In the mid-20th century, the Western world experienced an unprecedented political, social and ideological upheaval. After women won the right to vote in many countries, a part of society questioned what happened to those aspects of life where men still dominated the female sex. This uneasiness, which later gave rise to the second wave of feminism, had as one of its fruits the work of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir , in which this thinker tried to understand the nature of femininity.

Next we will see what are the main characteristics of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory and the way in which it has influenced psychology and philosophy.

Who was Simone de Beauvoir? Brief biography

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 in the French capital, Paris. During her youth she studied philosophy at the Sorbonam first, and then at the École Normale Supérieure. In this second institution she met Jean-Paul Sartre , and at that moment began an affective relationship that lasted a lifetime. Finally, she died in Paris in 1986.

Sartre’s existentialist influences can be seen in The Second Sex , Beauvoir’s best known work, although the application of this perspective to gender studies was totally original, as we will see. On the other hand, besides developing an important theoretical body for feminism, this philosopher was also a novelist.

Simone de Beauvoir’s theory: its essential principles

These are the main characteristics of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical work:

1. Recognizes the masculine as the reference point

Beauvoir’s starting point was to realize that all of humanity’s cultural productions, from art to the use of language, have man as their central point, their main reference.

For example, when expressing the idea of “human being” the figure of man , or that of man and woman, is used by default, but never that of woman. Another example would be that, many times, developing the feminine version of something consists of adding unequivocally feminine attributes to “neutral” models. For example, there are products with a “women’s” version that differ from the standard model in that they are pink, thus indicating that the standard model is actually the male one. The same would be true in politics: the normal and expected thing is that politicians are men.

2. The concept of “the Other”

From the previous idea, Simone de Beauvoir develops the idea of “the Other”, or rather, “the other”. This category serves to express in a visual way the fact that the feminine gender moves around the periphery of the human , it is an attribute that is not integrated in the first one, but rather an extension of it, while the masculine is indeed indesligible from the idea of the human as if they were synonyms.

3. A Male Saga of Domination

Linked to the above elements is the corroboration that the story, to all intents and purposes, has been written by men, both literally and symbolically . Simone de Beauvoir sees in this a symptom of a phenomenon of domination and submission of women, and in turn the reason why women have been alienated from all aspects of life and symbolic production.

4. You are not born a woman, you become one

Recapitulating, we will see that for Simone de Beauvoir the reference point of the human is the man and that the feminine is, in any case, a specific attribute not comparable to the concept of the masculine, since it is defined according to its proximity or distance from this reference point .

The conclusion he draws from this is that the feminine is, in itself, something that has been designed and defined by men and imposed on women. This is summed up in his famous phrase “you are not born a woman, you become one”. In short, women are not so in a way that is alien to history and politics , but rather because of the dominance of the male gaze over “the Other”.

5. For a non-alienated femininity

The theory that Simone de Beauvoir traces in The Second Sex is not simply a description of what she considered to be reality; attached to this was a moral indication, of what should be done and is good . Specifically, this philosopher pointed out the need for women to define their own identity outside of the male gaze, without being coerced by the impositions of that moral and intellectual reference nourished by centuries and centuries of domination.