Low female wages stem from women’s disarmed position, not fewer needs.

Evidence

It is insufficient to say that women have fewer needs than men: that is only a subsequent justification. Rather, women, as we have seen, did not know how to defend themselves against exploitation; they had to compete with prisons that dumped products without labor costs on the market; they competed with each other. Besides, in a society based on the marital community, woman seeks emancipation through work: bound to her father’s or husband’s household, she is most often satisfied just to bring home some extra money; she works outside the family, but for it; and since the working woman does not have to support herself completely, she ends up accepting remuneration far inferior to that of which a man demands. With a significant number of women accepting bargain wages, the whole female salary scale is, of course, set up to the advantage of the employer. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 265

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Beauvoir’s causal analysis unravels the ‘women have fewer needs’ justification and shows how a structural bind — working within a marital community while seeking emancipation through wage labor — produces the very salary gap used to justify women’s dependence. A dense chain, not a single claim.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s other work on institutions and social capital — how a disarmed group lacks the collective consciousness to defend itself, parallel to Milgrom’s point that reputation institutions require information and enforcement capacity a group must organize to get. — connects to: Nineteenth-century employers preferred women workers because they could be paid less and exploited more.; Low wages structurally push working women to accept male financial protection. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1919; Economic emancipation alone does not place women in a situation identical to men’s — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1920

Broader Connections

• Low wages structurally push working women to accept male financial protection. #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1919
• Economic emancipation alone does not place women in a situation identical to men’s #complicates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1920