Women's Complicity

This paper is about women's complicity or women's involvement in actions that directly or indirectly lead to the restriction of other women's freedoms and rights. Among the first to mention women's complicity was Simone de Beauvoir, who in her book The Second Sex described the phenomenon of women's participation in unjust patriarchal practices, suggesting the existence of passive (forced, unintentional) and active (intentional) complicity. Using Christopher Kutz's theory of collective complicity and its extension by Brian Lawson, the validity of the notion of female complicity is examined through selected examples of anti-female practice mentioned in the works of feminist theorists. Although feminists spoke of women's complicity in the context of women's self-objectification, domestic work, and political activity on the right, the conclusion of this paper is that only in the latter case can we speak of active and then only of feminist and politically relevant female complicity.