Conceptualism has lost ground: biological
and social sciences no longer believe there are immutably determined entities
that define given characteristics like those of the woman, the Jew, or the
black; science considers characteristics as secondary reactions to a situation.
If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. Does
the word “woman,” then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment
philosophy, rationalism, or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among
human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word “woman”;
American women in particular are inclined to think that woman as such no longer
exists. If some backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her
friends advise her to undergo psychoanalysis to get rid of this obsession.
Referring to a book—a very irritating one at that—Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,
Dorothy Parker wrote: “I cannot be fair about books that treat women as women.
My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be
considered as human beings.” But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit
short; and it is easy for antifeminists to show that women are not men.
Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract;
the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. To
reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish
character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this
denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.
Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
