived by them as a
tomboy, an incomplete man, which leads her either to display a
haughty superiority or to manifest—like Stekel’s transvestite—a
sadistic aggressiveness toward them. But this case is rather rare. We
have seen that most lesbians partially reject men. For them as well as
for the frigid woman, there is disgust, resentment, shyness, or pride;
they do not really feel similar to men; to their feminine resentment is
added a masculine inferiority complex; they are rivals, better armed to
seduce, possess, and keep their prey; they detest their power over
women, they detest the “soiling” to which they subject women. They
also take exception to seeing men hold social privileges and to feeling
that men are stronger than they: it is a crushing humiliation not to be
498

able to fight with a rival, to know he can knock you down with one
blow. This complex hostility is one of the reasons some homosexual
women declare themselves as homosexuals; they see only other
homosexual women; they group together to show they do not need
men either socially or sexually. From there one easily slides into
useless boastfulness and all the playacting of inauthenticity. The
lesbian first plays at being a man; then being lesbian itself becomes a
game; a transvestite goes from disguise to livery; and the woman
under the pretext of freeing herself from man’s oppression makes
herself the slave of her personage; she did not want to confine herself
in a woman’s situation, but she imprisons herself in that of the
lesbian. Nothing gives a worse impression of small-mindedness and
mutilation than these clans of liberated women. It must be added that
many women only declare themselves homosexual out of self-interest:
they adopt equivocal appearances with exaggerated consciousness,
hoping to catch men who like “perverts.” These show-off zealots—
who are obviously those one notices most—contribute to throwing
discredit on what public opinion considers a vice and a pose.
In truth, homosexuality is no more a deliberate perversion than a
fatal curse.
10
It is an attitude that is
chosen in situation;
it is both
motivated and freely adopted. None of the factors the subject accepts
in this choice—physiological facts, psychological history, or social
circumstances—is determining, although all contribute to explaining
it. It is one way among others for woman to solve the problems posed
by her condition in general and by her erotic situation in particular.
Like all human behavior, this will involve playacting, imbalance,
failure, or lies, or, on the other hand, it will be the source of fruitful
experiences, depending on whether it is lived in bad faith, laziness,
and inauthenticity or in lucidity, generosity, and freedom.
1.
A heterosexual woman can easily have a friendship with certain homosexual men,
because she finds security and amusement in these asexual relations. But on the whole,
she feels hostile toward these men who in themselves or in others degrade the
sovereign male into a passive thing.
2.
It is noteworthy that English law punishes homosexuality in men while not
considering it a crime for women.
3.

In the Eyes of Memory
.
499

4.

La méthode psychanalytique et la doctrine freudienne (Psychoanalytical Method
and the Doctrine of Freud”
).
*
Krafft-Ebing,
Psychopathia Sexualis
.—T
RANS
.
*

Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, Volume 2:
Sexual Inversion
.—T
RANS
.
5.
As in Dorothy Baker’s novel
Trio
, which is, moreover, very superficial.
6.

Ces plaisirs (The Pure and the Impure
).
*
Discrepancy between Renée Vivien’s poem quoted by Beauvoir and Vivien’s
published version, both translated by Gillian Spraggs.—T
RANS
.
†
Cited incorrectly by Beauvoir as
Sortilèges
, which is nonexistent; poem from
translation of
Sillages
(1908; Sea Wakes).—T
RANS
.
7.

At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand
.
*
Discrepancy between Vivien’s poem quoted by Beauvoir and Vivien’s published
version, both translated by Gillian Spraggs; from “Je t’aime d’être faible” (“I Love You
to Be Weak”), in ibid.—T
RANS
.
8.

Me
.
9.
A heterosexual woman who believes—or wants to persuade herself—that she
transcends the difference of the sexes by her own worth will often have the same
attitude; for example Mme de Staël.
10.

The Well of Loneliness
presents a heroine marked by a psychophysiological
inevitability. But the documentary value of this novel is very insubstantial in spite of
its reputation.
500