Reflection On The Subjectivity Of Women 's "Other" Status

Simone de Beauvoir who is the most famous feminist in the modern France put forward a groundbreaking idea of "the woman is the other" in her great work The Second Sex. Beauvoir carried on a thorough discussion on the women’s situation of being the other with her unique feminine perspective, and then she combined feminist philosophy with the philosophy of The Other. Beauvoir’s theory of "the other" has profound ideological origin. Ac-cording to Existentialism firstly, she applied the theory of being-in-itself and being-for-itself which came from Sartre to analyze the relationship between men and women. Then in the aspect of methodology, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Merleau-Ponty’s body phenomenology were quite enlightening for Beauvoir to analyze the women’s situation and the cause of the other. The work The Second Sex is divided into two volumes, and book one as the theoretical framework of the whole mainly draw a picture of the formation and evolution of the Other’s status from a perspective of female groups, and then book two probes into the history of individual female, reveals the generation and situation of the contemporary female, and find a way out for women to survive. Finally Beauvoir comes to a conclusion on the only pathway of liberation of women, which is to establish sibling relationships with men.Beauvoir’s theory of The Other has its limits, largely for the limits of that time. However, we can’t deny her outstanding contribution in the history of the development of feminism, and also cannot deny Beauvoir. The development of the modern feminist philosophy can still learn lessons from Beauvoir’s theory of The Other.Based on The Second Sex, the paper is divided into four parts to discuss Beauvoir’s theory of The Other in which women are placed in the second. First of all, in the first part of the article, the author have investigated the source of theory of The Other, illustrated the Sartre, Hegel, and Merleau-Ponty’s influence on Beauvoir, and revealed Beauvoir’s basic position of Existentialism. Following, the second part makes a specific analysis on the view of "The woman is the other", in which the author clarifies the connotation of "the other", explains the women’s characteristics of internality, otherness and femininity as the "absolute other", and analyzes the causes of female status, finally I reveals the deep root of women’s subordinate status---patriarchy. The third part is the reflection of subjectivity on the women’s status of "the other". In this chapter, the author mainly discusses some ways for women seeking their subjective existence and their own transcendence. The fourth part of this article is an objective comment on Beauvoir’s theory of "the other", in this part Ⅰ illustrate the positive significance and limitations of the theory. The eventual part is a general description of the full text, is also an outlook of harmonious relations between male and female.