40 The New York Review
A Woman’s Work
Elaine Blair
Becoming Beauvoir: A Life
by Kate Kirkpatrick.
Bloomsbury Academic, 476 pp., $28.00
Diary of a Philosophy Student,
Vo l u m e 2 , 1 9 2 8 – 2 9
by Simone de Beauvoir,
edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le
Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons,
and Marybeth Timmermann, and
translated from the French
by Barbara Klaw.
University of Illinois Press,
374 pp., $48.00
The second wave of the American
feminist movement produced a lot of
books. The Feminine Mystique, Sexual
Politics, The Dialectic of Sex—best
seller followed best seller, each look-
ing at how some combination of cus-
tom, law, and centuries-old ideologies
led to the gendered divisions of labor
and status that obtained in the US in
the Sixties and Seventies: women con-
centrated in low-paying jobs or unpaid
volunteer work, responsible for house-
work and childcare, largely absent from
government and the upper and middle
ranks of most industries and profes-
sions, making photocopies and coffee
for radical men who made speeches.
Every ten years or so, publishers re-
issue these books with new introduc-
tions, and critics recommend them. But
just try reading one. Some of their cen-
tral insights have so thoroughly entered
the mainstream of culture that they
now seem obvious, while other claims
have been qualified and corrected by
successive generations. Either way,
they seem trapped in their time. “After
a few chapters I began to find much
of it boring and dated,” writes histo-
rian Stephanie Coontz of reading The
Feminine Mystique (which had been
very important to her mother) for the
first time as an adult. “It made claims
about women’s history that I knew
were oversimplified,” she continues,
and Betty Friedan’s “generalizations
about women seemed so limited by
her white middle-class experience that
I thought the book’s prescriptions for
improving women’s lives were irrel-
evant to working class and African-
American women.” Coontz writes this
in A Strange Stirring: The Feminine
Mystique and American Women at the
Dawn of the 1960s, in which she ends
up complicating some of her own nega-
tive first impressions of The Feminine
Mystique. Which suggests you may
need to read (or write) a second book,
one of historical exegesis, to appreciate
a feminist classic.
During an interview a few years ago,
I asked the essayist and memoirist
Vivian Gornick, who had been active
in the movement, what she thought of
those books today. “Oh, they’re unread-
able now,” she shrugged, no trace of
lament. “It’s like that with a lot of fire-
brand writing, you know. It’s hardly ever
literature.” Yet, as Gornick has written,
millions of people read the books, saw
truth in them, and were moved to action:
they marched or they made changes in
their own lives or both, and collectively
these actions moved their society closer
to its egalitarian principles. Literature
or not, the second-wave classics played
their part in a kind of ideal meeting of
reader and book.
The writer who invented the genre
was neither a feminist nor an Ameri-
can. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex was published in France in 1949
when she was forty-one years old. A
few years later, its English transla-
tion would haunt and inspire Friedan,
Kate Millett, and Shulamith Firestone.
When she wrote it, Beauvoir, a social-
ist, did not see the need for a political
movement specifically for women’s
rights. It was a time of feminist qui-
escence, when activism on behalf of
women seemed to belong to the past
rather than the future. Earlier in the
century, there had been an expansion
of education opportunities for women
in France: they had won the right to
sit for the prestigious French agréga-
tion exam that was the entry point to
university teaching. Beauvoir had been
the ninth woman to pass the exam in
philosophy, and more women entered
the field behind her. As of 1944, women
also had the right to vote. They were
on their way. But something nagged
at the philosopher. “The situation of
woman,” she writes in her introduction,
“is that she—a free and autonomous
being like all human creatures—nev-
ertheless finds herself living in a world
where men compel her to assume the
status of the Other.”
Beauvoir was drawing on the long-
standing philosophical concept of the
Other, especially as developed by Hegel
and Husserl and, most recently, her
partner, Jean-Paul Sartre: the Other is
a consciousness outside the self whose
vexing discovery is crucial to our for-mation of a full sense of selfhood. A
lot can go wrong in the encounter.
Beauvoir’s first novel, L’Invitée (1943),
explored the problem of the existence
of other people in the context of a
love triangle culminating in murder,
while Sartre, in Being and Nothingness
(1943) and his play No Exit (1944),
highlighted the peculiar shame of fall-
ing under another person’s gaze, help-
lessly subject to his interpretations.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir turns to
this problem as it plays out among social
groups. Any two people from different
backgrounds might seem foreign to
each other, she writes in her introduc-
tion, but ordinarily each understands
that to the other he is the foreigner.
“Foreignness” or “difference” is—or
should be—a reciprocal concept. But
there can be groups of people, Beau-
voir continues, whose foreignness be-
comes fixed in their society. She points
to Jews in Europe and blacks in the
United States as well-known examples
of minorities who are perennially ex-
cluded from their respective societies’
self-definition. The dominant majority
has widespread social permission to
doubt and deny the selfhood of the mi-
nority, and over generations this doubt
can creep into the consciousness of the
minority members themselves: they
become permanent Others. Women,
Beauvoir argues, are another kind of
Other. Though she’s not a minority
anywhere, woman in Western society
has been widely imagined as a devia-
tion from the male standard—and not
a deviation for the better. Women’s
reciprocal claims to selfhood are com-
monly doubted and denied.A strange kind of doggedly re-
searched, densely argued work of
nonfiction arranged itself around this
observation. Beauvoir shows in The
Second Sex how centuries of law, cus-
tom, and myth have reiterated the idea
that female people are not quite as
good, or as real, or as human as male
ones. Patriarchalism has a history, she
reveals, and a set of self-serving blind
spots observable in all manner of West-
ern thought (biology, philosophy, psy-
choanalysis, literature—she reviews
them all). Most grippingly, Beauvoir
spends about five hundred pages illus-
trating, in novelistic detail, how male-
dominant culture can come to bear on
women’s inner lives, impressing them
so early and profoundly in their devel-
opment that they can seem less good
and less real even to themselves. Begin-
ning with the Existentialist principle
that every human consciousness seeks
to project itself outward and act upon
the world, Beauvoir argues that the
human consciousness housed in a fe-
male body in twentieth-century France
is, in certain consistent ways, checked
from early childhood in its attempts
to project and to act, and is instead
pressed to identify with perspectives
other than its own—to perceive itself
from the outside.
Beauvoir’s notion is akin to W. E. B.
Du Bois’s racial double consciousness,
the “sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others” that he
had described forty-five years earlier
in The Souls of Black Folk. Beauvoir’s
was the first attempt to show how con-
sciousness of one’s lower status, of one’s
deviance from the norm, can affect
women. Though earlier thinkers like
Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill,
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had made
the case for women’s rights, Beauvoir
went beyond advocacy: her deep study
of the philosophy, psychology, and his-
tory of female alterity opened up en-
tirely new channels of thought. With
The Second Sex, the modern feminist
polemic was born.Beauvoir grew up in a bourgeois
Parisian family, attended a convent
school, and nursed an outlandish de-
sire to study philosophy. Her ambition
was spurred by a magazine picture of
Léontine Zanta, the first woman in
France to have received a doctorate in
philosophy, photographed “in a grave
and thoughtful posture, sitting at her
desk,” as she recalled in Memoirs of a
Dutiful Daughter (1954). Beauvoir was
a brilliant student but not a success in
her parents’ straitened Parisian social
world (“I found smiling difficult”), and
she had no inheritance. Her parents
reluctantly accepted her ambitions.
The most prestigious path, the École
Normale Supérieure, was closed to
women at that time, so Beauvoir began
by studying math and literature at two
other colleges as she prepared for en-
trance examinations to the Sorbonne,
where she finally went on to study
philosophy.
She joined a study group with Paul
Nizan, the future novelist; René
Maheu, a future director-general of
UNESCO; and an aspiring philosopher,Simone de Beauvoir