The Second Sex (7 page)

Opinions about the respective roles of the two sexes have varied greatly; they were initially devoid of any scientific basis and only reflected social myths. It was thought for a long time, and is still thought in some primitive societies based on matrilineal filiation, that the father has no part in the child’s conception: ancestral larvae were supposed to infiltrate the
womb in the form of living germs. With the advent of patriarchy, the male resolutely claimed his posterity; the mother had to be granted a role in procreation even though she merely carried and fattened the living seed: the father alone was the creator. Artistotle imagined that the fetus was produced by the meeting of the sperm and the menses: in this symbiosis, woman just provided passive material, while the male principle is strength, activity, movement, and life. Hippocrates’ doctrine also recognized two types of seeds, a weak or female one, and a strong one, which was male. Artistotelian theory was perpetuated throughout the Middle Ages and down to the modern period. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Harvey, slaughtering female deer shortly after they had mated, found vesicles in the uterine horns that he thought were eggs but that were really embryos. The Danish scientist Steno coined the term “ovaries” for the female genital glands that had until then been called “feminine testicles,” and he noted the existence of vesicles on their surface that Graaf, in 1672, had erroneously identified as eggs and to which he gave his name. The ovary was still regarded as a homologue of the male gland. That same year, though, “spermatic animalcules” were discovered penetrating the feminine womb. But it was thought that they went there for nourishment only, and that the individual was already prefigured in them; in 1694, the Dutchman Hartsoeker drew an image of the homunculus hidden in the sperm, and in 1699 another scientist declared he had seen the sperm cast off a kind of slough under which there was a little man, which he also drew. In these hypotheses woman merely fattened a living and active, and perfectly constituted, principle. These theories were not universally accepted, and discussion continued until the nineteenth century. The invention of the microscope led to the study of the animal egg; in 1827, Baer identified the mammal’s egg: an element contained inside Graaf’s follicle. Soon its structure could be studied; in 1835, the sarcode—that is, the protoplasm—and then the cell were discovered; in 1877, the sperm was observed penetrating the starfish egg. From that the symmetry of the two gametes’ nuclei was established; their fusion was analyzed in detail for the first time in 1883 by a Belgian zoologist.

But Aristotle’s ideas have not lost all validity. Hegel thought the two sexes must be different: one is active and the other passive, and it goes without saying that passivity will be the female’s lot. “Because of this differentiation, man is thus the active principle while woman is the passive principle because she resides in her non-developed unity.”
⁴
And even when the
ovum was recognized as an active principle, men continued to pit its inertia against the agility of the sperm. Today, there is a tendency to see the contrary: the discoveries of parthenogenesis have led some scientists to reduce the role of the male to that of a simple physicochemical agent. In some species the action of an acid or a mechanical stimulation has been shown to trigger the division of the egg and the development of the embryo; and from that it was boldly assumed that the male gamete was not necessary for generation; it would be at most a ferment; perhaps man’s cooperation in procreation would one day become useless: that seems to be many women’s desire. But nothing warrants such a bold expectation because nothing warrants universalizing life’s specific processes. The phenomena of asexual multiplication and parthenogenesis are neither more nor less fundamental than those of sexual reproduction. And it has already been noted that this form is not a priori favored: but no fact proves it is reducible to a more elementary mechanism.

Rejecting any a priori doctrine, any implausible theory, we find ourselves before a fact that has neither ontological nor empirical basis and whose impact cannot a priori be understood. By examining it in its concrete reality, we can hope to extract its significance: thus perhaps the content of the word “female” will come to light.

The idea here is not to propose a philosophy of life or to take sides too hastily in the quarrel between finalism and mechanism. Yet it is noteworthy that physiologists and biologists all use a more or less finalistic language merely because they ascribe meaning to vital phenomena. We will use their vocabulary. Without coming to any conclusion about life and consciousness, we can affirm that any living fact indicates transcendence, and that a project is in the making in every function: these descriptions do not suggest more than this.

In most species, male and female organisms cooperate for reproduction. They are basically defined by the gametes they produce. In some algae and fungi, the cells that fuse to produce the egg are identical; these cases of isogamy are significant in that they manifest the basal equivalence of the usually differentiated gametes: but their analogy remains striking. Sperm and ova result from a basically identical cellular evolution: the development of primitive female cells into oocytes differs from that of spermatocytes by protoplasmic phenomena, but the nuclear phenomena are approximately the same. The idea the biologist Ancel expressed in 1903 is still considered valid today: “An undifferentiated progerminating cell becomes male or female depending on the conditions in the genital gland at
the moment of its appearance, conditions determined by the transformation of some epithelial cells into nourishing elements, developers of a special material.” This primary kinship is expressed in the structure of the two gametes that carry the same number of chromosomes inside each species. During fertilization, the two nuclei merge their substance, and the chromosomes in each are reduced to half their original number: this reduction takes place in both of them in a similar way; the last two divisions of the ovum result in the formation of polar globules equivalent to the last divisions of the sperm. It is thought today that, depending on the species, the male or female gamete determines the sex: for mammals, the sperm possesses a chromosome that is heterogenic to the others and potentially either male or female. According to Mendel’s statistical laws, transmission of hereditary characteristics takes place equally from the father and the mother. What is important to see is that in this meeting neither gamete takes precedence over the other: they both sacrifice their individuality; the egg absorbs the totality of their substance. There are thus two strong current biases that—at least at this basic biological level—prove false: The first one is the female’s passivity; the living spark is not enclosed within either of the two gametes. It springs forth from their meeting; the nucleus of the ovum is a vital principle perfectly symmetrical to the sperm’s. The second bias contradicts the first, which does not exclude the fact that they often coexist: the permanence of the species is guaranteed by the female since the male principle has an explosive and fleeting existence. In reality, the embryo equally perpetuates the germ cells of the father and the mother and retransmits them together to its descendants, sometimes in a male and sometimes in a female form. One might say that an androgynous germ cell survives the individual metamorphoses of the soma from generation to generation.

That being said, there are highly interesting secondary differences to be observed between the ovum and the sperm; the essential singularity of the ovum is that it is supplied with material destined to nourish and protect the embryo; it stocks up on reserves from which the fetus will build its tissues, reserves that are not a living substance but an inert material; the result is a massive, relatively voluminous, spherical or ellipsoidal form. The bird’s egg’s dimensions are well-known. The woman’s egg measures
0.13
mm, while the human sperm contains sixty thousand sperm per cubic millimeter: their mass is extremely small. The sperm has a threadlike tail, a little elongated head; no foreign substance weighs it down. It is entirely life; this structure destines it for mobility; the ovum, on the contrary, where the future of the fetus is stored, is a fixed element:
enclosed in the female organism or suspended in an exterior environment, it waits passively for fertilization. The male gamete seeks it out; the sperm is always a naked cell, while the ovum is, according to the species, protected or not by a membrane; but in any case, the sperm bumps into the ovum when it comes into contact with it, makes it waver, and infiltrates it; the male gamete loses its tail; its head swells, and, twisting, it reaches the nucleus. Meanwhile, the egg immediately forms a membrane that keeps other sperm from entering. For echinoderms where fertilization is external, it is easy to observe the rush of the sperm that surround the floating and inert egg like a halo. This competition is also another important phenomenon found in most species; much smaller than the ovum, the sperm are generally produced in considerable quantities, and each ovum has many suitors.

Thus, the ovum, active in the nucleus, its essential principle, is superficially passive; its mass, closed upon itself, compact in itself, evokes the nocturnal heaviness and repose of the in-itself: the ancients visualized the closed world in the form of a sphere or opaque atom; immobile, the ovum waits; by contrast, the open sperm, tiny and agile, embodies the impatience and worry of existence. One should not get carried away with the pleasure of allegories: the ovum has sometimes been likened to immanence and the sperm to transcendence. By giving up its transcendence and mobility, the sperm penetrates the female element: it is grabbed and castrated by the inert mass that absorbs it after cutting off its tail; like all passive actions, this one is magical and disturbing; the male gamete activity is rational, a measurable movement in terms of time and space. In truth, these are merely ramblings. Male and female gametes merge together in the egg; together they cancel each other out in their totality. It is false to claim that the egg voraciously absorbs the male gamete and just as false to say that the latter victoriously appropriates the female cell’s reserves because in the act that merges them, their individuality disappears. And to a mechanistic philosophy, the movement undoubtedly looks like a rational phenomenon par excellence; but for modern physics the idea is no clearer than that of action at a distance; besides, the details of the physicochemical interactions leading to fertilization are not known. It is possible, however, to come away with a valuable indication from this meeting. There are two movements that come together in life, and life maintains itself only by surpassing itself. It does not surpass itself without maintaining itself; these two moments are always accomplished together. It is academic to claim to separate them: nevertheless, it is either one or the other that dominates. The two unified gametes go beyond and are perpetuated; but
the ovum’s structure anticipates future needs; it is constituted to nourish the life that will awaken in it, while the sperm is in no way equipped to ensure the development of the germ it gives rise to. In contrast, whereas the sperm moves around, the ovum is incapable of triggering the change that will bring about a new explosion of life. Without the egg’s prescience, the sperm’s action would be useless; but without the latter’s initiative, the egg would not accomplish its vital potential. The conclusion is thus that fundamentally the role of the two gametes is identical; together they create a living being in which both of them lose and surpass themselves. But in the secondary and superficial phenomena that condition fertilization, it is through the male element that the change in situation occurs for the new eclosion of life; it is through the female element that this eclosion is established in a stable element.

It would be rash to deduce from such an observation that woman’s place is in the home: but there are rash people. In his book
Tempérament et caractère selon les individus, les sexes et les races
(Nature and Character According to Individuals, Sex, and Race), Alfred Fouillée claimed he could define woman entirely from the ovum and man from the sperm; many so-called deep theories are based on this game of dubious analogies. It is never clear what philosophy of nature this pseudo-thinking refers to. If one considers laws of heredity, men and women come equally from a sperm and an ovum. I suppose that vestiges of the old medieval philosophy—that the cosmos was the exact reflection of a microcosm—are floating around in these foggy minds: it was imagined that the ovum is a female homunculus and woman a giant ovum. These reveries dismissed since the days of alchemy make a weird contrast with the scientific precision of descriptions being used at this very moment: modern biology does not mesh with medieval symbolism; but our people do not look all that closely. If one is a bit scrupulous, one has to agree that it is a long way from ovum to woman. The ovum does not yet even contain the very notion of female. Hegel rightly notes that the sexual relationship cannot be reduced to that of two gametes. Thus, the female organism has to be studied in its totality.