Simone de Beauvoir and the ‘other’ woman

‘The Second Sex’, as well as being a feminist manifesto, implored women to challenge ingrained notions of inferiority to the men who dominated them

The concept of ‘the other’ has underpinned feminist teachings ever since (AFP/Getty)

The reputation of the French existentialist and feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) has a certain irony attached to it. The major claim of her most important book, The Second Sex, arguably the most significant feminist text of the 20th century, is that women tend to be conceived as “the Other” of men.

Certainly, this is true in the case of Beauvoir, since quite unjustifiably she is remembered today as much for her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, as she is for her own original philosophy.

The notion of “the Other” might sound commonsensical, but in fact it is based on a complex piece of existential analysis. Its roots lie in Hegel’s famous dialectic of the “Master and the Slave”. In simple terms, Hegel argued that people come to see themselves as autonomous agents by dominating other people (the Other). Inspired by Sartre’s arguments in Being and Nothingness, Beauvoir used this idea to understand the relations between men and women. Thus, in the introduction to The Second Sex, she claimed that woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is ‘the Other’.”