Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Kristen Peters
Central Michigan University
Changing Ideas of Womanhood in Judaism and Islam
I. Introduction
A. Simone de Beauvoir identified woman as Other in her book The Second Sex. Her use of
Other conveyed the concept of woman as secondary to man, who was considered to
normative human being. She used “Other” to explain the duality between groups, or the
Self and the Other. Man was considered the normative human being, the whole person,
and woman was considered the secondary human, defined in her difference to man.
Throughout patriarchal history, women have been given a secondary status to men.
B. This paper identifies the similarities in women’s status in Judaism and Islam, as described
by Judith Plaskow in The Coming of Lilith and Kecia Ali in Sexual Ethics and Islam. Despite
apparent differences in the traditions, the concerns raised by Plaskow and Ali are similar.
C. To show this, I will identify examples of the secondary status of women in Jewish and
Islamic practices discussed by Plaskow and Ali. Next, I will discuss critiques the authors
make and use all three sources together to pull together some possible solutions.
II.
Simone de Beauvoir
A. Simone de Beauvoir raised the question, “What is a woman?” in The Second Sex, which was
first published in 1949. She asserted that to be biologically female is not the same as being a
woman or feminine. Woman was a social construct that was important and expected for
females to conform to. de Beauvoir claimed that this was because man is used to describe
human beings as a whole; man was the normative human being.
B. de Beauvoir raised the question, why do women cooperate with this system? She suggested
several reasons for this:
1. Women didn’t tend to identify with one another as women with a shared
group identity (pg 9). They lacked solidarity because they were more likely to
identify with the males in their economic, racial, or social group than to
women across groups.
2. Women were ultimately bonded to men by economic and biological need.
Men needed women just as much as women needed men, but men had all of
the social, political, and economic power, so they benefitted from the need
(pg 10).
3. Women found it easier to remain connected to the dominant social group.
Men provided material and economic security (pg 11). If women were to
distance themselves from men, they would lose these protections.
C. de Beauvoir expressed a lack in confidence that men would be willing to give up the system
that had given them so much privilege throughout the centuries (pg 15). She even
suggested that men may not be completely aware of woman’s situation as secondary human
being (pg 16). With that in mind, she expressed caution in trusting what even the most
sympathetic of men have to say about women’s secondary status.
D. de Beauvoir believed that women would be able to do away with their secondary status by
gaining control of reproduction through the legalization of contraception and abortion.
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