Rediscovery Series #2: Private Property Perpetuates Women’s Oppression, From Simone de Beauvoir in 1949

Feminism has staged a comeback.

While it’s been around in earnest since the 1800s, the veiled struggle for gender parity is probably as old as civilized society itself.

And while it’s common to see people connect women’s grievances regarding enfranchisement, pay, education, abortion, marriage and harassment to male domination of significant institutions, law, religion, culture, biology, and other factors, Simone de Beauvoir made a different, deeper connection in her book The Second Sex published way back in 1949.

She said a root cause of women’s oppression is in the very concept of private property:

Since the cause of women’s oppression is found in the resolve to perpetuate the family and keep the patrimony intact, if she escapes the family, she escapes this total dependence as well; if society rejects the family by denying private property, woman’s condition improves considerably. Sparta, where community property prevailed, was the only city-state where the woman was treated almost as the equal of man. Girls were brought up like boys; the wife was not confined to her husband’s household; he was only allowed furtive nocturnal visits; and his wife belonged to him so loosely that another man could claim a union with her in the name of eugenics: the very notion of adultery disappears when inheritance disappears; as all the children belonged to the city as a whole, women were not jealously enslaved to a master: or it can be explained inversely, that possessing neither personal wealth nor individual ancestry, the citizen does not possess a woman either. Women underwent the burdens of maternity as men did war: but except for this civic duty, no restraints were put on their freedom.

That’s jarring. Market economies are built on the concept of private property — without it, markets cannot exist. Private ownership of property (land and capital) is necessary for it to be used in the most productive way possible: it forces property owners to submit to the wishes of the public in order to derive any benefit from it.

At the same time, Beauvoir makes a solid point. In fact, private property is the root idea behind the relationship, property, personal, family, legal, and cultural factors that restrain women in ways men aren’t restrained.

With all that said, doesn’t private property — and all the aspects of society that result from it — hugely benefit us? Where would we be as a society of we couldn’t own our own homes or businesses and reap the benefits of our own labor?

More fundamentally, and to get away from the socialism-versus-capitalism debate, where would we be without the idea of family itself? If children ‘belonged to the city’, would women and men just lose the deep emotional attachment to the children they birthed that they have now? Who would we work for? What would we strive for in life?

I applaud Beauvoir for thinking so deeply and critically of the societal underpinnings of women’s oppression. While the practical conclusions of this concept aren’t reasonable to implement in modern society, it’s very possible Beauvoir didn’t intend them to be implemented. At the very least, this idea is an intriguing thought exercise.

And because she was bold enough to publish it, we are lucky to have it to sharpen our thought, guide our debate, and shape our actions.