"Xian Qi or Ji Nu"

The expression “Housewife or courtesan” crystallizes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s insistence that women belong in one of two unequal roles: dependent within the home or defined by their relation to men outside it. Simone de Beauvoir presents the formula as more than a polemical slogan. It makes visible how a demand for women’s equality could be answered by assigning them a narrow social destiny, even as economic change was opening new possibilities beyond the household.

The dilemma and its author

Proudhon, whom de Beauvoir identifies as a notable exception among nineteenth-century reformers generally favorable to equality, reacted against Saint-Simonian mysticism and supported small property owners. He also defended women’s confinement to the home. The two roles in his formula do not offer women independent lives: the housewife is dependent on a man, while the courtesan is defined by a sexual and social relation to men. The apparent choice therefore preserves male authority whichever path a woman takes.

Proudhon’s argument extended beyond the slogan. In Justice, he treated a couple as a union rather than a partnership between equals, asserted that man alone counted as a social individual, and claimed that women were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior. He represented that supposed inferiority numerically, assigning women a value of 8/27 compared with men. When Mme Adam and Mme d’Héricourt answered him, he replied with La pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes. De Beauvoir notes the contradiction between his idealized rhetoric about the “real woman” and the unhappiness recorded in his own wife’s letters.

A political break with reform

The formula mattered in a period when women’s demands were acquiring practical economic grounds. During the nineteenth century, women increasingly entered industrial production; machinery reduced the importance of physical-strength differences in many forms of work, and expanding industry required more workers than men alone could supply. De Beauvoir describes this shift as a transformation in women’s social position, not simply a change in theoretical debate.

Proudhon’s stance also disrupted the association between feminism and socialism. He protested against a socialist women’s banquet presided over by Leroux and attacked Jeanne Deroin, who had run for deputy in 1849. His rejection of women’s equality exposed a conflict within reform movements: commitments to social change did not necessarily extend to women’s emancipation. “Housewife or courtesan” gives that exclusion its starkest form, presenting dependence as women’s proper place precisely as their work made that place contestable.

Work, wages, and collective interests

Entering paid work did not automatically free women from dependence. Employers welcomed women partly because they accepted lower wages, while male workers could view their labor as cheap competition. De Beauvoir stresses that the interests of women and male workers were not automatically aligned: coalition required a deeper recognition of their shared situation. Women’s integration into unions gave them a means to defend their own interests and to cease being used to undercut workers as a whole.

The figures she cites make the economic inequality concrete. In France, a survey covering 1889–93 found that women received half the male wage for a day’s equal work. A 1908 survey reported that the highest hourly rates for women working at home did not exceed twenty centimes and could fall to five, leaving exploited workers unable to live without charity or a protector. In the United States in 1918, women earned half men’s salaries; in Germany, women received about 25 percent less for mining the same amount of coal. These conditions show why paid work could open a route out of domestic confinement without yet securing economic independence.

The wider logic of the “choice”

De Beauvoir connects the dilemma to the broader social production of women’s inferiority. Women, like Black people, could be praised when they were submissive and assigned a supposedly natural character shaped by the very conditions that subordinated them. The dominant group then treated the effects of inferior status as proof of inherent inferiority. The analogy has limits: de Beauvoir distinguishes women’s situation from that of Jews, and emphasizes that race and class divisions can also prevent solidarity among women. But the comparison clarifies how praise of the “true woman” can serve as a means of keeping women in a place chosen for them.

The expression’s force lies in the false narrowness of its alternatives. It makes a structural restriction sound like a choice, while both prescribed roles leave women defined in relation to men. Against that restriction, de Beauvoir sets the gradual emergence of women’s economic participation and organization—not as completed liberation, but as the material basis from which women might defend their interests and claim a social existence beyond the roles Proudhon allowed.