The Second Sex (98 page)

The second preconceived idea immediately following the first is that the child is sure to find happiness in his mother’s arms. There is no such thing as an “unnatural mother,” since maternal love has nothing natural about it: but precisely because of that, there are bad mothers. And one of the great truths that psychoanalysis has proclaimed is the danger “normal” parents constitute for a child. The complexes, obsessions, and neuroses adults suffer from have their roots in their family past; parents who have their own conflicts, quarrels, and dramas are the least desirable company for children. Deeply marked by the paternal household, they approach their own children through complexes and frustrations: and this chain of misery perpetuates itself indefinitely. In particular, maternal sadomasochism creates guilt feelings for the daughter that will express themselves in sadomasochistic behavior toward her own children, without end. There is extravagant bad faith in the conflation of contempt for women and respect shown for mothers. It is a criminal paradox to deny women all public activity, to close masculine careers to them, to proclaim them incapable in all domains, and to nonetheless entrust to them the most delicate and most serious of all undertakings: the formation of a human being. There are many women who, out of custom and tradition, are still refused education, culture, responsibilities, and activities that are the privileges of men, and in whose arms, nevertheless, babies are placed without scruple, as in earlier life they were consoled for their inferiority to boys with dolls; they are deprived of living their lives; as compensation, they are allowed to play with flesh-and-blood toys. A woman would have to be perfectly happy or a saint to resist the temptation of abusing her rights. Montesquieu was perhaps right when he said it would be better to entrust women with the government of state than with a family; for as soon as she is given the opportunity, woman is as reasonable and efficient as man: it is in abstract thought, in concerted action that she most easily rises above her sex; it is far more difficult in this day and age to free herself from her feminine past, to find an emotional balance that nothing in her situation favors. Man is also much more balanced and rational in his work than at home; he calculates with mathematical precision: he “lets himself go” with his wife, becoming illogical, a liar, capricious; likewise, she “lets herself go” with her child.
And this self-indulgence is more dangerous because she can better defend herself against her husband than the child can defend himself against her. It would obviously be better for the child if his mother were a complete person and not a mutilated one, a woman who finds in her work and her relations with the group a self-accomplishment she could not attain through his tyranny; and it would be preferable also for the child to be left infinitely less to his parents than he is now, that his studies and amusements take place with other children under the control of adults whose links with him are only impersonal and dispassionate.

Even in cases where the child is a treasure within a happy or at least balanced life, he cannot be the full extent of his mother’s horizons. He does not wrest her from her immanence; she shapes his flesh, she supports him, she cares for him: she can do no more than create a situation that solely the child’s freedom can transcend; when she invests in his future, it is again by proxy that she transcends herself through the universe and time; that is, once again she dooms herself to dependency. Not only his ingratitude but the failure of her son will refute all of her hopes: as in marriage or love, she puts the care of justifying her life in the hands of another, whereas the only authentic behavior is to assume it freely herself. Woman’s inferiority, as we have seen, originally came from the fact that she was restricted to repeating life, while man invented reasons for living, in his eyes more essential than the pure facticity of existence; confining woman to motherhood is the perpetuation of this situation. But today she demands participation in the movement by which humanity ceaselessly tries to find justification by surpassing itself; she can only consent to give life if life has meaning; she cannot try to be a mother without playing a role in economic, political, or social life. It is not the same thing to produce cannon fodder, slaves, victims, as to give birth to free men. In a properly organized society where the child would in great part be taken charge of by the group, where the mother would be cared for and helped, motherhood would absolutely not be incompatible with women’s work. On the contrary, a woman who works—farmer, chemist, or writer—has the easiest pregnancy because she is not centered on her own person; it is the woman who has the richest personal life who will give the most to her child and who will ask for the least, she who acquires real human values through effort and struggle will be the most fit to bring up children. If too often today a woman has a hard time reconciling the interests of her children with a profession that demands long hours away from home and all her strength, it is because, on the one hand, woman’s work is still too often a kind of slavery; on the other hand, no effort has been made to ensure children’s health, care, and education
outside the home. This is social neglect: but it is a sophism to justify it by pretending that a law was written in heaven or in the bowels of the earth that requires that the mother and child belong to each other exclusively; this mutual belonging in reality only constitutes a double and harmful oppression.

It is a mystification to maintain that woman becomes man’s equal through motherhood. Psychoanalysts have tried hard to prove that the child provides the equivalent of the penis for her: but enviable as this attribute may be, no one believes that possessing one can justify an existence or that such possession can be a supreme end in itself. There has been an enormous amount of talk about the sacred rights of women, but being a mother is not how women gained the right to vote; the unwed mother is still scorned; it is only in marriage that the mother is glorified—in other words, as long as she is subordinate to the husband. As long as he is the economic head of the family, even though it is she who cares for the children, they depend far more on him than on her. This is why, as has been seen, the mother’s relationship with her children is deeply influenced by the one she maintains with her husband.

So conjugal relations, homemaking, and motherhood form a whole in which all the parts are determinant; tenderly united to her husband, the wife can cheerfully carry out the duties of the home; happy with her children, she will be understanding of her husband. But this harmony is not easy to attain, for the different functions assigned to the wife conflict with each other. Women’s magazines amply advise the housewife on the art of maintaining her sexual attraction while doing the dishes, of remaining elegant throughout pregnancy, of reconciling flirtation, motherhood, and economy; but if she conscientiously follows their advice, she will soon be overwhelmed and disfigured by care; it is very difficult to remain desirable with chapped hands and a body deformed by pregnancies; this is why a woman in love often feels resentment of the children who ruin her seduction and deprive her of her husband’s caresses; if she is, by contrast, deeply maternal, she is jealous of the man who also claims the children as his. But then, the perfect homemaker, as has been seen, contradicts the movement of life: the child is the enemy of waxed floors. Maternal love is often lost in the reprimands and outbursts that underlie the concern for a well-kept home. It is not surprising that the woman torn between these contradictions often spends her day in a state of nervousness and bitterness; she always loses on some level, and her gains are precarious, they do not count as any sure success. She can never save herself by her work alone; it keeps her occupied, but does not constitute her justification: her justification rests
on outside freedoms. The wife shut up in her home cannot establish her existence on her own; she does not have the means to affirm herself in her singularity: and this singularity is consequently not acknowledged. For Arabs or Indians, and in many rural populations, a wife is only a female servant appreciated according to the work she provides, and who is replaced without regret if she disappears. In modern civilization, she is more or less individualized in her husband’s eyes; but unless she completely renounces her self, swallowed up like Natasha in a passionate and tyrannical devotion to her family, she suffers from being reduced to pure generality. She is
the
mistress of the house, the wife, the unique and indistinct mother; Natasha delights in this supreme self-effacement, and in rejecting all confrontation, she negates others. But the modern Western woman, by contrast, wants to be noticed by others as
this
mistress of the house,
this
wife,
this
mother,
this
woman. Herein lies the satisfaction she will seek in her social life.

The family is not a closed community: notwithstanding its separateness, it establishes relations with other social units; the home is not only an “interior” in which the couple is confined; it is also the expression of its living standard, its wealth, its tastes: it must be exhibited for others to see. It is essentially the woman who will organize this social life. The man is connected to the community as producer and citizen, by ties of an organic solidarity based on the division of labor; the couple is a social person, defined by the family, class, milieu, and race to which it belongs, attached by ties of mechanical solidarity to groups socially similar to themselves; the woman is the one most likely to embody this most purely: the husband’s professional relations often do not reflect his social level, while the wife, who does not have the obligations brought about by work, can limit herself to the company of her peers; besides, she has the leisure, through her “visits” and “receptions,” to promote these relations, useless in practice, and that, of course, matter only in categories of people wanting to hold their rank in the social hierarchy, that is, who consider themselves superior to certain others. She delights in showing off her home and even herself, which her husband and children do not see because they have a vested interest in them. Her social duty, which is to “represent,” will become part of the pleasure she has in showing herself to others.

First, she has to represent herself; at home, going about her occupations, she merely dresses: to go out, to entertain, she “dresses up.” Dressing has a twofold significance: it is meant to show the woman’s social standing (her standard of living, her wealth, the social class she belongs to), but at the same time it concretizes feminine narcissism; it is her uniform and her attire; the woman who suffers from not
doing
anything thinks she is expressing her
being
through her dress. Beauty treatments and dressing are kinds of work that allow her to appropriate her person as she appropriates her home through housework; she thus believes that she is choosing and
re-creating her own self. And social customs encourage her to alienate herself in her image. Like his body, a man’s clothes must convey his transcendence and not attract attention;
¹
for him neither elegance nor beauty constitutes him as object; thus he does not usually consider his appearance a reflection of his being. By contrast, society even requires woman to make herself an erotic object. The goal of the fashion to which she is in thrall is not to reveal her as an autonomous individual but, on the contrary, to cut her from her transcendence so as to offer her as a prey to male desires: fashion does not serve to fulfill her projects but on the contrary to thwart them. A skirt is less convenient than trousers, and high-heeled shoes impede walking; the least practical dresses and high heels, the most fragile hats and stockings, are the most elegant; whether the outfit disguises, deforms, or molds the body, in any case, it delivers it to view. This explains why dressing is an enchanting game for the little girl who wants to look at herself; later her child’s autonomy rises up against the constraints of light-colored muslin and patent-leather shoes; at the awkward age she is torn between the desire and the refusal to show herself off; once she has accepted her vocation as sex object, she enjoys adorning herself.