As a French person, I grew up thinking that philosophy was for everyone.
My parents didn’t go to college, but I grew up seeing Foucault, Deleuze, and also Spinoza and Hegel among their books. They had friends who were construction painters or post office receptionists and who – of course! – had read Sartre and were well-versed in the master-slave dialectic. So, when I started being a philosopher, I thought I could write for people like them, and not only for my colleagues. But I also remember opening books by Deleuze or Foucault as a teenager and feeling humiliated by the technicality of their jargon. Surely, as the old French saying goes, ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, “what is well conceived can be clearly stated.” If these philosophers were so good, how come I could not understand what they were writing? And how could they pretend to be talking to ‘normal people’ if their language was so obscure? If I ever write a book, I thought, I will write in a way that makes no one feels like they’re not smart enough to understand my ideas – even though that doesn’t seem to stop my parents’ friends from reading philosophy.
Then, a few years after starting to study philosophy, I discovered that there were women philosophers – yes, it took me years of curriculum in philosophy to read a female philosopher for the first time – and that some of them seemed concerned with issues that were part of “the real life,” my real life, this very life I thought my parents’ obscure philosophy books were betraying. Of course, this view seems simplistic to me now, but back then, what a breath of fresh air! And I started to connect the dots and wonder: maybe philosophy could help me figure out my grandmother?
My grandmother is from Corsica, a small island in the Mediterranean. She corresponds in many ways to the stereotypical image of Mediterranean women: she is a fantastic cook, she keeps a perfectly clean and tidy house, she’s the first one up in the morning, the last one down at night. She raised her kids and took care of her husband – who, at most, did the dishes. On every social occasion, she was perfectly dressed, and her hair and makeup were impeccable. Fascinated by her as a small kid, I grew more and more puzzled over time. When looking at the cupboards filled with piles and piles of perfectly ironed linen, I remember wondering: why does she do all of this? Surely, we would live just as well with non-ironed sheets!
Her entire existence was organized around serving us. Yet, that was not the whole story: she had a lot of power over us. She decided almost everything around the house, and she governed all of us through guilt. She would make sure to remind us how much she worked and how much she had sacrificed for the family. She would compare me constantly to the daughter of the neighbors: I should have better grades than her, be better dressed, and—very important—thinner. And I couldn’t help but wonder: if she was a servant because that was imposed on her as a woman, and disliked it, why did she raise my father to be such a traditional Mediterranean man, promised to a great destiny and no housework?
Fast forward a few years, and my book, On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient – and its revised and expanded English version We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives – is my response to the quest to understand my grandmother. It is written with the hope that it is readable by construction painters (and I am happy to report that the construction painter I had in mind did in fact read it!). Although it was based on years of doctoral work, the manuscript was written in the immediate aftermath of the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement with the following conviction: philosophy could and should give women the tools to analyze and conceptualize how living through all these experiences shapes their lives, their behavior, and their freedom. This post will describe my work in this book, where I argue that women’s submission in a patriarchal system is understandable, rational, and pleasurable, though not in their best interests. It aims to understand what role women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy, without falling into the pitfall of blaming the victims—women who are subject to patriarchy.
I start with following observation: Even the most independent and feminist women can catch themselves enjoying the conquering way in which men look at them, desiring to be a submissive object in the arms of their partner, or preferring domestic work—the small pleasures of well-folded laundry, of a pretty-looking breakfast table—to supposedly more fulfilling activities. Are these desires and pleasures incompatible with their independence? Do they betray the centuries of feminism that precede them? Can one expect men to “make the first move” and demand sex equality? The ambiguities of these topics are blindingly obvious in everyday life or when one opens a “women’s” magazine: at the same time women are called to be free, to have their own career, to refuse any degrading treatment from men. These magazines overflow with advice and norms on the best ways to be an attractive sexual object, an obliging wife, a perfect mother.
There is a contradiction between the philosophical discourse that takes for granted that submission is a moral vice and the everyday cultural valorization of female submission. Moreover, the traditional sexist idea that women are naturally submissive puts us in an impasse. Either we talk about female submission in its complexity, without remaining silent on the appeal of submission, which ostensibly places us on the side of the sexist tradition that makes submission women’s natural destiny, or we posit that men and women are equal and, in that case, women’s submission, like men’s, is either a moral vice or a pathology, and is not really within the scope of philosophical inquiry. In the case of the latter, the only possible explanation for the valorization of female submission in cultural works is to see it as a manifestation of male domination in these passive victims that women would be. Thus, either one takes the appeal of submission for women seriously and adopts the sexist position that there is an immutable female nature, or one refuses the idea of a natural inferiority of women and, in that case, submissive women who are satisfied with this submission appear as passive victims or submissive beings that are guilty of not cherishing their freedom.
In order to solve these issues, the book opens with the building of a philosophical concept of submission. Studying women’s submission consists in studying the action or the situation of women when they take part, as inferiors, in a relation of domination that they do not actively resist. It examines male domination not from the perspective of the dominants but from the perspective of those who submit themselves. Instead of describing women’s subordination in an external and objective manner, it means wondering what it is for a woman to be a woman living in male domination and thus describing a subjective, bottom-up experience of domination. It means purposefully not starting from the idea that submission would be in women’s nature, or against women’s nature, that it would be immoral, or the sign of an oppressed false consciousness shaped by patriarchy. To the contrary, submission is understood as a broad non-moralized attitude or action of not actively resisting domination.
However, there are many pitfalls and difficulties in the analysis of women’s submission, the main one being the essentialization of female submission. To guard against this, I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy is a good prism through which to understand the phenomenon of submission. Beauvoir’s understanding of sexual difference, and more precisely of womanhood as a situation, provides an illuminating framework to understand the relationship between womanhood and submission. To be a woman is to be in a certain economic, social, and political situation. This situation implies a set of norms according to which women are conditioned to behave and on the basis on which they are judged. Moreover, Beauvoir’s phenomenological method enables her to overcome all the methodological issues of an analysis of submission.
Through a close reading of The Second Sex, I show first that women’s oppression consists in an alienation of women that happens through their objectification, and especially their sexual objectification. And this oppression is what leads women to submit to men. Then, I establish that women are the only beings whose bodies already have a social meaning before they can even experience them. In other words, becoming a woman is discovering that our own body belong to men’s gaze even before it is fully ours. The specificity of women’s body is that it is a social body before being a lived body and therefore functions in a way that makes submission enticing. Submission can indeed be a source of pleasure and power for women. Finally, I use Beauvoir’s conception of freedom to show that women do not actively choose submission, but they consent to the submission that is prescribed to them by social norms, even though this submission can seriously harm them.
If this can look like a depressing conclusion, I believe (and the very many discussions I had with my readers in France give me reasons to think it’s true) it has an emancipatory power: First, it is an invitation to fight for social change: it means that feminist activism and feminist philosophy can contribute to freeing women from their destiny of submission by promoting a change of social norms! And recognizing that society expects submission from us and that we consent to it at different degree helps raising out consciousness of how patriarchy shapes our lives. Even my grandmother seemed to gain something from it: “consenting to one’s submission,” she said when I handed her the manuscript of my dissertation, “maybe that’s what I did all these years…” She looked relieved to discover a way to describe this behavior that she did not fully choose, nor fully oppose.
Manon Garcia
Manon Garcia, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, will become an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University in July 2021. She works on questions in 20th Century French philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of social sciences (esp. economics), and phenomenology.
