Abstract

The pivotal theme of Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, Le Deuxième Sexe, is the idea that woman in relation to man has positioned herself secondarily in the lifeworld as the Other of man since the ancient times and further that this secondary position of women in the social order is imposed by the force of the patriarchal atmosphere rather than the feminine characteristics. This paper interprets the details of this argumentation by referring to Beauvoir’s addressing the issue of how to reply to the question: What is a woman? And an appropriate answer to this question will lead one to seeking the task of resolving the ultimate problem of her feminist discourse: Why is woman the Other? In this regard the point Beauvoir makes here it is that the Otherness or inferiority of woman is not naturally given or inherently found in the female sex rather it has been the process of historical unfolding that enabled man to treat woman as a secondary being and woman became convinced with that subordinate role in the making of human tradition. The two words that Beauvoir finds most significant for her existentialist-feminist interpretation of the male and the female statures in human tradition are transcendence and immanence. Men have always been free to transcend their limitations in terms of involving themselves in the progressive life projects whereas women have never been so free to act their own in the life projects instead they find themselves imprisoned in their immanence—the overall factual givenness of their being in the world. If woman submits to her immanence, she will do so in bad faith, as she is a free individual who cannot only make herself free from this immanence, but she can also project herself through her future endeavors by transcending her facticity.