Have you ever noticed, people canât speak about Simone de Beauvoir without giving dates and mentioning ages?
Itâs because she was always obsessed with real time.
geneviève brisac 1
In teaching Beauvoir, the task is to help students read her historically without dismissing her as âdated.â
deborah nelson 2
In rapidly changing societies all generations are transitional.
wini breines 3
In the US, in Great Britain and Australia, in France itself, The Second Sex mattered enormously at the outset of second-wave feminism. In memoir after memoir from the 1960s and 1970s, we read that this one book changed womenâs lives: led them to withdraw their energies from the male-dominated left and invent consciousness-raising, to leave their husbands and abandon what Adrienne Rich called âthe old way of marriage,â
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to see their culture, their families, their own bodies in new and challenging ways. Many of us who teach womenâs studies today acknowledge this by assigning the book, or at least some carefully selected parts of it. Kate Millett: âBetty [Friedan] wasnât the mother of us all. Simone de Beauvoir was.â Our Bodies, Ourselves: âThe Second Sex was the
But which Second Sex were they reading? For years I owned two editions of H.M. Parshleyâs English version. One was a large-format work of serious philosophy, undecorated except for some tasteful stripes, intended to be read at a library table: this is the text that functioned in my undergraduate Feminist Theory seminar to signify that womenâs studies was a scholarly rigorous undertaking, not some flaky fad. 6 The other copy is a drugstore paperback. Its cover shows a crouching naked lady emerging from a vague and lurid yellowish haze. Blurbs emphasize its daring and titillating content, marking and marketing it as a Book About Sex:
[T]he most penetrating, frank, and intimate book ever written about Womanâ¦. [A] Frenchwoman, who never loses sight of the needs and desires of both sexes, has used her artistry and erudition to explore woman in each of her many dimensions. Her ⦠highly original and stimulating conclusions have produced a book that overwhelmed reviewersâ¦. 7
This change in presentation, from scandalous trash to ponderous tome, was a tribute to scholars and activists who worked to get Beauvoir taken seriously as a philosopher and thinker. And it is also a tribute to feminist advances, in and out of the academy, more generally: an intellectual woman, writing about women, is no longer exotic, risqué, miraculous, faintly terrifying. We tend now to see that early edition as a sexist misunderstanding, a joke in rather bad taste. But paradoxically, it was the earlier, trashier, version that inspired second-wave feminists. The yellow one, the âdirtyâ one, was the one they read. 8
Readers from that time often mention The Second Sex alongside other booksâSylvia Plathâs The Bell Jar, Mary McCarthyâs The Group, especially Doris Lessingâs The Golden Notebookânovels which sold very widely in the early 1960s, and which share a paradoxical transitional status. These books kicked
Soon, women would say âwe,â would recognize that even the most intimate pain of living as a woman under patriarchy was, in Adrienne Richâs phrase, âshared, unnecessary, and political.â 10 Those who came of age politically in the 1970s would draw on existentialist language and energy to mobilize for reproductive freedom, equal pay, sexual self-determination, and a thousand other things. Beauvoir herself would move beyond the hope she expressed at the end of The Second Sex and participate in direct collective action, to the point where she insisted on being pictured on the cover of Lâarc only as one member of her group: already a visible and committed woman of the left, she became a force for feminism. 11
But not long after this the problem of not saying âweâ was replaced by an awareness of the dangers of saying âweâ too quickly, as in, âwhat do you mean we, white woman?â And in the United States, at least, The Second Sex soon became a target, accused of a myopic lack of inclusivity that was said to characterize the âsecond wave.â In 1988, Elizabeth Spelmanâs highly influential Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought took an attack on Beauvoir as its starting point, drawing and quartering her for precisely the assertion she had been unwilling, or unable, to make.
So the reception of The Second Sex has been caught between two paradoxes. First, how could a mass movement have been started by a book which barely sketches the possibility of collective action? And then, what are we to do with a book that does not speak of differences between women in the ways identity politics came to demand, but that nonetheless appears to have spoken to women of color around the world, from Lorraine Hansberry to Sara Ahmed, in a powerful way?
The relation between âIâ and âweââepistemological, ethical, political, practicalâhas proved one of feminist theoryâs stubbornest knots. For sound and healthy reasons, both pronouns often feel uncomfortable in our mouths, often sound poisoned in our ears. Yet for strong and healthy reasons, I/we continue to use and need them. This isnât (just) an academic issue. Whenever I hear (or say) a sentence like âam I a feminist?â âam I still a feminist if?â âis feminism still about me?â âis feminism about me yet?â âis there a group I can join?â even, âisnât there anything we can do about [whatever awful thing has happened that day]?â the same problem is being posed. Because Iâm still hoping the answer to all those questions is âyes,â for me and my students among others, I want to bracket the forms this issue has taken for the last three decades or so, and go back behind and before âweâ (and I) got into such a mess.
Even as we pursue the project of exegesis and analysis of Beauvoir as a brilliant and multifaceted theoretical thinker, a major philosopher of the twentieth century, I think we should pay attention to what women saw in the yellowish, and yellowing, version, the one they hid in their laundry baskets alongside The Golden Notebook.
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Taking her philosophical arguments seriously requires us to read them alongside the (then) more popular and (now) more suspect discourses with which readers sometimes confused them, and from which they often grew: âtrashyâ sex manuals, bad novels with romance plots, outmoded psychoanalytic and sexological authorities, âhuman rightsâ talk, andâlast but not leastâexistentialism. I think those first readers saw something more recent theorists, especially philosophers, have missed, or dismissed, or been embarrassed to mention: an energetic, passionate critique of the sorry state of most womenâs sexual and romantic lives, and an argument that womenâs oppression could be, should be, taken just as seriously as other ongoing struggles for liberation. The biggest mistake we can make as readers, I think, is to try and purge Beauvoir and other postwar women writers of the marks of such prefeminist or even antifeminist discourses that were in her temporal
In what follows, Iâve concentrated on three recurring aspects of Simone de Beauvoirâs thoughtâbad sex, lesbians, and ârace and classââwhich have in recent years been considered embarrassingly âof her era,â and which remain underdiscussed despite the current renaissance of serious scholarship on Beauvoir. 14 Looking carefully at the parts of The Second Sex many readers skim or skip, and also at her other essays and autobiographical works, I provide a set of intensive, interdisciplinary readings that locate her writing in her own time and place, neither to accuse nor to excuse, but to clarify: to understand what she was doing then, hoping to show how she is still âgood to think withâ now. My aim is not to defend at all costs everything Beauvoir ever said or did, but to enable readers to agree or disagree with her in a non-anachronistic way by seeing what larger conversation her texts were part of, what key terms have changed their meaning, whom she was arguing with, what she could or could not have known. This requires a method that will strike some readers as digressive, involving long excursions into (for instance) the arcana of early psychoanalysis and the politics of decolonization. But I am ultimately less interested in where her ideas came from than in where they went and might still go.
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This is a very good time to be working on Simone de Beauvoir. For one thing, after decades of lobbying by scholars dissatisfied with Parshleyâs unsignalled cuts and distortions, I can now finally add a third English version to the two copies of The Second Sex on my shelf.
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The new translationâimperfect, but completeâjoins the ongoing efforts of the University of Illinois Pressâs
One could not always assume this. Activists and polemicist feminists of the 1970s frequently built on and borrowed from Beauvoir, albeit selectively and often without attribution (as writers as different as Kate Millett and Christine Delphy have since acknowledged).
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But Beauvoirâs reputation was particularly ill-served, both in France and the United States, by feminist theorists in the 1980s, who while continuing to appropriate her insights, also used her as a kind of transference fetishâidealized icon and/or punching bagârather than responding to what she actually wrote. Pioneering correctives to this view were provided in France by the feminist philosopher Michèle Le DÅuff in 1989 and in the United States by Margaret Simons, through her own essays (collected in 1999)
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and her work as an anthologist, editor of the Beauvoir Series, and general inspiration. Further excellent work by the late Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Karen Vintges, Sonia Kruks, Toril Moi, and others has now cleared the ground of sexist dismissals, and of Beauvoirâs own evasion of the title âphilosopher,â and has done a great deal to rescue her work from the contradictory sets of misreadings that have dogged it: assertions for example that The Second Sex is both too essentialist, and insufficiently attentive to important differences
Thanks to these scholars, I can assume Beauvoir was a serious, careful, original thinker, motivated by deep and clear feminist commitments, and move on from there. In particular, it is no longer necessary to defend Beauvoir against the idea that she was simply Sartreâs over-devoted acolyte, her work ruined by the influence of an apolitical, sexist, outdated philosophical system, her feminism vitiated by a life as his devoted slave (or as a kind of grass widow).
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The question, âshould The Second Sex âcountâ as original philosophy?â has been sufficiently answered in the affirmative that it has also been helpfully reopened: yes, she was a philosopher, but what sort of philosophy is this, and what else was she also doing? Nancy Bauerâs characterization of Beauvoirâs philosophic method is suggestive: âFor her, the test of whether a philosopherâs work is worthy of appropriation is not whether it is susceptible to correction but whether it provides one with a philosophical idiom, a set of terms and concepts that open up a way to do oneâs own philosophical work.â
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I follow Bauer in proposing that we read Beauvoir herself in precisely that way, but with the addition that not all the idioms she âappropriatedâ are philosophicalâthe bookâs
Twenty-five years ago, I began asking students to read the whole of The Second Sex, in part because of its historical importance, but also because it seemed refreshingly free of that eraâs paralyzing impasses (the question of feminine language, âdifferenceâ vs âequality,â difficulties with the category âwomanâ and âwomen,â etc.) and more directly connected to the studentsâ lived realities, to the questions they were asking themselves about sex, work, and life. My hope was that taking another look at Beauvoir could provide what scholars of American literature sometimes refer to as a âusable past.â That view has been confirmed by several prominent scholars, who have seen in Beauvoirâs concept of womanâs âsituationâ a healthy alternative to what Judith Butler called in 1990 âthe circular ruins of contemporary debate.â 22 Literary theorist Toril Moi argues that Beauvoir avoided the âiatrogenicâ problems of later feminist âtheoreticism,â because she offered neither a feminism of equality nor a feminism of difference but a feminism of freedom; was neither wholly determinist nor wholly voluntarist with respect to âthe bodyâ; and took no interest whatever in the problematic distinction between sex and gender: she managed without it. Moi shows that in order to use her for our time, we need to first remember that she is not of our time:
Because contemporary English-language critics have read Beauvoirâs 1949 essay through the lens of the 1960s sex/gender distinction, they have failed to see that her essay provides exactly the kind of non-essentialist, concrete, historical and social understanding of the body that so many contemporary feminists are looking forâ¦. If many feminist critiques of Beauvoir strike me as fundamentally flawed ⦠it is not so much because they misread Beauvoirâs position on difference (though some do), as because they utterly fail to grasp that Beauvoirâs political project is radically different from their own. 23
Sonia Kruks makes a related, convincing claim that existentialist and phenomenological approaches, including Beauvoirâs, can bring back what was lost in subsequent âpostmodernâ and post-structuralist theory: crucial concepts of freedom and shared subjectivity. Kruks, Vintges and others also observe that
These analyses confirm my view that Beauvoir not only served as a repressed source for feminist arguments of the 1970s and beyond, but can serve as a good resource for feminism today. For instance, her failure to anticipate and subscribe to the âidentity politicsâ of the 1980s no longer looks like such a terrible mistake; and the lack of a clear demarcation between biologically given âsexâ and socially constructed âgenderâ is no longer cause for derision or condescension to those of us who have been convinced (by such scholars as Anne Fausto Sterling and Judith Butler, as well as by several decades of changes to the life-world of the sex-gender system) that what we used to call âsexâ is also inextricable from social processes. Moreover, Beauvoirâs attention to the impediments to solidarity between groups of women is very much to the point. The intervening mist appears to be clearing.
And yet there is still work to do. As a general reader of feminist/gender/sexuality/cultural theory, I find it irritating that so many peopleâincluding many feministsâstill cite and credit Foucault, or Bourdieu, or Lacan, or Judith Butler, for key and groundbreaking ideas (such as the social construction of gender) where they could, should, cite Beauvoir. When I tell people what Iâm working on, I still encounter puzzled expressions: âbut Beauvoir didnât have anything to say about race, so what is there to discuss?â On the other hand, those who do appreciate Beauvoir have sometimes over-emphasized her kinship with later writers, and later strands of feminist theory or philosophy, to the point of distortion.
I worry particularly about attempts to ârescueâ Beauvoir by emphasizing her positive statements about âbeing with others,â bringing her closer to the mainstream âethic of careâ strand within American feminist philosophy, which seems to me very much at odds with what is most challenging and provocative in Beauvoirâs own thought.
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Similarly, attempts to show commonalities between Beauvoir and Irigaray, and/or between Beauvoir and Kristeva, ignore real and basic disagreement about embodiment, psychoanalysis, maternity,
Meanwhile, what Bronwyn Winter forthrightly calls âidées bizarresâ
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continue to appear, even in scholarly journals. Too much writing about Beauvoir still focuses on details of biography, in ways that range from hagiographic to passive-aggressive.
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Most disappointingly, the introduction to the American edition of the new translation reproduces all the old biographical clichés, mentions the workâs key ideas only to casually dismiss them as old-fashioned, and concludes by suggesting that the book might nonetheless be valuable to a new generation of readers as a âpersonal meditation.â Perhaps in the same spirit, the cover of this version shows neither a naked woman nor a dull abstract
Summing up the state of âBeauvoir studiesâ at the end of those meetings, Sylvie Chaperon saw a promising amount of attention to Beauvoirâs texts, but less engagement with Beauvoirâs feminist contentions than she would have liked; she also noted an absence of historical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Twelve years later, this still seems accurate to me. I would add that serious scholars still too often tend to approach Beauvoir from one or another narrowly disciplinary perspective. In particular, there continues to be a split between a more philosophical way of appropriating Beauvoirâs conceptual legacy, and a more traditionally âlit critâ way of reading her texts. This was not a split she herself madeânor were/are these the only two options. Properly understanding Beauvoir requires, I believe, a fully interdisciplinary approach and a lack of embarrassment about crossing boundaries between high and low culture, philosophy and literature, literature and trash. The peculiar effectiveness of her texts (especially The Second Sex) in creating an âimagined communityâ of women and feminists has a lot to do with her lack of respect for disciplinary decorum and her successful negotiations between the intellectual and the popular, between the objective voice of the scholar and the voice which calls on us to identify as readers with a wide and contradictory array of subject positions, powerfully illustrated through literary, sexological, and anecdotal examples.
Sympathetic, intelligent commentaries on The Second Sex are still crucial because that text opposes, to the non-philosophical reader, a million opacities and resistances. One can only keep hold of part of it at a time. In its very opacities and resistances, though, lie its survival, its ability to engender a wide variety of fructifying and divergent feminist discourses, to always give us something
In understanding her work, I have tried to adopt a similarly open-ended method, with no intellectual tool or tradition ruled out a priori as inappropriate or ânot my field,â no aspect of the question set aside as âbeyond the scope of this inquiry,â and no policing of disciplinary boundaries. But I do not see my work as a simple commentary. I agree with Genevieve Lloydâs remark, apropos of Michèle Le DÅuffâs work, that doing the history of philosophy is also doing philosophy, 35 and I agree also with Christine Delphy that âthe history of feminist movements is not just the record of a struggle, it is a terrain of struggle in itself.â 36
Volume 2 of The Second Sex opens with an important paragraph that has one foot in the past and another in the future.
The women of today are well on their way to overthrowing the myth of femininity; they are starting to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living as full human beings. Raised by women in a world of women, their usual destiny is marriage, which still subordinates them practically to the man; male prestige is hardly vanishing, it still rests on a solid economic and social foundation. So we
must study womanâs traditional destiny carefully. How is a woman apprenticed to her condition, how does she feel it, in what world does she find herself trapped, what escapes are permitted to her: that is what I shall try to describe. Only then can we understand what problems are faced by women who, burdened by the past they have inherited, are doing their best to forge a new future. 37
The end of this paragraph announces what would come to be called âsocial construction,â 38 articulated just a page later in the most famous sentence Beauvoir ever wroteââOn ne naît pas femme: on le devientâ (One is not born but becomes a woman). Also crucial is her simultaneous emphasis on both the âcommon backgroundâ women share and on âeach womanâs singular existence,â the double focus (or, if you like, the dialectic) that animates her entire project. What I want to underscore now, though, is that she opens this second volume, âThe Lived Experience of Women,â by locating writer and reader together in an instant of time that she describes as transitional, ambiguous, or split, a âtodayâ which contains in itself both a âyesterdayâ and a âtomorrow.â
Should we see this as marking a particular post-war moment, an âin-between,â which is now historical, dated, past? We could then still hear the text making a good argument for its own continuing relevance: if in 1948 it was true that, even though things were changing, it was important to study how they had traditionally been, because the past is/was sedimented in the (then)
Where am I, where are âwe,â in this picture? What she is saying seems, on the face of it, simply true: things for women now, at least/especially for women who have had my kind of âluck,â are better than ever before. Iâve been able to make concrete my independence from the myth of femininity (I earn my living, I have never needed to marry). And yet there are still people who have trouble treating women as human beings (including some members of the US government), women in the aggregate still donât make the same money men make, and one still meets quite a few women who see emulating the myth of femininity as their best deal, practically and psychologically ⦠and some of them may well be right. One almost wants to say with Faulkner, âthe past is not dead, it is not even past.â (Or to say with Lessingâs Julia, âWhatâs the use of us being free when they arenât?â) 39 Weâre so much better off than women âback in the day.â And yet â¦. That other women in other years have read this passage and said what I just said merely reinforces the vertigo: 40 are we stuck in a time warp, or (to steal Kurt Vonnegutâs phrase) âunstuck in time,â free-falling? If we are, as Breines says, âin transition,â where are we going? Will we (or someone) ever get there?
âOn ne peut pas parler de Simone de Beauvoir sans donner des dates, sans citer des âges, lâavez-vous remarqué? Câest quâelle fut toujours obsédée du temps réelâ (Brisac, âBeauvoir âen temps réelâ: une écriture de lâinstantané,â 58). Except where noted, all translations are my own.
Midwest Faculty Seminar on Simone de Beauvoir, University of Chicago, November 21â23, 1996.
Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties, 24.
Rich, âWhen We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,â 43. For accounts of the effects The Second Sex had on the marriages of two otherwise very different women, see Angie Pegg in Penny Forster and Imogen Sutton, Daughters of de Beauvoir, 53â65, and Marge Piercy, Sleeping With Cats: A Memoir, 118.
Boston Womenâs Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women, 60; Michèle Le DÅuff, Hipparchiaâs Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., 57. See also now Miriam David, Feminism, Gender and Universities: Politics, Passion, and Pedagogies, 103, 106, 111, 112, 116, 128, 130, 132, and 141.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Parshley (1989).
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Parshley (1965).
The French, obviously, were reading it in French. But as Judith Coffin shows in a very interesting article, âBeauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,â even in France The Second Sex was often read and reviewed alongside Kinseyâs contemporaneous work, and was understood similarly to be a work dealing primarily with sexual matters.
âLes femmes ⦠ne disent pas ânousââ (Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe [hereinafter DS], 1:19). All references are to the French edition. As a general rule, I will refer to Beauvoirâs works under their French titles, not least because the English titles by which they are known are often approximations. The exception is The Second Sex, which in the interests of consistency will be called throughout by its English title. (So much of my discussion deals with its reception by Anglophone readers that either way would have been awkward, and this way seemed less fussy.)
Rich, âTranslations,â in Diving Into the Wreck, 41.
Annie Sugier and Kahina Benziane, âNos chemins se sont croisés,â 329.
See for instance Elayne Rapping, The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Womenâs Lives, 4.
Indeed, the parts of the book that speak most powerfully to students today are not always the parts that we foreground in trying to push them to think about it as theoryâwhich is why students who are assigned to read only the introduction, or only excerpts from it, are in my view missing out.
There are certainly other aspects equally worthy of similar excavation: in particular, her take on âthe data of biology.â
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Perhaps my work will be especially helpful for Anglophone readers who encountered Beauvoir first, or only, in Parshleyâs translation: the Beauvoir I discuss here may not be the âBeauvoirâ such readers know. For explanation of why a new translation was sorely needed, see Margaret Simons, âThe Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess Whatâs Missing from The Second Sex,â and Toril Moi, âWhile We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex.â The new version has not been uncontroversial: see Moi, âThe Adulteress Wife,â and Nancy Bauer in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. My own more positive view appeared in the Womenâs Review of Books.
See Margaret Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir; Elizabeth Fallaize, ed., Beauvoir: A Critical Reader; Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, ed., Le Cinquantenaire du deuxième Sexe; Claudia Card, ed., Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir; Emily Grosholz, The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir; Simons, ed., The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir; Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh, ed., Beauvoirâs Political Thinking: Critical Essays; Thomas Staudter, ed., Beauvoir cent ans après sa naissance: contributions interdisciplinaires de cinq continents; Kristeva et al., eds., (Re)découvrir lâÅuvre de Simone de Beauvoir. Of these, the Chaperon and Kristeva volumes are particularly massive, international, and varied. See also now Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold, ed., Blackwellâs Companion to Simone de Beauvoir.
Forster and Sutton, Daughters of de Beauvoir, 22â23.
Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism.
See especially Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoirâs The Second Sex; Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir; Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir: Gender and Testimony; Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays; Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism; Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir; Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics and Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity. Lori Marso, Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter, is a welcome addition to this group, although it was published too recently to fully inform my study.
This last idea particularly informed Deirdre Bairâs 1991 biography. (The phrase âgrass widowâ is Karen Vintgesâs summary of Bairâs view.) Now available are a range of other interpretations, including that her ideas were radically different from his, and better, but that she never explicitly signaled this (Le DÅuff); that she invented âSartreanâ existentialism, and he stole it (Fullbrook and Fullbrook); that she influenced his turn to the social after the war, although he never quite credited her properly (Kruks); that other philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Hegel) were actually more important influences on her work than Sartre was (Heinämaa). All these views seem to me plausible and interesting; it is not my project here to choose among them, and I will be discussing Sartre only in so far as a contrast with his position clarifies Beauvoirâs.
Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism, 83.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 8. Butlerâs own uptake of Beauvoir is rather more labyrinthine, as Iâll discuss briefly below.
Moi, What is a Woman?, 5, 184.
For similar arguments that the insistence on a sharp break between existentialist and âpost-structuralistâ French thought is not borne out by careful reading of a considerably more complex intellectual history, see Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay. Foucault and Sartre now appear to have agreed about quite a few things (which may explain why they signed so many of the same manifestos). Perhaps Beauvoir and Butler will appear to feminists in the twenty-second century, not as succeeding and oppositional âphasesâ of theory, but as overlapping interlocutors.
See in particular Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, and my discussion in chapter 1 below.
A particularly curious case of apparent rapprochement is Julia Kristevaâs recent enthusiasm for Beauvoirâfor instance, she figured prominently among the organizers of the Beauvoir centenary colloquium in Parisâwhile continuing to maintain her own quasi-mystical ideas about maternity and sexual duality, which would have been anathema to Beauvoir. See for example Kristeva, âBeauvoir in China,â and âBeauvoir aux risques de la liberté.â
See for example her interview with Alice Jardine, published in Signs in 1979.
Hipparchiaâs Choice, 55â57.
âSimone de Beauvoir, câétait un philosophe; ce nâest pas un interactive videogame. Il faut lire le livreâ (Introductory remarks, âColloque internationale: Cinquantenaire du deuxième sexe,â Paris, January 1999).
Bronwyn Winter, âLâessentialisation de lâaltérité et lâinvisibilisation de lâoppression: lâhistoire bizarre mais vraie de la déformation dâun concept,â 78.
Reference to Beauvoirâs biography and autobiography will also play a role in my own analyses; what seems crucial to avoid is, not biography as such, but a triumphalist sense that biography determines ideas, that ideas have no life of their own; and also the temptation to second-guessing (âBeauvoir must have felt, though she never saidâ) to which work on women writers has been particularly prone.
I cannot here take account of all the post-Bair Beauvoir biographies, except to marvel that there are so very many of them, going over substantially similar ground. Hazel Rowleyâs 2005 Tête-à -tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre was in some respects an advance over Bair, whose book was riddled with factual errors and has been superseded by publications of private documents; but Rowleyâs failure to document sources for much of her information means it cannot really be used by scholars. Kate Kirkpatrickâs Becoming Beauvoir, while aimed at a general readership, does an admirable job of taking Beauvoirâs ideas seriously. There is still no substitute for working directly with Beauvoirâs autobiographical texts, notebooks, and letters, which is what I have done.
The British edition had a simple cover and a really excellent, clear historical introduction from veteran socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham ⦠but thereâs a e-book on Amazon.co.uk (apparently a bootleg of excerpts, pretending to be complete) that features a headless naked sweating woman with her hand in her crotch â¦
Agnès Logeart and Aude Lancelin, âSimone, la scandaleuse.â The true scandal was not simply that they published this photograph by Art Shay, which had already appeared in Hazel Rowleyâs book, but that they had silently photoshopped it to make Beauvoir look thinner: thus not only continuing the long tradition of replacing womenâs thought with womenâs bodies, but updating it to enforce todayâs anorectic and somatophobic version.
One of her characteristic moves was to turn a prescriptive or ânecessaryâ account into a descriptive, historically contingent one.
Genevieve Lloyd, âLe DÅuff and History of Philosophy.â
âChristine Delphy a dit, il y a bien des années, quâécrire lâhistoire du mouvement féministe nâétait pas seulement documenter une lutte, mais câétait âun terrain de lutte en soiââ (Winter, âLâessentialisation de lâaltérité,â 96, quoting Delphy, âLibération des femmes an dix,â 9).
âLes femmes dâaujourdâhui sont en train de détrôner le mythe de la féminité; elles commencent à affirmer concrètement leur indépendance; mais ce nâest pas sans peine quâelles réussissent à vivre intégralement leur condition dâêtre humain. Ãlevées par des femmes, au sein dâun monde féminin, leur destinée normale est le mariage qui les subordonne encore pratiquement à lâhomme; le prestige viril est bien loin de sâêtre effacé; il repose encore sur de solides bases économiques et sociales. Il est donc nécessaire dâétudier avec soin le destin traditionnel de la femme. Comment la femme fait-elle lâapprentissage de sa condition, comment lâéprouve-t-elle, dans quel univers se trouve-t-elle enfermée, quelles évasions lui sont permises, voilà ce que je chercherai à décrire. Alors seulement nous pourrons comprendre quels problèmes se posent aux femmes qui, héritant dâun lourd passé, sâefforcent de forger un avenir nouveauâ (Le deuxième sexe, 2:9).
Here she continues: âWhen I use the words âwomanâ or âfeminineâ obviously I am not referring to any archetype or any unchangeable essence; after most of my claims the reader should infer âin the current state of education and social custom.â The point is not to set forth some eternal Truths, but to describe the common background from which every singular womanâs existence takes off.â [Quand jâemploie les mots âfemmeâ ou âfémininâ je ne me réfère évidemment à aucun archétype, à aucune immuable essence; après la plupart de mes affirmations il faut sous-entendre âdans lâétat actuel de lâéducation et des mÅurs.â Il ne sâagit pas ici dâénoncer des vérités éternelles mais de décrire le fond commun sur lequel sâenlève toute existence féminine singulière.]
Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 404.
For instance, Michèle Le DÅuff in 1989 (Hipparchiaâs Choice, 3â6): more than a quarter of a century agoâ¦