Freedom of the "second sex": the theoretical and practical aspects (based on S. de Beauvoir's research)

In J. Brown's musical composition "It's a Man's Man's World", we find the following lines: "This is a man's world, a world of men, but it turns into nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl". This song illustrates the problem of relations between the two sexes, exacerbated in the second half of the twentieth century. Woman for man acts as the Other, but it is not "you", neither friend nor brother, this is someone "whose existence contains a threat, a danger", because this infringes my other, masculine freedom. That why it is possible to project the perception of the woman's problem: according to the trends of the historical development of humankind, the basis of the relationship in this world is organized and reorganized in men designs, "created" by his "hands". Thus, the woman as an "alien" Other got on the "roadside" of historical development. S. de Beauvoir claimed the definition of human freedom based on the existentialist interpretation: freedom reveals its presence only in the act of transcendence, in which I, predetermined by biological parameters and the social framework, went beyond the limits of itself. According to S. de Beauvoir's concept, such transcendence each time is produced in man' activity, whether it concerns science, art, politics or military affairs. "Man assures the repetition of Life while transcending Life through Existence [i.e. goal-oriented, meaningful action]: by this transcendence he creates values that deprive pure repetition of all value... Whereas in serving the species, the human male also remodels the face of the earth, he creates new instruments, he invents, he shapes the future". Just these two sentences of S. de Beauvoir's drafts the "portrait" of the man as a creator and his creative potential as godlike. The woman devoting her life to the man as his wife, bearing and upbringing his children, on the contrary, wallows in her immanence. Unlike the man with his purpose of existence in the implementation of projective plurality, the sense of a woman's life is revealed in her nature, in praxi in the mother's incarnation. However, it seems appropriate that the modern woman is able to be free, which, by the way, is an inherent characteristic. But being free is not an a priori way of her existence, for there exist natural external constraints. These constraints are, for example, characteristics of the female existence arising from the physiological nature of the woman, as well as the problems associated with many roles she can perform: as wife, mother or employee. Thus, each feminist in the twenty-first century fiercely defending the freedom of women on the "barricades" of thoughts and actions is an undoubtedly free human. Therefore, in an attempt to understand the problems of freedom of the modern woman one should not fall into absolutization of factors that may limit this freedom.

Keywords

Authors

References