Criticizing Women

Abstract One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. This chapter argues that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, as a sign of what she called “bad faith.” To make this case, the chapter poses a challenge to two recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. However, this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. This tension can be resolved by adopting instead a different interpretation of Beauvoir, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. Revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith” makes clear that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation.