Yet discussion of women’s rightful place in American life never fell away. A New York Times writer in 1952 observed that questions about women’s roles were perennial: Could women do men’s work? Did men hold them back? Was it right that they gave free rein to their highest intellectual ambitions, or should they hunker down to be better wives and mothers?37 In 1956, Life magazine, bellwether of the mainstream, announced that things were going so well for American women that someday the 1950s might be seen as the decade of a “feminist revolution,” magically realized without the need for unpleasant conflict.38
This all goes toward explaining the surprising success of a new book about women, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, briefly an American bestseller in 1953. The book slipped through the neo-domestic consensus, riding undercurrents of restlessness and reaching readers who were skeptical about fixed ideas about women’s place. It was at once the most definitive and exhaustive statement of women’s wrongs since Mill’s On the Subjection of Women and, paradoxically, a book severed from the feminist tradition. Beauvoir took pains to disassociate herself from anyone who had ever protested the very injustice she described. Feminism was a boring subject, she allowed, clearing her throat to begin. “Enough ink has been spilled in the quarrel over feminism.” Now the whole controversy was practically over. “After all, is there a problem?” she asked disingenuously.39
Glittering with insights, The Second Sex laid out two premises that became the intellectual foundation of the feminism that was reborn ten years later. First, womanhood is a social role, not a biological given; and second, women’s subordination is not simply a result of institutional forces—the law, education, politics, economics—but a consequence of the male-centeredness of all culture. The Second Sex was to play the role in the second half of the twentieth century that Mill’s and Wollstonecraft’s books played in the nineteenth. But like the Vindication, the ripple effects were more important than the initial splash. Published in America when the hunt for Communists was going full swing and domestic conservatism was riding high, the book struck Americans as an exotic thought experiment rather than a provocation for change.
A strange combination of ardor and detachment made Beauvoir just the right author for a time when some were willing to muse about injustice to women but not do anything about it. Trained in philosophy, she was a leading figure of Parisian intellectual society, the close colleague, friend, and onetime lover of Jean-Paul Sartre. She began writing The Second Sex in 1948. It was an odd book for a European intellectual to write. If there was ever a time and a place when the woman question was less pressing than other questions, this was it. Europe was a continent of graves. Thirty million dead; six million Jews murdered. Others took the catastrophe itself as their subject, training their powers of mind on understanding the character of fascism, the annihilation of the Jews, the nature of the Communist drive for domination: “rubble texts,” a historian has called writings from these gray years, written from the ruins.40
Yet reading The Second Sex, you would never know it came from a ravaged city. Physically, Paris came through the war intact, its institutions functioning and its buildings not bombed, protected but also poisoned by the Nazi occupation. It took real effort for Beauvoir to pull down the blinds on what had happened and what was happening: French collaboration with the Germans, the destruction of the city’s large Jewish community, the mutual recriminations of different factions of the Resistance, and acute food shortages. “The city lay under a black depression,” remembered Saul Bellow, who lived there in 1948. “The gloom everywhere was heavy and vile.”41
Nor would you know that France had finally just granted women the vote, almost the last European nation to do so (Switzerland, 1971, and Lichtenstein, 1984, brought up the rear). French suffrage represented a recognition of women’s courageous activity in the Resistance, contributions that disproved the right’s insistence that women were incapable of engaging meaningfully in politics and the left’s judgment that women were reactionary Catholics who must be kept out. Beauvoir hardly mentioned French suffrage, displacing the subject of women’s enfranchisement onto a brief discussion of American suffrage.
But the fact that the intellectuals’ attention was elsewhere seems to have freed up something in this exceedingly proper woman. Despite all the trappings of the French avant-garde, Beauvoir was a “dutiful daughter”—a phrase she later used to title her memoir—who had long played to the hilt the role of exceptional woman in a circle of brilliant men. But as scores were being settled and politics reworked between 1946 and 1949, that tight male intellectual authority flagged and she took on an unorthodox subject that really only interested her, not them. It was as if she felt that no one was watching.
The questions she addressed were blunt. How is it that this world belongs to men and always has? And what is a woman, anyway? The Second Sex was a voluminous answer. Reading it now, the book seems to swoop through time and space. Beauvoir’s commanding persona leaves the impression that she is taking up everything that ever mattered in women’s relations to the world, men, and themselves. The Second Sex is social criticism in the grand manner, extending her philosophical gifts to survey biology, mythology and religion, literature, and history (medieval to modern), capped by a long section examining the stages of female development from girlhood to maturity.
But the book always circles around to light on one elegant, crystalline explanation of why women are second: the hierarchy men create between Self (male) and Other (female). The world belongs to men because they succeed in inundating the very terms of being, how the sexes view and experience life, with the opposition of male universal to female particular, male Normal to female Abnormal. “She [Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” She is the second term, the afterthought.42
Now, half a century later, feminists confidently propose that the social arrangements that divide human beings in two—men and women—are by no means natural but rather socially created, or constructed. Beauvoir originated this stunning idea but tucked it halfway through the book. “One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman; no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society” (my emphasis).43 Magisterially she explained how that “becoming” occurred, beginning in prehistory when men’s awe of female fecundity engendered fear. Her range of subjects was extraordinary, from North American Indian potlatch rituals to ancient history, modern novels, and contemporary labor statistics. Leafing through the book now, even doubtful readers will encounter observations that still hold: her bleak description of how housework never ends, for example. “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.”44
This is not to say that The Second Sex transcends its time and place. The book is time-bound in many ways, not the least in the dour and dire view of its subject. More indictment of Woman than defense, it recapitulated the terms of 1950s misogynist thought even as Beauvoir criticized them. Woman-as-she-exists (the subject is always abstract Woman; Beauvoir seldom refers to actual people) is a sorry sort. Her body defines her, and it is a mess. Hormonal surges convulse her; menstruation disables her; fecundity swamps her; organs turn irritable and inflamed, swell and degenerate. “It escapes her control, it betrays her; it is her most intimate verity, but it is a shameful verity that she keeps hidden.”45 One can scarcely exaggerate how fraught are Beauvoir’s descriptions with a language of distress and disgust, taken uncritically from the woman-despising medical profession of the time.
Beyond the bog of biology, the social and psychological facts only sink the sex deeper. Yes, Beauvoir sees women surviving in a world not of their o
wn making, trapped in rigid structures of subordination. But they bear more than a little blame for their plight. Womanhood, that entropic state that drags one down into the debased “Other,” is made from without but also from within. The accusations are relentless. Women make themselves vassals of male breadwinners. They are petty, unreasonable, timid, materialistic, “false, theatrical, self-seeking, and so on.” They are bad with tools and they believe in astrology. They smile too much. “Man wants woman to be an object; she makes herself object.”46 The female reader can hardly exit the book without resolving with all her heart to be different, to get away from her pitiable sex. The text has no recourse to living women who might sustain a better future, except for the author herself. The only escape route seems to be modeling oneself on her.
Like Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir didn’t much like women. True, present-day defenders show that, technically speaking, she did identify herself with the second sex—“If I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman,’ ” she announced right off. But the declaration rings hollow, as if she were signing up by mail. The poet Stevie Smith, reviewing the British edition, joked that the book made one wonder how women could have survived their loathsome biology at all, let alone lived to be sometimes “brave, happy, active and occupied.”47
In France, the book was caught in the crossfire between Communists who pilloried it as petty bourgeois and conservatives who found shocking all the talk about sex. The vitriol made it a succès de scandale, prompting the illustrious New York publishers Alfred and Blanche Knopf to purchase the English translation rights. When Knopf published it in 1953, American readers and critics responded warmly, enthralled by its learning and ambition. It was a “glorious and fantastic book,” pronounced Elizabeth Hardwick from her perch as one of the very few women who mattered in the New York intelligentsia.48 In a climate where feminism was moribund, the book’s distance from any sense of political engagement in the here and now made it assimilable. A book that did not much like women, but that meant to defend them—that was a book that could make headway.49
The book’s moment in the limelight spluttered out, and it dropped out of sight, as had A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But the ideas did not vanish. Copies remained on shelves, repositories of a way of seeing the world that would become wildly relevant ten years later in the United States and a little later in France. The Second Sex was a diagnostic tool kit, ready for a time when women came to believe they could not only read but actually do something about always coming in second.
The National Woman’s Party was the one organization in the 1950s to declare itself feminist and to press for an explicitly feminist measure—the ERA. Still led by the now-elderly Alice Paul, the NWP was an indefatigable lobbying group devoted to this one great cause. As drafted in 1923, the amendment read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” The framers thought it would abolish all sexism in the law at one swoop, and, by extension, all sexism, period. Its lobbyists were familiar habituées of the halls of Congress, with a presence in Washington that far outstripped the organization’s actual importance.
Virtually all liberal organizations opposed the ERA. The crux of the conflict was over fair labor standards for women workers—protective legislation, as it was called. From the beginning of the twentieth century, social feminists fought for those very state laws. Arguing on the basis of the state’s obligation to protect women’s morals and health, they won legislation that required employers to give rest breaks to female employees, prohibited women from heavy lifting, and banned them from tending bar, working at night, and working long hours.50 However counterproductive and paternalistic (or maternalistic) they may seem today, for nonunion workers, these laws were some of the only fair labor standards in play in the early part of the century. They were the signal achievement of American social feminists, who failed to secure other provisions—government-funded maternal and child health care, mothers’ pensions, child care services—that their counterparts in Scandinavia, Britain, and France won in varying combinations (for many different reasons, few of them having to do with feminism). Some state laws were restrictive (bans on night work and maximum hour provisions, which effectively prevented women in union jobs from earning overtime pay). Others were predicated on protecting women’s morals and their ability to bear children, laws that meshed with conservative gender norms but did little to improve workplace conditions. But others were beneficial, requiring employers to provide bathroom and lunch breaks, and stipulating safety and quality-of-workplace measures.51
The one thing both sides agreed on was that the ERA would abolish these statutes, since protective laws singled out women for special treatment. The NWP thought this was good, because protective laws interfered with women’s freedom of contract and exercise of their full capabilities. Why should a workingwoman be barred from a job that required her to lift more than twenty pounds, the NWP demanded scornfully, if she wanted it? Who said she was so delicate? Labor feminists recognized the dilemma but insisted the laws meant protection for a vulnerable class, the only restraints to employers’ demands on easily exploitable nonunion workers. “We settled for practical gains that made some difference to women who worked in factories and sweatshops, rather than striving for an ideal that was largely theoretical, given the social and political circumstances,” explained Esther Peterson, a leader in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and then the AFL-CIO.52
The standoff was also between different political venues. Officially the Woman’s Party was nonpartisan, but by the 1950s, it incorporated a contingent of McCarthyites and segregationists along with garden-variety business Republicans. Its supporters in Congress included Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Strom Thurmond.53 The organization refused to support the Fair Labor Standards Act or minimum-wage legislation. Its idea of woman leaned heavily toward the affluent and privileged, and its emphasis on liberty had to do primarily with liberty of contract: women’s problems with inheritance and property rights, their difficulties in making their way in business and male-dominated fields.54
Insofar as women’s issues entered politics in Washington, the standoff blocked any change. Each side had supporters in Congress, but the issue was low on male politicians’ agendas (and politicians were almost exclusively male). Thoughtful women facing the problems of work and sex discrimination had to wonder: If the ERA was useless, what would be better? So things stood in Washington in 1960.
The balance shifted that year when John F. Kennedy was elected president. With a Democrat in office indebted to the labor vote, the unions had access to Washington they hadn’t had since the New Deal. Kennedy appointed Esther Peterson as assistant secretary of labor, the administration’s highest-ranking woman. Peterson, imbued with social feminist aims and union experience, had spent years in Scandinavia and was determined to import to America something of the spirit of experimentation with public resources for women—child care, maternal leave, household support—she saw there. She believed the time had come to put women’s needs forward and persuaded the president to form a high-profile President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). The PCSW would come up with a program of reforms that went beyond the “futile agitation about the ERA,” she promised.55
With backing from the administration, women had a chance to create proposals linked to Kennedy’s domestic policy. Peterson was not looking to reawaken a women’s movement: She thought feminism was “an antiquated, more-than-slightly ridiculous notion.”56 Rather, she would utilize insider politics—connections to male patrons in the administration, Women’s Bureau allies, and like-minded women in government positions. The immensely prestigious Eleanor Roosevelt was the commission’s chair until she died late in 1962. Peterson, the vice chair and real administrator, chose the commissioners, some two dozen men and women from elites in government, business, academics, unions, and women’s organizations. They included Dorothy Height, president of th
e National Council of Negro Women; Mary Bunting, president of Radcliffe College (Harvard’s then-sister school); the Princeton economist Richard A. Lester; union leaders; and leaders of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant women’s national organizations. Except for Marguerite Rawalt, a lawyer in a federal civil service position, Peterson kept out anyone associated with the Woman’s Party.57
For the research committees that would do the real work of amassing information and writing the report, Peterson tapped a network of women in and around Washington. As individuals, they brought their own frustrations and grievances to bear on the problems at hand. A number had begun promising careers in the Roosevelt administration, only to be frozen in place (or frozen out) during the Truman and Eisenhower years.58 Rawalt had been a lawyer in the Bureau of Internal Revenue since 1933, stalled at mid-level; Catherine East, similiarly blocked in the Civil Service Commission, came onto the commission as executive secretary. The House Un-American Activities Committee had hounded Mary Keyserling and her husband, Leon Keyserling, out of their positions as high-level government economic advisers; Mary was doing nonprofit consulting when Esther Peterson brought her in to join the research group on protective legislation. The next year, President Johnson appointed her to head the Women’s Bureau when Mary Anderson retired.59
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