Becoming A Woman: Simone de Beauvoir on Female Embodiment

Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don ’t only create our own values, we create ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir, although an avowed life-long existentialist, posits limits to this central existentialist idea of self-creation and self-definition, qualifying the absolute freedom Jean-Paul Sartre posited in Being and Nothingness. By contrast de Beauvoir presents an ambiguous picture of human freedom, in which women struggle against the apparent disadvantages of the female body.

In The Second Sex, her most famous work, de Beauvoir sketches a kind of existential history of a woman ’s life: a story of how a woman’s attitude towards her body and bodily functions changes over the years, and of how society influences this attitude. Here de Beauvoir raises the core question of female embodiment: Are the supposed disadvantages of the female body actual disadvantages which exist objectively in all societies, or are they merely judged to be disadvantages by our society? She answers this question by exploring case studies of the various stages of female life. In these case studies the female body is presented as both positive and negative, and women as both oppressed and free. A woman ’s body is the site of this ambiguity, for she can use it as a vehicle for her freedom and feel oppressed by it. There is no essential truth of the matter: it depends upon the extent to which a woman sees herself as a free subject rather than as the object of society ’s gaze.