Beauvoir saw women’s condition as bad faith lived all day long

Evidence

Women, in other words, live much of their lives in what Sartre would have called bad faith, pretending to be objects. They do what the waiter does when he glides around playing the role of waiter; they identify with their ‘immanent’ image rather than with their ‘transcendent’ consciousness as a free for-itself. The waiter does it when he’s at work; women do it all day and to a greater extent. It is exhausting, because, all the time, a woman’s subjectivity is trying to do what comes naturally to subjectivity, which is to assert itself as the centre of the universe. A struggle rages inside every woman, and because of this Beauvoir considered the problem of how to be a woman the existentialist problem par excellence. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 682

Categorization

• DEFINE: Recasts bad faith through immanence vs transcendent free consciousness, then applies it to gender.
• XREF: The immanence/transcendence distinction is core existentialist vocabulary worth anchoring for orientation. — connects to: Beauvoir saw motherhood as a threat to a woman’s integrity; Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 64; Beauvoir argued women become Other through history, not by nature — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 265

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir saw motherhood as a threat to a woman’s integrity #expands (0.80)
• Beauvoir argued women become Other through history, not by nature #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 265
• Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics #qualifies (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 64