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 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 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 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 ind
ividuals 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:
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 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 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 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.—TRANS.
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]).