"Women's Great Historical Failure"

“The great historical defeat of the feminine sex” is a phrase Simone de Beauvoir examines while challenging the story of an ancient golden age of female rule. Johann Jakob Bachofen’s hypothesis, adopted by Friedrich Engels, treated the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy as a historical defeat for women. Beauvoir accepts the phrase as a way to name women’s subordination, but rejects the imagined age of female sovereignty behind it: women’s mythic power did not make them men’s equal political partners.

The historical hypothesis

Beauvoir notes that patriarchal myths and monuments preserve memories of women who once held elevated positions. She compares accounts of successive declines in women’s standing: the Brahman period in relation to the Rig-Veda, the Rig-Veda in relation to an earlier stage, and pre-Islamic Bedouin women’s status in relation to that accorded by the Quran. Figures such as Niobe and Medea evoke a time when mothers could take pride in their children as their own, while Andromache and Hecuba occupy a prominence in Homeric poetry that women hidden in the classical Greek gynaeceum no longer possessed.

These traces encourage the supposition that a genuine reign of women existed in primitive times. Bachofen proposed that history had passed from matriarchy to patriarchy; Engels adopted that hypothesis and called the transition the great historical defeat of the feminine sex. Beauvoir presents this account as influential, but distinguishes its explanatory force from the evidence for an actual era of female political rule.

Why the golden age is a myth

For Beauvoir, the supposed golden age confuses women’s symbolic or supernatural power with social equality. Woman could appear as Earth, Mother, or Goddess, and be surrounded by taboos or credited with magical power. Yet such elevation placed her beyond ordinary human political relations rather than establishing her as man’s peer. Beauvoir’s central qualification is that society remained male: political and social authority belonged to men.

The distinction also clarifies what “Other” means in this argument. Being treated as the absolute Other is not the same as being recognized as another subject with whom reciprocal relations can be formed. Men’s relations of reciprocity, Beauvoir argues, were established with other men; women instead functioned as possessions and as means of exchange between male groups. The appearance of female power therefore does not demonstrate that women constituted an autonomous political group or met men as equals.

Descent and the persistence of male authority

Beauvoir extends this argument beyond the proposed shift from matrilineal to patrilineal descent. A society’s lineage system, by itself, does not determine whether women possess authority. Across patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or nominally undifferentiated systems, women remain under male guardianship. The relevant variation is which man exercises authority: a woman’s father or eldest brother, whose power can extend to her children, or her husband after marriage.

Matrilineal descent, in this account, does not necessarily transfer power to women. Beauvoir cites the formulation that it can amount to the authority of a woman’s father or brother extended into her husband’s village. Woman mediates a system of law and kinship but does not own that law; the filiative relation is still organized between masculine groups. This qualification makes the phrase “historical defeat” less a simple account of women once ruling and then losing power than a challenge to the assumption that a change in descent automatically changed women’s concrete position.

The phrase in Beauvoir’s argument

The expression belongs to a broader analysis of how women are made into the inessential term beside a male subject treated as universal. Beauvoir argues that women have not historically formed a separate group that could posit itself as an autonomous subject; the bond between women and the men who dominate them is interwoven with family and social life. The proposed defeat therefore cannot be reduced to a single episode or a clean historical break. It points instead toward a persistent structure of male authority, even where symbols of female power survive.

Beauvoir’s treatment also cautions against mistaking an idealized past for liberation. Calling women’s subordination a defeat can name its historical weight, but the myth of former female supremacy risks concealing the continuing absence of reciprocity. In her account, women’s position must be judged not by goddess imagery or descent labels, but by who holds authority and who can act as a subject in social and political life.