ABSTRACT
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir complained that women ‘have erected no virile myth in which their projects are reflected’, that they ‘still dream through the dreams of men’. And she linked this lack with a crucial failure in self-consciousness-with women’s failure to set themselves up as Subject; their connivance at remaining ‘other’ in relation to men: ‘A myth always implies a subject who projects his hopes and his fears towards a sky of transcendence.’1 We have now seen some of the ways in which the western intellectual tradition’s ideals of Reason have contributed to this female predicament. Women’s general disinclination to reach for the sky of transcendence is connected not only with practical obstacles, but also with conceptual ones. The ‘status of manhood’ has been seen as itself an attainment, in ways in which femininity is not. Women have shared in these ideals only at the expense of their femininity, as culturally defined. And these definitions have intersected with articulations of the public-private distinction in ways that have helped form our understanding of femininity as a complement to male Reason-a domain of ‘natural’ concerns and traits, out of which men are expected to grow to maturity.
