Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism
Margaret A. Simons
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0742512460
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on BeauvoirOs wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her handwritten diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity. Simons also draws on her experience as a WomenOs Liberation organizer as she witnessed how women used The Second Sex in defining the foundations of radical feminism. Bringing together her work as both activist and scholar, Simons offers a highly original contribution to the renaissance of Beauvoir scholarship.
dispenses with the incredible women of the Italian Renaissance in two sentences (Beauvoir [1949] 1970, 118), eliminating all mention of specific women and their stories and distorting an important point in Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s historical oppression. Could it be the military exploits of these women that made the translator uncomfortable? We find there [in the Italian Renaissance] women who were powerful sovereigns, such as Jeanne d’Aragon, Jeanne de Naples, Isabelle d’Este; others were
or “for-others” may not be immediately obvious in their meaning; but an interested reader could find an explanation of these technical expressions because they belong to the accepted vocabulary of existential phenomenology. Far from simplifying Beauvoir’s language in a way that would make her ideas clearer, and more accessible to an American audience, which was evidently the translator’s intention, these mistranslations have the opposite effect. They make Beauvoir’s ideas less accessible and
It would be hard to imagine anything more closely tied to a daughter’s sense of being a woman than being a mother, since she gets so much of her emotional concept of what a woman is by relating to real women; for most of us, the woman who was most present in our earliest, impressionable years was the woman (or women) who mothered us. But many women professionals, in fact, share the experience of having been treated in some respects as a son by their father. Our fathers often identified with us,
own relationships—including lesbian connections—with others. Students: Olga, Védrine, and Natasha After the long-anticipated but unhappy two-year vacation from academia following her success in the agrégation in 1929, Beauvoir took up her career in philosophy once again. She was assigned by the French sex-segregated system to teach in girls’ preparatory schools, or lycées, first in Marseilles and then in Rouen, the northern city made famous by Jeanne d’Arc. Despite her earlier contempt for
the project of determining whether the “phenomenon” of mysticism issues from an “irreducible experience,” a determination Baruzi describes as inaccessible to sociological, historical, or psychological method. A reference to Husserlean phenomenology also seems apparent in Baruzi’s description of his quest to discover “the lived experience” [l’expérience vécue] of the mystic (Baruzi 1924, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi). In his 1925 presentation to the French Philosophical Society, “Saint John of the Cross and