Tentative Answer: Women compared to other minorities

4. Does de Beauvoir support the idea that there is a female culture and identity which puts them in parallel situation as other “minorities?”

The fundamental difference between women and other oppressed groups is that there is no clear historical event that has deemed women inferior, as de Beauvoir states is the case with Black and Jewish people. Since “women have never constituted a closed and independent society” (628) by virtue of the sexual nature of the human species, the fashion of the subjection of women in society is necessarily different from that of other groups of people that have been isolated from their oppressors at some point in history. Thus, the spatial separation that facilitated the white exclusion of and discrimination against certain ethnic and racial groups could never have occurred in the case of women.

It is also important to note that the notions of femininity and womanhood have been created by the social body that then uses those very notions as justification for the superiority of men. The imposition of this identity prevents women from naturally having a sense of unity and solidarity with other women. As a result of this, they exist within the framework given to them by men while also attempting to inhabit a space that challenges that framework. Since the other oppressed groups de Beauvoir mentions did exist within an independent community and experienced a degree of self-determination disallowed to women, these other groups do not encounter the same type of “paradox of their situation” (628).