QuestionsWhat is a just society?Man is the Subject, woman is the Other
What is a just society?Equality

Man is the Subject, woman is the Other

"He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other"

Simone de Beauvoir 1908 · 1986One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
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What it claims

Woman's condition as Other is an injustice to be corrected: a just society is one that restores her concrete chances of being a subject, on a par with man.

Why

Man posits himself as the Subject and defines woman in relation to himself; her place as the Other is imposed, not chosen.

In short

"Man is the Subject, woman is the Other" is an argument by Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, Volume I, Introduction (1949)) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: equality). Its claim: Woman's condition as Other is an injustice to be corrected: a just society is one that restores her concrete chances of being a subject, on a par with man. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Second Sex, Volume I, Introduction (1949)
Valid with an implicit premise

What is a woman? Beauvoir starts by noting that a man would never think of writing a book on the situation of men: man goes without saying, woman is what departs from him. She draws an analysis from it: humanity is defined in the masculine, and woman is posited in relation to him, as the Other. She judges this situation from the standpoint of freedom: it deprives a free being of her chances of existing as a subject. Mind the vocabulary: in the same Introduction she asks us to discard the "vague notions of superiority, inferiority, and equality" and to judge institutions "from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals". We have therefore filed this argument under the "Equality" camp (correcting what deprives people of their chances) while recognising that her criterion is freedom. In the Introduction she poses the question whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated rather than settling it: the conclusion is our reconstruction, based on her ethical standpoint.

P1Man posits himself as the Subject, the essential, the Absolute, and defines woman in relation to himself: she is the inessential, the Other. She is not regarded as an autonomous being.
P2This place as Other is not chosen by women: no subject posits itself spontaneously as inessential. The Other is posited as Other by the One.
P3Yet a woman is, like every human being, an autonomous freedom. In a world that makes her be the Other, an attempt is made to freeze her into an object and doom her to immanence.
P4When a freedom is thus brought back to immanence without having willed it, it is frustration and oppression, "an absolute evil".
P5This situation is historical, not natural: a situation created over time can come undone at another time.
P6 · implicit premiseA just society does not maintain an oppression that deprives free beings of their concrete chances of existing as subjects, when that situation can be changed: it corrects it.
Therefore woman's condition as Other is an injustice to be corrected: a just society is one that restores her concrete chances of being a subject, on a par with man.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a world where everything is true (woman is the Other, against her will, through a historical situation that can change) and yet the just society leaves things as they are: for instance if it judges that another value, such as family stability, comes before individual chances.
Valid with P6, the principle of justice that takes us from the observation ("it is an oppression that can end") to the duty ("it must be corrected"). Beauvoir assumes it everywhere and half states it when she says she judges institutions by individuals' concrete chances. Note the caution at the end of the Introduction: she writes that women's situation gives them "fewer possibilities" and that "the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated". To reject the argument, one can deny P3 (an autonomous freedom "without destiny" is a debatable idea), P2 (women also consented to their role) or P6 (justice asks for more than restoring chances).
Analogy. In a village, everyone starts calling "the others" the inhabitants of a single street, never asking their opinion, and reserves the right to decide what is "normal". After a hundred years, they end up calling themselves that. This does not prove it is just: it proves the label worked. Beauvoir says the street of women has never been able to say "we".

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Rousseau and the defenders of complementarity 1762 · attacks premise 3

The two sexes are different by nature and complement each other: in what they have in common they are equal, in what they differ they are not comparable. Woman is made to please man, and each thus follows his destination. This is not oppression but a natural order.

Beauvoir replies
Simone de Beauvoir 1949
About the formula "equality in difference", she observes that it is exactly the one the Jim Crow laws applied to black Americans, and that this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination.
The debate goes on (our summary) Rousseau does not use the formula "equality in difference" (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier render it as "separate but equal"). Beauvoir targets the antifeminism of the twentieth century, but her argument holds against any complementarity that assigns places. A defender of complementarity may answer that the comparison with the Jim Crow laws is too strong, since they were imposed by law, whereas he appeals to nature. The disagreement is then over what is natural and what is imposed, which is the very question of the first argument.
T
Those who appeal to women's happiness or choice attacks premise 2

Many women do not feel oppressed: they say they prefer their role, or draw real advantages from it (protection, status, time with children). Can one claim they are wrong? Is a housewife not happier than a woman worker?

Beauvoir replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Simone de Beauvoir 1949
She sets happiness aside as a criterion: we cannot really know what the word means, there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call happy a situation one would like to impose on others.
Simone de Beauvoir 1949
She herself grants that the man who sets woman up as an Other will find in her a deep complicity.
The debate goes on (our summary) So she does not deny that women consent: she explains it (the advantages of an alliance with the stronger, flight from the "metaphysical risk" of freedom, she says elsewhere in the same Introduction). But the risk of paternalism remains: who decides what a woman "really" wants? Beauvoir answers with a criterion other than happiness (chances of freedom). Her critics see a judgment made from outside; her defenders reply that the criterion is not external, since she draws it from "the fundamental claim of every subject" to posit itself as the essential (same passage). Later feminist debates often come back to this point.
D
Difference feminism (Luce Irigaray and others, from the 1970s) 1974 · attacks premise 3

Saying that woman must fulfil herself as an "autonomous subject", through transcendence, takes a masculine model as the norm of the human. One should rather value what is proper to women (the body, motherhood, other ways of existing), instead of asking them to resemble men.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
We have not yet found a direct reply by Beauvoir in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We found no direct answer by Beauvoir to this criticism in our corpus (she was alive in the 1970s, but we do not have her texts from that period). Two passages in the Introduction point in opposite directions: she denounces the fact that "there is an absolute human type that is masculine", and asks us to discard notions of equality and superiority and start anew; but her own norm, freedom as self-surpassing, is the one she draws from existentialist ethics. Scholars still debate whether that norm is really neutral.