1176 SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR
groups have been treated as the “Other” and have redefined themselves. Why not
women? Later in the book, de Beauvoir speculates that a woman’s identity as the
“Other” derives in part from her body—especially her reproductive capacity. But
in our selection, she points outs that women have always (with rare exceptions)
been subordinated to men, “and hence their dependency is not the result of a
historical event or a social change—it was not something that occurred.” Women
have accepted their role as the “Other” because otherness “lacks the contingent or
incidental nature of historical facts.” Women have no past, no history of their
own. They are not grouped together as women, they have no solidarity of employ-
ment since as a rule they work dispersed among men. In short, they do not have
the “concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to
face with the correlative unit.”
The goal of The Second Sexis to move beyond analysis to a “concrete means”
for organizing women. According to de Beauvoir, there must be two changes in
order to accomplish this goal: (1) Women need to act as authentic subjects choos-
ing their own histories and (2) society must be changed to make this possible. The
first of these needed changes reflects de Beauvoir’s existentialism, the second her
Marxism.
Whereas traditionalists condemned the entire work, feminist critics raised
questions about some of de Beauvoir’s specific analyses. Many contemporary
feminists claim that she did not go to the roots of patriarchy and its pervasive
infection of even our language. Other feminists question her existentialist or
Marxist assumptions (and her apparent hostility to the female body). But most
feminists salute de Beauvoir for calling attention to feminist issues. As one writer
put it,The Second Sexis for feminists “the base-line from which other works
either explicitly... or implicitly... take off.”
There are several biographies of de Beauvoir, including Axel Madsen,Hearts
and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
(New York: Morrow, 1977); the thorough Deirdre Bair,Simone de Beauvoir: A
Biography(New York: Summit Books, 1990); Ursula Tidd,Simone de Beauvoir:
Gender and Testimony(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Hazel
Rowley,Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre(New York:
HarperCollins, 2005); and her own autobiography, Simone De Beauvoir,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, translated by James Kirkup (New York:
HarperCollins, 2005). General studies of her writings include Terry Keefe,
Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings(Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble,
1983); Judith Okely,Simone de Beauvoir: A Re-reading(London: Virago Press,
1986); Renee Winegarten,Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical View(New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Catharine Savage Brosman,Simone de Beauvoir
Revisited(Boston: Twayne, 1991); Margaret Crosland,Simone de Beauvoir: The
Woman and Her Work(London: Heinemann, 1992); and Clandia Card, ed.,The
Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003). For material on her feminist theories specifically, see Jean
Leighton,Simone de Beauvoir on Woman(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1975); Mary Evans,Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin
(London: Tavistock, 1985); Rosemarie Tong,Feminist Thought:A Comprehensive
