Women a.k.a “the Other”
In Simone de Beauvoir’s text, The Second Sex, she examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are oppressed and are bound to be inferior to males – simply by the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. From this she categorizes women from men by calling them the “other”. This is because De Beauvoir perceives women being unlikely to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives freely as me, and mostly unaware of their own oppression. We can also include the ideas and methods of the famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, in which I would think he would agree on the point of women being considered …show more content…
In order to examine how Descartes would look at this idea, I chose to use his work of the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. In this text he provides the methods that guide his reason that have helped him make remarkable discoveries. In his method, he takes his opinions and “get rid of them all at one go, so as then to replace them afterwards with better opinions or even with the same ones after I had straightened them” (Descartes, 6). This allows him to act as a spectator and experience new discoveries and ideas on where he can build his opinion on. I think that if he used this method and went on a journey to watch the world with the goal of analyzing women, he would be able to recognize the idea of women being considered the “other”. By living in the age of the Scientific Revolution, he would see a field mostly dominated by men and place such as universities excluding women from enrolling. He would also see the men would use science to spread the view that women were inferior by nature and secondary to men. By living around the 17th Century, Descartes would rationalize the he would have to agree on the idea of women being the “other” and inferior to that of …show more content…
For example in the text she explains about the differences between men and women in an economic standpoint. She states that “In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success” (De Beauvoir, 6). From this we can analyze that the gender of a person greatly affects how well they do in their career and the limits that are put upon them. In jobs and professions there is a term called glass ceiling, which is used to describe an unseen barrier or system that prevents some people, in this case women, from rising to the top of the corporate chain. This idea of a glass ceiling is still present today’s society as seen through wages and job positions in many places such as industries and politics. Although differences between the wages of men and women have been getting closer, women continue to earn considerably less than men. Even in high ranking positions, males make up a higher percentage of what gender occupies positions such as CEO opposed to a woman attaining these roles. As a result, the sense of male superiority in society today which causes women to not usually occupy the role of a leader or be equal to men in career positions and considers them to be in this category of the
In Simone de Beauvoir’s text, The Second Sex, she examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are oppressed and are bound to be inferior to males – simply by the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. From this she categorizes women from men by calling them the “other”. This is because De Beauvoir perceives women being unlikely to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives freely as me, and mostly unaware of their own oppression. We can also include the ideas and methods of the famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, in which I would think he would agree on the point of women being considered …show more content…
In order to examine how Descartes would look at this idea, I chose to use his work of the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. In this text he provides the methods that guide his reason that have helped him make remarkable discoveries. In his method, he takes his opinions and “get rid of them all at one go, so as then to replace them afterwards with better opinions or even with the same ones after I had straightened them” (Descartes, 6). This allows him to act as a spectator and experience new discoveries and ideas on where he can build his opinion on. I think that if he used this method and went on a journey to watch the world with the goal of analyzing women, he would be able to recognize the idea of women being considered the “other”. By living in the age of the Scientific Revolution, he would see a field mostly dominated by men and place such as universities excluding women from enrolling. He would also see the men would use science to spread the view that women were inferior by nature and secondary to men. By living around the 17th Century, Descartes would rationalize the he would have to agree on the idea of women being the “other” and inferior to that of …show more content…
For example in the text she explains about the differences between men and women in an economic standpoint. She states that “In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success” (De Beauvoir, 6). From this we can analyze that the gender of a person greatly affects how well they do in their career and the limits that are put upon them. In jobs and professions there is a term called glass ceiling, which is used to describe an unseen barrier or system that prevents some people, in this case women, from rising to the top of the corporate chain. This idea of a glass ceiling is still present today’s society as seen through wages and job positions in many places such as industries and politics. Although differences between the wages of men and women have been getting closer, women continue to earn considerably less than men. Even in high ranking positions, males make up a higher percentage of what gender occupies positions such as CEO opposed to a woman attaining these roles. As a result, the sense of male superiority in society today which causes women to not usually occupy the role of a leader or be equal to men in career positions and considers them to be in this category of the