Simone de Beauvoir and a period of transition
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Simone de Beauvoir and a period of transition Małgorzata Durygin1
Accepted: 27 September 2020 © UNESCO IBE 2020
Abstract This article discusses the global intensification of gender inequality during the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflects on the meaning of being a woman in the recent time of transition and the phenomenon of gender discrimination, which has been a lived experience of women worldwide. The article compares the Covid-19 situation seen through a gender lens with the previous period of transition described by Simone de Beauvoir seventy years ago. It argues that the post-pandemic world should be created from the feminist perspective that calls for social and educational change. Keywords Covid-19 · Simone de Beauvoir · Gender inequality · New normal · Gender “A syllogism is not useful in making mayonnaise or calming a child’s tears” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 726) “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 2002, p. 6)
I am writing this reflection amid the pandemic of Covid-19. It is an unusual time when, as the Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk (2020) states, “the virus will alert to us another truth: how very much we aren’t equal”. She writes that now “before our eyes, the smoke is dispersing from the civilizational paradigm that has shaped us over the past two hundred years: that we are the masters of creation, that we can do anything, that the world belongs to us. A new time draws near” (Tokarczuk 2020). The pandemic has changed societies and economies, and everybody’s life is affected now due to the crisis. Unfortunately, as many have noticed, it has already turned out to be a bigger burden for women (Jeltsen 2020; Lewis 2020; Paskin 2020; Sanchez, Rodriguez, and Gralki 2020; Taub 2020). Simone de Beauvoir (2011, p. 28) states that “women—except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences—do not use ‘we’”. One cannot speak for all women collectively due to the lack of solidarity among all divided and conquered women, and especially * Małgorzata Durygin [email protected] 1
Department of Teaching and Learning, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, ZEB, Miami, FL 33199, USA
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of “white wimmin [ … ] colonized by white boys” with “wimmin of color” and other oppressed groups of females (Davenport 1983, pp. 88–89). However, since “no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 24), as a human being who “was not born but rather became woman” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 330), I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on the recent situation and its consequences for women as it is also my lived experience. I am writing this reflection not only as a woman but also as a mother, a wife, and a teacher. And a person, who also, like journalist Helen Lewis (2020), has enough of enthusiastic comments on a liberating experience of the quarantine and the possibilities awaiting all isolated at home. I have been staying at home with my family for quite some time now. I try
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