Property, Women & Politics [antikvár]

IntroductionWhy the title Property, Women and Politics: Subjects or Objects? The subtitle clearly harkens back to one of Simone de Beauvoir's dualisms, the one which I think has best withstood the test of time and the interrogation of contemporary feminist writers who justifiably suspect all dualisms.1 In The Second Sex Beauvoir writes,Now what marks the specificity of woman's situation is that while she, like any other human being, is an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the Other: they claim to fix her as an object and to doom her to immanence, since her transcendence is to be perpetually transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness.2The notion of woman as object has worked its way into popular thought: the outcry against women as mere sexual objects in advertising, for example, uses Beauvoir's terminology. But in this book I want to do something different from what prevails in popular speech at the end of the century, something more akin to what Beauvoir originally had in mind, I think.In The Second Sex Beauvoir offers three uses of the subject/object distinction. First, there is the 'despotic subject', who views others as an object: the position corresponding to what Beauvoir calls 'male sovereignty'. In this dualistic formulation, the sovereign existence of a subject requires the presence of an object. To apply this split to property-holding, men's status as property-holders would require the objectification or commodification of women: as sexual objects in pornography, for example, or as wives who could be 'owned' (communally or privately).