November 7, 2019 45her. One of the daydreams he en-
joys is the impregnation of things
by his will, shaping their form,
penetrating their substance: the
woman is par excellence the “clay
in his hands” that passively lets
itself be worked and shaped, re-
sistant while yielding, permitting
masculine activity to go on.Had men ever been subject to such
cool scrutiny by a female author? Beau-
voir recalled that Albert Camus, her
friend at the time, “bellowed, ‘You have
made a laughing-stock of the French
male!’” This is, on the face of it, an odd
comment, because if there’s one thing
Beauvoir does not do, it’s deride men.
Virginia Woolf, by contrast, had some
fun in A Room of One’s Own sketching
the hypothetical intellectual misogy-nist Professor von X., author of The
Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
of the Female Sex, whom she pictured
with “a great jowl,” “very small eyes,”
and an expression that “suggested that
he was labouring under some emotion
that made him jab his pen on the paper
as if he were killing some noxious in-
sect as he wrote.” Firestone, Millet,
and Andrea Dworkin at times all turn
caustic in their own sketches of sexist
behavior. But Beauvoir isn’t one for
satire or mischief. Though her primary
purpose was to awaken women to a
fuller historical and philosophical view
of their relation to men, her secondary,
equally sincere purpose seems to have
been to awaken men to those same re-
lations. There is nothing in The Second
Sex at odds with the idea that men and
women are—or should be—good-faith
comrades in struggles against all kinds
of injustice.
If Beauvoir has made men a laugh-
ingstock, then, it’s not because she
writes derisively, but simply because
she has made men visible. The very ex-
istence of the book confirms it. Men, no
less than women, are potential objects
of intellectual investigation, scientific
scrutiny, psychological speculation.
They’re sitting ducks. The Second Sex
was, among many other things, an un-
precedented foray into the objectifica-
tion of men.Excerpts from the book were first
published in the journal that she and
Sartre edited, Les Temps Modernes.
The issues sold out. Beauvoir received
many letters of appreciation, mostlyfrom women, but there was a larger
flood of criticism from right and left.
A columnist in Le Figaro dismissively
summed up the book as “woman, rel-
egated to the level of the Other, is ex-
asperated in her inferiority complex.”
(Toril Moi, in Simone de Beauvoir:
The Making of an Intellectual Woman,
has noted that contemporary commen-
taries on The Second Sex were par-
ticularly characterized by sarcasm.) A
writer in L’Esprit criticized its “tone
of ressentiment,” and the philosopher
Jean Guitton, Kirkpatrick writes, “ex-
pressed pain at seeing between its lines
‘her sad life.’”
When her lover Nelson Algren came
to visit Beauvoir in Paris in 1949, he was
impressed to find that people stared,
pointed, and whispered about her in
cafés—apparently not kindly. “You’vemade all the right enemies,” he would
tell her. Beauvoir also came in for some
hate mail, as she would recall:I received—some signed and some
anonymous—epigrams, epistles,
satires, admonitions, and exhorta-
tions.... People offered to cure me
of my frigidity or to temper my la-
bial appetites; I was promised rev-
elations, in the coarsest terms.What could this be but obscene harass-
ment, politely described?
More than twenty years after The
Second Sex, a women’s political move-
ment emerged. By then the book and
Beauvoir were passé to many young ac-
tivists, but in 1970 members of the radi-
cal French women’s liberation group
MLF nonetheless asked Beauvoir if
she wanted to join them in their cam-
paigns. She did.
“The situation of women in France
has not really changed in the last
twenty years,” she told an interviewer.
The tide toward equality that she once
thought inevitable had not rolled in,
“even in left-wing and revolutionary
groups and organizations in France.
Women always do the most lowly, most
tedious jobs, all the behind-the-scenes
things, and the men are always the
spokesmen.” Though she still didn’t
believe in essential female qualities
that set women apart from men, she
did think that women—whatever ex-
actly they were—needed to organize
on their own behalf. It had not been
enough to analyze; now Beauvoir ex-
horted: “Don’t gamble on the future,
act now, without delay.”A women’s liberation demonstration, Paris, 1971. The text on the sign reads, “WA K E U P/
the husband’s breakfast! /wake up the children /QUICK! leave for nursery school...”G
illes Peress/Magnum Photos
The perfect holiday present for your favorite reader:
A GIFT MEMBERSHIP IN THE
BOOK CLUB
OUR RECENT BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS
Th e Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel • Nothing But the Night by John Williams
Max Havelaar, or the Coff ee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Multatuli
Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov
Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky • Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake
Th ree Summers by Margarita Liberaki
Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of Wind by Lyall Watson
Th e Corner Th at Held Th em by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Images and Shadows by Iris Origo • Free Day by Inès Cagnati
Th e Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. LawrenceTh e NYRB Classics series is dedicated to publishing an eclectic mix
of fi ction and non-fi ction from diff erent eras and times and of various
sorts. Th e series includes nineteenth-century novels and experimental
novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned stud-
ies, established classics and cult favorites, new translations, literature
high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. NYRB Classics are, to a large
degree, discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into
outside of the classroom and then remember for life.Each year we off er books in this highly praised series, which was fea-
tured in Th e New York Times, to members of our subscription book
club. Book club memberships are $150.* NYRB editors select one book
each month and we send the selection, postage-free, to each recipient.
We’ll start the 2020 gift membership with the January 2020 selection.Book club memberships are available as gift subscriptions.
With each gift subscription, we will send you a FREE book.For a look at the entire series, please visit http://www.nyrb.com.To order a gift subscription, go to http://www.nyrb.com/holiday or
call 1-800-354-0050* Th e $150 subscription prices are valid for US addresses only.
For prices of Canada and overseas book club subscriptions, please visit http://www.nyrb.com.