Judson M.R. Redpath

Chapter 5: 173-188

After reading Chapter 5, "Existentialist Feminism," in Rosemarie Putnam Tong's book, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, it becomes apparent that Tong examines an existentialist approach to feminist thought. In doing so, she cross-examines The Second Sex, by Simone De Beauvoir, who was the prominent existentialist feminist of the time. However, before Tong proceeded to delve into de Beauvoir's perspective, Tong gives a backdrop to de Beauvoir by analyzing Jean-Paul Sartre's text, Being and Nothingness. While analyzing Sartre's text, Tong also unfolds some of the parameters of existentialism. This in turn produced an insight to existentialism as it exists within a patriarchal system.

In her analysis, Tong uproots Sartre's understanding of the psyche, in which "Sartre made [a] distinction between the observer and the observed by dividing being into two parts: being-for-itself (pour-soi) and being-in-itself (en-soi). Being-in-itself refers to the repetitive, material existence…; being-for-itself refers to the moving, conscious existence…" (Tong 174). Basically, what Sartre was facilitating is that humans have two basis of being. One is the physical realm we exist in, in which we can touch and feel and observe. The other is the realm of the psyche, in which we are able to consciously observe and think. Furthermore, Sartre further analyzes these states of being, by the relations we make with other beings. He observed when we make relations we subject others into objects to insure our "pour-soi's" existence.

As Tong furthers her analysis, she uncovers Simone de Beauvoir's feminist perspective through an existentialist approach. In doing so, Tong first cites de Beauvoir's analysis of "man" and "woman," in which "men named 'man' the self and 'woman' the other" (Tong 179). This in turn produces an institution of women's oppression, in which women find themselves internalizing the ideological structure of the patriarchal system that placed women as "other." In de Beauvoir's analysis, she uproots many prominent thinkers like Freud and Marx, and then dismisses their understanding of women by arguing that Freud's analysis of "repressed or sublimated sexual impulses" are too simplistic for explaining civilization, and Marx's ideology of deconstructing capitalism and replacing it with a socialist society would not deconstruct sexist agendas. She delves deeper into the roles of women within society and the internalizing of "other." First, she examines the "wife," in which marriage is an institution of slavery that "transforms freely given feelings into mandatory duties." Second, she examines the "mother," in which at first the child brings liberation from other, through the woman placing the same institution of "other" upon the child. However, this is only an illusion, because the child grows up and develops its own being. Next, she analyzes the "career woman." This institution of being, she argues, is narcissistic, in which a "woman" is supposed to keep up her "womanly" appearance, while fulfilling her duties at work. Next, she examines the "prostitute," in which the prostitute uses her status as "other," which correlates to her body, to institute her "self." In her final argument, de Beauvoir exclaims that each role a woman portrays, or participates in, is not her own making, but constructed within the patriarchal institution. So, no matter what a woman does to liberate herself from "otherness," she is confined within a system of patriarchy.