But the same is not said of men: no one says of a man without children ‘he is not a true man’.18
Abortion law (as it was) penalized the poorest women in society. If a woman could plan her pregnancies ‘according to her desires and her interests’, then she could be reconciled with a life that included studying and a career. Beauvoir took men’s resistance to this possibility to be rooted in fear – ‘fear that women would discover and reclaim their autonomy in all domains by taking their destiny into their own hands’.19
To put this in context, prior to 1965 married women in France had no legal recourse to work – or to their own bank accounts – without their husbands’ permission. In 1970 French law instituted ‘parental authority’ in the place of ‘paternal power’. And in 1972 a filiation law granted equal status to children born in or out of wedlock.
Beauvoir wanted to make ‘abortion irrelevant by making more available the contraceptive methods that are officially authorized, but that only 7% of French women are using’; she believed that, ‘Realizing this reform will at the same time surpass it.’20 Beauvoir’s defence of abortion raised issues of power, responsibility and justice – not just ‘choice’. In October 1972 Beauvoir wrote that it was ‘a great responsibility to bring a human being into this world’, asking, ‘How can one consent to this if one is incapable of helping him find his place on Earth’?21 The worst-off women were most disadvantaged by lack of access to contraception and safe abortion, and it was these women who were charged with breaking the law while rich, bourgeois women had the means to escape these consequences.
Autumn of 1972 saw the publication of the fourth and final volume of her memoirs, ominously entitled All Said and Done. This volume departs from the chronological order followed by its three predecessors, instead offering a compilation of Beauvoir’s thoughts about things she valued: writing, reading, films, politics, music, art, being engaged in the world. Since the publication of Force of Circumstance in 1963 she had seen that readers wanted to take the conclusion of Force of Circumstance as ‘an admission of failure and a disavowal of my life, in spite of all the statements that fundamentally denied any such interpretation’.22 On publication of All Said and Done a review in Esprit asked: ‘Why did she write it? What did she want to tell us?’ It was ‘neither history nor legend’, but rather ‘application exercises (as one says at school) of Sartre’s thought, which are a little annoying’. It was disappointing to find her ‘total lack of reflection on a commitment that was punctuated by so many failures’.23
But it wasn’t an application of Sartre’s philosophy and, although she did not show the world all of them, she was a woman who reflected on her failures. Among the things Beauvoir included were defences of her originality and descriptions of her methodology in Old Age, as well as the changing role of writing in her life. Between 1963 and 1970 she had written the memoir of her mother’s death, two works of fiction, two prefaces and Old Age. But she experienced periods when the idea of holding a pen made her feel sick. She had become someone who felt that her life’s public work had been accomplished: ‘my work is complete, even though it may go on’.24
At the outset of the book Beauvoir also marks the deaths and illnesses of those near her: Giacometti had been ill, his mother died; Sartre’s mother’s death is also recounted.
She memorialized Violette Leduc. Since meeting the aspiring novelist in a cinema queue in the mid-1940s, Beauvoir’s life had been ‘closely mingled’ with Violette’s, especially for the ten years leading up to Violette’s sudden death from cancer in May 1972.25 Leduc always considered Beauvoir her literary mentor, and made Beauvoir the guardian of her unpublished writings. She would go on to oversee the 1973 publication of Leduc’s La chasse à l’amour (Hunting for Love).26
Beauvoir continued to take pleasure in reading, which enabled her to see the world through others’ eyes. In All Said and Done she chronicled some of her interests, Solzhenitsyn’s Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Artur London’s On Trial, ethnological studies, Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress, biographies. She read Oscar Wilde, George Sand, Anais Nin, Hannah Arendt, psychoanalysis and detective novels. She re-read the Bible.27 She did crosswords; time was no longer a commodity she wanted to hoard.
She was still interested in the question ‘how does a woman adjust herself to her womanly state, her female condition?’ But her views had evolved, and she wanted to tell her readers how the process of living had led her to see new perspectives. If she were to write The Second Sex again, she said, she would take a more materialistic approach rather than basing her analysis on the opposition between self and other. She had not, in hindsight, given enough weight to the economics of scarcity and the situations in which men become men. Her claim that one was ‘not born a woman, but becomes one’ was correct, she said, but it needed to be completed by the statement that one is ‘not born a man, one becomes one’.28
She regretted that since the publication of The Second Sex there had been a backlash of books encouraging women to accept traditional feminine ‘vocations’, with false prophets declaring feminism out of date. What the new generation of feminists (Millet, Firestone, Morgan, Greer) demanded was the ‘decolonization of women’, since women have been ‘colonized from within’ to see unreciprocal unpaid work in the home and discrimination and exploitation in the workplace as just the way things are.29 At the end of All Said and Done she wrote: ‘This time I shall not write a conclusion to my book. I leave the reader to draw any he may choose.’30 As ever, the writer’s vocation was to appeal to the freedom of her reader – even when writing about her own life.
In 1972 Simone de Beauvoir publicly adopted the label ‘feminist’ in an interview with the German journalist Alice Schwarzer. Given her writings and political campaigns between the 1940s and early 1970s it is very hard to believe that Beauvoir was making a ground-breaking admission – but it was big enough news to be bought by a newspaper. For although in 1949 Beauvoir declared that she, like the suffragists, was a feminist,31 and in a 1965 even called herself ‘radically feminist’ (in an interview with Francis Jeanson, a colleague at Les Temps Modernes),32 in the much more widely read Force of Circumstance Beauvoir claimed that she had ‘avoided falling into the trap of “feminism”’ in The Second Sex.33
With increased political momentum, in the early 1970s debates about feminism in France (and elsewhere) had become diverse enough to require precise definitions of allegiance. Beauvoir and Schwarzer did the interview for two reasons: because they wanted the public to know that Beauvoir had ‘converted’ to a particular kind of political feminism and because they needed to raise funds for a feminist ‘Tribunal’ to be held that February at the Paris Mutualité. An interview like this would sell, they thought: and the The Nouvel Observateur bought it.
Schwarzer presented this interview as ‘historic’; that in it Beauvoir proclaimed ‘loud and clear, “I am a feminist”’.34 Schwarzer asked her the obvious question: why was the author of The Second Sex only calling herself feminist twenty-three years later? Beauvoir’s answer was that the situation in France hadn’t changed enough in those years. Only 7 per cent of women were taking the pill, and women were still barred from interesting careers and progression. She claimed that she had not identified with the reforming and legalistic feminisms she saw in France before the MLF, and liked the latter’s radical approach because it seemed better for tackling the radical inequality that persisted between the sexes. Even within political groups whose aim was to liberate everyone, Beauvoir still saw women doing the tedious, creditless, powerless jobs while men were given interesting roles of public responsibility. She made it clear that she did not repudiate men – she rejected the conflation of feminism and misandry, and acknowledged that the men of her day did not set up the patriarchal structures of society. But they still profited from them, and for that reason she thought it was important to have a ‘cautious attitude’.35
Other feminists had criticized The Second Sex for being a middle-class docume
nt, written by an elite woman who was blind to her own privilege. And in this interview Beauvoir acknowledged that she had overlooked many questions of class in her earlier work. But she didn’t think the class struggle would emancipate women because they were not a different class but a different caste. People can rise or fall into different classes. But once you are born into a caste you stay there: a woman cannot become a man, she said, and the way they are treated economically, politically and socially is as an inferior caste.36
Rather than confessing a conversion from non-feminist to feminist outlooks, in her interviews Beauvoir publicly rejected her previous belief that economic independence and socialism would deliver the changes needed to emancipate women. Instead, she endorsed women-only movements that gave voice to ‘anonymous’ women’s voices rather than those of male ‘specialists’.
The MLF had a homosexual undercurrent, and Beauvoir thought this disadvantaged it to a certain degree because it perpetuated the image that they were, in Beauvoir’s words, ‘hysterical shrews and lesbians’.37 Her words are shocking to modern readers, particularly in the knowledge of the ways she herself was the target of gendered slurs and had lesbian relationships. Her relationships were still not public knowledge, but in her interview Schwarzer asked Beauvoir whether female homosexuality could be a ‘political weapon’. Beauvoir’s reply, and the ensuing conversation, shows that she associated lesbian feminists with the imposition of ‘sexual dogmas’: she thought that homosexuality can play a useful role politically, but ‘when they allow themselves to be obsessed with their biases, they run the risk of driving heterosexuals away from the movement’:
Alice Schwarzer Their first argument is that, in the current circumstances, any sexual relationship with men is oppressive. They therefore refuse it. What do you think of this?
Simone De Beauvoir Is it really true that any sexual relationship between a man and a woman is oppressive? Couldn’t one work toward, not refusing this relationship, but making it so that it isn’t oppressive? The claim that all coitus is rape shocks me. I do not believe this. When they say all coitus is rape, they are taking up masculine myths again. That would mean that the man’s sexual organ is a sword, a weapon. The issue is inventing new sexual relations that are not oppressive.38
In May of 1972 Beauvoir went to Grenoble to give a lecture for Choisir, for whom she was actively campaigning, and on 8 November there was a trial at the Court of Bobigny that attracted national attention to their cause. A young woman of 16 years, ‘Marie-Clare C.’, had had an abortion with the complicity of her mother. She had broken the law, and she was tried along with three other women. Gisèle Halimi defended them, drawing on several prominent scientific and cultural authorities (including Beauvoir) in her defence. She argued that these women were being tried by another age. The 1920 law especially penalized the poor. Each year millions of women who were ill informed about contraception resorted to this option. And in doing so they endangered their lives and risked irreversible mutilation.
The trial shifted the tide of public opinion – in 1970, only 22 per cent of French people favoured lifting restrictions on abortion; a year later support had risen to 55 per cent.39 Although there were still a few years to wait, in 1974 the Minister of Health, Simone Veil, developed new legislation, making access to contraception easier in December 1974 and championing what became known as ‘la loi Veil’ (the Veil law), legalizing abortion from January 1975.
Meanwhile, in March 1973 Sartre suffered another stroke. This time it was worse; he was not remembering things and not recognizing people. The doctor said he had asphyxia of the brain, and again advised no drinking or smoking. Sartre was 67 now, and he made a half-hearted attempt to forego his vices. But then he wholeheartedly embraced them again.
In addition to her writing and feminist work, Beauvoir continued to be dedicated to her editorial role in the management of Les Temps Modernes, and with Sartre ill she assumed the task of chairing its Wednesday morning meetings. Claire Etcherelli, a novelist Lanzmann had introduced her to in the late 1960s, remembered the scene:
11:00. She welcomed everyone, seated on her yellow divan. Next to her was a pile of articles […] conscientiously read and annotated. The small group which constituted the committee took their places in a semi-circle around the divan.40
Etcherelli described witnessing Beauvoir’s rejection phone calls to aspiring authors, during which she could be ‘frank and brutal’ in her criticism. But Beauvoir did not use her status as director to publish anything without the support of the committee.41
That summer Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon were travelling in southern France before meeting Sartre to travel together to Venice. (He had already had his summer holiday with Arlette, and was on the way to having his holiday with Wanda.) Beauvoir and Le Bon stayed in Venice for a couple of days but then left: Beauvoir did not want Sylvie to be bored in Venice, and both women had an appetite for seeing new places. But Beauvoir had begun to feel a ‘double-edged guilt’: guilty if she left Sartre that she was letting him down, or guilty if she stayed that she was letting Sylvie down instead.42
The three of them reconvened in Rome in mid-August. Sartre’s sight had deteriorated; he had had a haemorrhage behind his left eye and now neither eye could see clearly. They had always followed strict schedules at home and now the routine shifted to accommodate Sartre’s new needs: Beauvoir read to him in the mornings; then lunch; then Sartre would sleep while Beauvoir and Sylvie went for walks or read quietly. When Sartre woke up Beauvoir read him the newspapers, in French or Italian, and then all three of them went to dinner together. Mealtimes showed the depths to which he’d fallen. He was prediabetic, and Beauvoir worried about his careless consumption of pasta and gelato. As an effect of his dentures and his stroke his lips were beyond his full control, so he did not eat cleanly.43 When Olga and Bost met them in Rome that year they were taken aback to see him so much in decline.
Not long after they returned to Paris Sartre decided to hire a new secretary, not to do the correspondence (he already had someone for that) but to read to him and talk. The secretary was Pierre Victor, the Maoist who had asked him to take over La Cause du peuple. At first, Arlette was suspicious. She phoned Beauvoir, saying that she didn’t want to have a ‘Schoenman’ situation on their hands. (Ralph Schoenman was the general secretary of the Russell Tribunal, who had made quite an impression in Stockholm and Copenhagen by claiming to speak on behalf of Bertrand Russell, whose age prevented his being there himself.) But Sartre wanted this, Beauvoir thought, and she didn’t want to infantilize him. It also meant that Beauvoir would have a little time to herself in the mornings, because Pierre would do the reading aloud.44 It was a decision she would come to regret.
Sartre was no longer doing the rounds of his women; they now attended him. He was 68 and completely dependent. In October 1973 he moved to a tenth-floor apartment in a modern building, 22 boulevard Edgar Quinet, near the Montparnasse Tower. It was just across the cemetery from Beauvoir’s. In Rome in the summer of 1974 Beauvoir recorded a series of conversations with Sartre that she said would be an oral sequel to his autobiography, Words. By the end of that summer he realized that his eyesight was not going to improve: he would never see again.
But he was still trying to work, planning a book with Pierre Victor that they had provisionally entitled Power and Liberty. Victor was, like many of his generation, interested in the thought of Foucault and Deleuze, and he told Sartre that their collaboration was a kind of dialectical, in which they thought in opposition to each other. Beauvoir was convinced, even after the events that unfolded, that Victor took the job out of sincere care for Sartre. It wasn’t easy: Victor often felt like quitting. When he arrived Sartre was often sitting in his flat, dozing or listening to music. It was ‘a constant struggle against death’, Victor wrote, and he had been employed to fight ‘sleep, lack of interest, or, more simply, torpor […]. What I was really involved in was a sort of resuscitation’.45
During the winter of 1973�
�1974 the feminist movement in France was at a turning point. With the battle for abortion nearly won, divisions emerged between different tendencies, and strategies, in the movement. Simone de Beauvoir wanted a law against sexism, like existing laws against racism. Sexism could not be legislated out of existence any more than racism could, but Beauvoir believed a law against it would be a useful tool. So with Anne Zelinsky she co-founded the League of Women’s Rights, an association with anti-sexist legislation as its objective.
The League met with opposition from fellow feminists, who saw it as a concession to – or even collaboration with the bourgeois and patriarchal framework of the legal system. The League took the view that social subversion was no longer the right course of action; instead, they pursued the reform of existing structures. Beauvoir was the League’s president, but she used her power in other domains to give voice to its opposition, too. In 1973 she offered a permanent column in Les Temps Modernes to those who wanted to denounce sexism. Called ‘Everyday Sexism’, its contributors deployed humour, lived experience and reflection to expose and challenge sexism rather than pursuing legal redress. The preface to the column is powerfully direct:
An individual who calls another a ‘dirty nigger’ in front of witnesses, or who prints insulting remarks about Jews or Arabs can be brought to trial and convicted of ‘racial slander’. But if a man publicly shouts at a woman, calling her ‘a whore’, or if in his written work he accuses Woman of treachery, foolishness, fickleness, stupidity, or hysterical behaviour, he runs absolutely no risk. […] We [the League of Women’s Rights] will demand that ‘sexist slander’ also be considered as a crime.46
The next year she published a preface to a book that passionately pleaded for divorce reform. Again, Beauvoir’s analysis includes philosophical nuances that are easily overlooked in the heat of political debate. To the objection that divorce was bad for the children, she replied that ‘a child can be “assassinated” by parents who insist on living side by side in disunion’. Divorce, according to Beauvoir, ‘is not a panacea’; ‘It only liberates women if they know how to put their freedom to use in a positive way. But in order to discover their own possibilities, divorce is often a necessary condition.’47
Becoming Beauvoir Page 36
