By the standards of a conventional erotic relationship, Beauvoir and Sartre do not appear very ‘necessary’ to each other by this stage. Their accounts diverge on precisely when the sexual aspect of their relationship ended, with Sartre rather vaguely claiming that it lasted ten years longer than Beauvoir claimed – in 1970 he told an interviewer ‘1946, ’47, ’48, I don’t remember’.58 They never lived together unless adverse circumstances required it and always addressed each other with the formal second person, vous. But each day they spent hours working by each other’s side, editing each other’s work, and managing Les Temps Modernes. Was this the life that Valkyrie and Baladin had dreamed of?
The Bosts moved into the floor below Beauvoir’s when another apartment became vacant, and the friends would often eat their evening meal together. But since Algren had come into her life Beauvoir had stopped sleeping with Bost. He never lacked for girlfriends, but even so, Bost was hurt by this at first. It was, to him, the least macho of the men she had known, that Simone would dedicate her next book: The Second Sex.
12
The Scandalous Second Sex
In The Prime of Life Beauvoir wrote that during the early 1930s ‘feminism’ and the ‘sex wars’ made no sense to her.1 So how did she come to write the so-called ‘feminist Bible’?
At the time of The Second Sex’s publication Beauvoir was 41 years old. She had seen her mother suffer an utterly unequal relationship with her father. As a girl she objected to being treated ‘like a girl’ when she knew boys and girls were equal in the eyes of God. Since the day the bookstore clerk flashed her she had often felt uneasy in the company of unknown men. She had lost Zaza, who died in the aftermath of arguments about the comparative value of dowries, propriety and love. She had seen her friends infected and hospitalized after illegal abortions. She had had conversations with women who were ignorant about their own bodies’ functions and pleasures. She had visited other countries, which made her realize that customs can look like necessities just because they’re common. She had read the opening pages of her friend Violette Leduc’s novel Ravages, and felt shocked at her own shock to its frank discussion of female sexuality: it spoke about ‘woman’s sexuality in a way no woman ever did, with truth and poetry’.2
In Pyrrhus and Cinéas, Beauvoir had written that everyone must occupy a place in the world, but only some of us freely choose what place we will occupy. The human condition is ambiguous: we are both subject and object. As object, your world is restricted by the constraints others impose. And as a subject, your actions not only realize your own freedom but create new conditions in the world for others. The 18-year-old Beauvoir had written in her diary that there were ‘things to hate about love’.3 Her fiction from the 1940s had bridged the boundaries between philosophy and literature. But in The Second Sex she argued that what went in the name of ‘love’ wasn’t actually love at all. She blended a different set of boundaries, between the personal, the philosophical and the political. And although she would be celebrated by some for doing so, Beauvoir would be severely ostracized by others first. It would be decades before the work gained recognition as a feminist classic. So what did it say that could provoke both strong disgust and – later – adulation?
In the first line of The Second Sex Beauvoir didn’t conceal her hesitation and irritation with the subject of ‘woman’. ‘I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman,’ she wrote. But ‘volumes of idiocies’ had been published over the last century – mourning the loss of femininity and telling women that they must ‘be women, stay women, become women’ – and she could no longer stay passively on the sidelines.
Beauvoir’s reticence makes better sense when understood in context. In 1863 Jules Verne wrote a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century. Women would wear trousers, he predicted, and they would be educated like men. Jules Verne’s other novels described fantastical human achievements: submarines, men travelling around the world in eighty days – even travelling to the moon! But despite Verne’s reputation as a successful writer of science fiction, this was a step too far: his literary agent rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century as too far-fetched. In Beauvoir’s generation Coco Chanel wore trousers and flapper fashion glamorized androgyny. Women had entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers. They had just won the right to vote. Some of them even outranked men on competitive national exams. They still couldn’t open their own bank accounts – and would not be able to do so until 1965 revisions to the Napoleonic Code.4 But by the late 1940s ‘feminism’ – a word that was, at the time, associated with the campaign for suffrage – had become dépassé in both America and France.5 That decade they had won the right to vote. What more could they want?
When Beauvoir looked at history she saw that human beings have a habit of looking at others’ bodies and creating castes, sometimes slave castes, based on their physical characteristics. No one doubted that this was true in the case of race. But, Beauvoir asked, what about sex? She argued that men have defined women as ‘other’ and relegated them to the status of a different caste: the second sex.
After her experiences in America and conversations with American feminists, Beauvoir knew that some feminists denied that the word ‘woman’ was even a useful term. But she thought they were in bad faith. Women like Dorothy Parker thought the inequality between the sexes could be resolved by defining women as ‘human’ instead of ‘woman’. But the problem with the ‘we’re all human’ point of view, Beauvoir said, is that women are not men. The equality they share at this level is abstract – and the possibilities open to men and women are different.
Each human being occupies a unique situation, and concretely the situations occupied by men and women are unequal. But why? Anyone can see, Beauvoir said, that human beings are split into two categories, with different bodies, faces, clothes, interests and occupations. But even so, the fact of the matter was that it wasn’t enough to have certain reproductive organs to be considered ‘woman’ because some females had them and were still accused of being ‘unwomanly’. When the novelist George Sand flouted conventional femininity, Gustave Flaubert tellingly called her ‘the third sex’.6
So, Beauvoir asked: if being female is not a sufficient condition to be a woman, what is a woman?
Beauvoir’s answer to the question ‘what is a woman?’ was that a woman is what a man is not. As Protagoras put it, ‘man is the measure of humanity’ – man is the norm by which ‘the human’ is judged. And throughout history, many men believed that women were inferior beings whose views were irrelevant to ‘human’ concerns. Even in the 1940s, Beauvoir found her opinions dismissed simply on the grounds that they were a woman’s:
I used to get annoyed in abstract discussions to hear men tell me: ‘You think such and such a thing because you’re a woman.’ But I know my only defence is to answer, ‘I think it because it is true,’ thereby eliminating my subjectivity; it was out of the question to answer, ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ because it is understood that being a man is not a particularity; a man is in his right by virtue of being man.7
In saying that woman is what man is not Beauvoir drew on Hegel’s ideas about the ‘Other’. Since human beings have a deeply rooted tendency to set themselves in opposition to what is Other to them, men set themselves as free ‘subjects’ and defined women by contrast – as objects. But Beauvoir was baffled by how this situation came to be so widespread, and why it persisted. Why, she wondered, didn’t more women contest the demeaning ways that men defined them?
She knew the familiar arguments against feminism: It will ruin family values! It will lower wages! Women’s place is in the home! We are ‘separate but equal’! But she thought they were masks for pernicious bad faith, much like the Jim Crow laws in America.8 George Bernard Shaw had criticized white Americans for making black Americans shine their shoes, and then concluding that shoe-shining was all they were capable of. Beauvoir argued that the same invalid inferences were made about women’s cap
abilities – because women are kept in situations of inferiority. The fact that they occupy an inferior situation in society does not mean that they are inferior innately. ‘The scope of the verb to be must be understood,’ she wrote; ‘to be is to have become.’9
The hopeful side of becoming is that situations can become better. For centuries men have spilt ink over the ‘human’ condition. But how, Beauvoir asked, ‘in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself’?10
That much she said in the introduction – a tiny fraction of the 972-page, two-volume tome. But it was not what her first readers would read first. In book form, The Second Sex was published in two volumes, in June and November of 1949. The material Beauvoir released in earlier issues of Les Temps Modernes was great from the point of view of publicity, and not so great from the point of view of myth-making and public censure. In 1963, when Beauvoir publicly evaluated the changing shape of her legacy in Force of Circumstance, she would write that the appearance of The Second Sex made her ‘a target of sarcasm’ like she had never been before.11 The ad feminam dismissals of Beauvoir were about to begin – and sarcasm would not be the worst of it.
Beauvoir worked hard to finish parts of the book in the spring of 1949 because Algren was coming to Paris. Fortunately she found this book easier to write than a novel. For fiction she had to carefully craft viewpoints and develop characters, taking care with plots, dialogue and foreshadowing. For this she needed to research, organize and write. She wanted freedom for women. But there only seemed to be two possible reasons why they didn’t have it: because they were oppressed, or because they chose not to be free. In both cases there was a moral problem; the question was, whose was it?
When Algren arrived in Paris Beauvoir was anxious at first: they hadn’t parted well. She went to meet him in the white coat she’d worn in Chicago two years before. With him in town ‘the family’ couldn’t believe the transformation they saw in her: she was soft and happy. Algren had been nervous about meeting Sartre, but their introduction was a success: Algren was at ease. He enjoyed meeting Olga and Sartre’s latest lover, Michelle Vian: they spoke English with him and lapped up his stories of American sin.
Beauvoir had decided to publish parts of the second volume – on ‘Lived Experience’ – in instalments in Les Temps Modernes that summer. Her method in the second part was different: she compiled historical accounts and first-person descriptions of different stages of or possibilities in women’s lives: childhood, being a girl, puberty, sexual initiation, lesbianism, marriage, motherhood, social expectations, prostitutes, old age.
When she published ‘The Sexual Initiation of Woman’ in May 1949 it provoked strong and revealing reactions. In it she described her vision of a non-oppressive, reciprocal sexual encounter where women enjoyed sex as subjects, not objects. Instead of being passive and submissive to non-reciprocal male desire, Beauvoir wrote about relationships where women, in ‘love, tenderness, and sensuality’, established ‘a relationship of reciprocity with her partner. The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes; they can easily be settled when a woman feels both desire and respect in a man.’12 Later she wondered whether it was a mistake to publish that chapter first.13
The esteemed Catholic novelist François Mauriac claimed that Beauvoir’s writing ‘literally reached the limits of the abject’. Was ‘a serious philosophical and literary review really the place for the subject treated by Mme Simone de Beauvoir’?14 This was the author whose steps Beauvoir had retraced as a student with Merleau-Ponty on her way to see Zaza: for decades she had admired his way with words and now he was using them to call her wayward.
The June and July issues of Les Temps Modernes flew off the newsstands. Beauvoir had published chapters on lesbianism and part of her section on maternity in these issues, and many readers were outraged. Her reputation was already scandalous in some quarters at this point – tied as it was to Sartre’s – but now she attracted insults of a different order: ‘unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything, even an unmarried mother’.15 She was propositioned by ‘sex maniacs’ and ‘active members of the First Sex’. The communists called her a petite bourgeoise whose analysis had nothing to say to the working classes. This time François Mauriac – that respectable pillar of the conservative establishment – wrote to one of the contributors to Les Temps Modernes that his ‘employer’s vagina has no secret from me’.16 When these words were published Mauriac was horrified. Shortly thereafter he began a series in Le Figaro Littéraire condemning pornography in general and Simone de Beauvoir in particular.
When the first volume of the book appeared in June, it sold rapidly – 22,000 copies in the first week.17 ‘Biology is not destiny,’ Beauvoir claimed – and neither is marriage or motherhood. Women like Marie Curie, she said, prove that it is not ‘women’s inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority’. But culture – high and low – keeps perpetuating oppressive ‘mythology’ about women. ‘Woman is not a fixed reality,’ she wrote, ‘but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming, that is her possibilities,’ because ‘when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing’ – that is, conscious, changing, free – ‘it is never possible to close the books.’18
If it were the case that women obviously had some biological, or psychological, or economic destiny, Beauvoir argued, there would be no problem: there would be a universal ‘femininity’ and those who had it would be ‘woman’. In Part I she looked at ‘woman’ from the point of view of biology, psychoanalysis and history. But she found no satisfying explanation of women’s secondary status in the sciences, or Freud or Marx, and demonstrated the ways in which she found their analyses wanting – why did Freud, for example, think he could base his views of female sexuality on male sexuality when he had no experience at all of the former?
The communist journalist Jeannette Prenant objected to the way that – she claimed – Beauvoir discouraged women from being wives and mothers. Another female reviewer, Marie-Louise Barron, called the first volume ‘gobbledygook’ and prophesied that the second would only offer ‘trifles’.19 Armand Hoog wrote that what Beauvoir really wanted to liberate was herself – she was humiliated to be a woman, but ‘she was born a woman, and I do not really see what she could change about that […] Destiny hardly lets itself be denied’.20
This newfound notoriety made it a little awkward showing Algren around Paris: she had been longing to show him her world for two years so they visited her beloved restaurants and cafés – but it bothered her that people whispered and stared. So after Bastille Day, she was relieved when they left for two months of travelling together: Rome, Naples, Amalfi and Pompeii – and from there to Tunis, Algiers, Fez, Marrakesh. On their way back from North Africa they visited Olga and Bost in Provence, where he was given the nickname ‘Tough Algren’.21
When she escorted Algren to Orly airport in the middle of September, she felt that they had just had their best days yet. She would go to see him in Chicago next year. He was happy, too, and during his layover he discovered in a magazine that while he was away his novel The Man with the Golden Arm had been given the National Book Award. His career was reaching its apex; in October Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his editor praising Algren as ‘the best writer under 50 […] writing today’.22
In October Beauvoir went back to Provence to be with Sartre and write. She’d been thinking about a new novel for a while but needed to get The Second Sex out of her system. She wanted the new novel to contain her, but once again she sat before blank paper wondering where to start. There would be a character loosely like herself: Anne. But where would this book take her? She took walks with Sartre, read, saw friends. One day they went to visit Sospel and Peira-Cava and they were surprised to read, in the next Sunday’s paper, a full account of their afte
rnoon. She found this relentless attention tiresome; but this was only the tip of it. She decided to translate one of Algren’s novels, so she worked on that when she wasn’t writing her own.23
The second volume of The Second Sex, published in November 1949, contained the famous line, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’24 Since every woman is a becoming and not a closed book, Beauvoir wanted to include women’s own descriptions of their lived experience, showing some of the ways that they were made ‘Other’ throughout the courses of their lives. As an open book herself, she was still Becoming Beauvoir, and in the process of trying to understand her own experience she realized that some of the obstacles she faced were endemic threats to other women’s becoming, too. Despite the passage of time, she was still the philosopher who had been inspired by Alfred Fouillée’s idea that ‘one isn’t born, but rather becomes, free’. And now she argued that it was not biology, psychology and economics that determined women to live lives set apart from men, or submissive to them; ‘civilization’ played a significant role too. And with Simone de Beauvoir, ‘civilization’ was hard at work.
Although her candid treatment of female sexuality was scandalous, it was her treatment of motherhood that came under the most sustained attack. Beauvoir thought society was in extravagant bad faith: how could they not see the duplicity in showing contempt for women and respect for mothers? ‘It is a criminal paradox to deny women all public activity, to close masculine careers to them, to proclaim them incapable in all domains, and to nonetheless entrust to them the most delicate and most serious of all undertakings: the formation of a human being.’25
Becoming Beauvoir Page 25
