Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism

Perhaps the sole point of criticism on which all serious readers of the English version of The Second Sex agree is that this translation, the only one published to date, is shockingly inadequate. The rights to the translation were bought by the publishing magnate Alfred A. Knopf after his wife, Blanche, who was visiting Paris at the time Le Deuxième Sexe was published in France, told him (without reading the book) that from the stir it was creating she thought it would become the next big scandalous best-seller, on the order of the Kinsey report. Knopf enlisted the translation services of Howard Parshley, a retired professor of human biology, who upon reading the book tried, and failed, to convince Knopf that although it contained some racy passages it had unignorable philosophical pretensions. It was most likely his desire to help the general-interest reader understand “the philosophy” of The Second Sex that moved Parshley to fill the book with annotations—always indistinguishable from Beauvoir’s original prose—that sometimes seriously distort her words. For a version of the story of the translation of The Second Sex, see Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, chapter 31. Margaret Simons chronicles the problems with the English translation—including the fact that Parshley cuts, without indication, more than 10 percent of the original text and that he also regularly mistranslates key philosophical terms (e.g., pour-soi is routinely rendered as “in-itself” rather than “for-itself”)—in her groundbreaking article “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir.” See also Moi, “(Mis)reading The Second Sex,” and Okely, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 54, for further specifications of problems with Parshley’s translation.

2. I am claiming here that reading The Second Sex against Rousseau’s Second Discourse would be philosophically productive, but I don’t pursue this comparison in the present book.

3. The Claim of Reason, p. 94. Cavell develops this concept throughout his work, notably in “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses” and “Being Odd, Getting Even.”

4. These include the essays collected in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret Simons, as well as Debra Bergoffen’s Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Sonia Kruks’s Situation and Human Existence, Michèle Le Doeuff’s Hipparchia’s Choice, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin’s Sex and Existence, Simons’s Beauvoir and The Second Sex, Karen Vintges’s Philosophy as Passion, and the essays of Sara Heinämaa. See also Toril Moi’s What Is a Woman?, which, although not written by a professor of philosophy, finds its philosophical bearings in many of the same sources in which I find mine.

5. This is perhaps why most revisionist considerations of Beauvoir as a philosopher tend to see The Second Sex as unproblematically continuous with her earlier philosophical writing. A notable exception here is Le Doeuff; see, e.g., “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into Ambiguous Line.” I discuss Le Doeuff’s thought-provoking work on Beauvoir briefly in the last part of this introduction. In chapter 5, I sketch her argument for the idea that there is a disjunction between Beauvoir’s earlier philosophical essays and The Second Sex.

6. Her starting with a declaration of our lack of knowledge of ourselves invites comparison with the opening passages of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. But if Beauvoir is inheriting something from these thinkers, then it is of course a question how the sex-based inflection of her remarks is to be taken. I take up this question specifically with respect to Beauvoir’s inheritance of Descartes’s Meditations, in chapter 2, and of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in chapters 3 through 7.

7. Although the English translation of The Second Sex obscures this fact, Beauvoir’s phrase querelle du féminisme obviously puns on the phrase querelle des femmes, the condescending rubric for the famous European debates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, often in the form of heated salon conversations involving both women and men, on “the woman question.” These debates are generally considered to have been constrained in scope and seriousness, although they produced a number of extremely interesting writings by women, such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. I take Beauvoir’s allusion here to be a suggestion that contemporary debates about feminism are no less constrained and no more serious than those earlier conversations that contemporary interlocutors tend to dismiss and ridicule.

8. I am indebted here to Cora Diamond, whose Whitehead lectures at Harvard in the late spring of 1993 helped me to put this point in this way.

9. See, e.g., chapter 1 of Bergoffen’s Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.

10. My use of the concepts of “sex difference” and “gender identity” in this sentence indirectly raises a question about what the difference between these two terms is supposed to come to. This is a question that I do not address head-on in this book, although I do explore at length, especially in chapter 7, Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between cultural and biological forces on the making of little boys and girls into men and women. For the most part, throughout the book I tend to avoid the term “gender,” except when so doing would be confusing or awkward (as in the unidiomatic phrase “sex identity”). I do this first and foremost because Beauvoir, as a francophone, had no such word in her vocabulary. Second, I am reluctant to employ a word that tends to conjure up certain fixed and, from the point of view of a reading of Beauvoir, anachronistic pictures about the nature of sex difference (e.g., the familiar picture on which “sex” is biological and “gender” is social or the postmodernist picture, most memorably articulated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, on which biological sex is no less fully “constructed” than social “gender”). In the first essay of her book What Is a Woman? Toril Moi asks searching questions about the usefulness of the so-called sex/gender distinction as a rhetorical and theoretical device in contemporary anglophone feminism. The split so often identified between sex and gender is ordinarily regarded by feminists as a direct legacy of The Second Sex, emblematized by the aphorism that opens part 2: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Moi argues compellingly that this misreading of Beauvoir goes a long way toward obscuring what is of most value in her work.

11. I am grateful to Toril Moi for pointing out to me, in an extremely helpful set of comments on a very early version of this material, the necessity of specifying what I mean by “condescension.” An overly broad conception of this term could have the undesirable effect of branding as unreasonable certain valuable modes of approach to Beauvoir’s writing, and specifically, as Moi observed, approaches grounding themselves in the terms of psychoanalysis.

12. See fn. 1 of this introduction for more on the problems with the English translation of the book.

13. “The Subjection of Women,” 49.

14. According to Beauvoir in her memoirs, “It was begun in October 1946 and finished in June 1949; but I spent four months of 1947 in America, and America Day by Day kept me busy for six months” (Force of Circumstance 186, n. 1). As Bair observes (380), this means that Beauvoir spent only about fourteen months writing The Second Sex.

15. Moi’s focus is broader than mine; her stated purpose is to document and explore what she sees as “the unusual number of condescending, sarcastic, sardonic or dismissive accounts” of Beauvoir (22), while I am interested in the gestures of condescension in particular. Moi notes that other writers (on p. 22 she mentions Elaine Marks and Anne Whitmarsh) have also written about the “hostile trend in the reception of Beauvoir’s work,” but her own discussion of this trend—as well as her command of both the critical literature and Beauvoir’s oeuvre as a whole—is by far the most thorough I know.

16. Consider the following passage, quoted in chapter 3 of Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, from René Girard’s review of the volume of Beauvoir’s biography entitled La Force de l’Age:

Being a particularly brilliant subject, Mme de Beauvoir could not stand the thought of forsaking the mention très bien, and she simply refused to be reconverted to home life, thus manifesting for the first time that spirit of rebellion which made her famous and which is still alive in her. However much we admire this valorous feat, we must not exaggerate the scope of the revolution. [… ] Mme de Beauvoir is the voice of all the other feminine first prize winners” (in Marks, ed., Critical Essays, p. 85; quoted in Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, p. 90 [ellipsis Moi’s]).

17. Je, Tu, Nous, p. 9.

18. Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man, p. 2. What Beauvoir actually says in the introduction to The Second Sex is that her perspective is one of “existentialist ethics” (TSS xxxiv; my emphasis). In chapter 5, I interpret this announcement very differently from the way Nye does. Nye provides an explicit example of what she takes to be Beauvoir’s mindless devotion to Sartre in her discussion of some (“clearly deficient”) remarks Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex about Goddess worship: “It is her existentialist presuppositions that forced Beauvoir to this unreflecting rejection of the different values inherent in early agricultural societies. Because these values do not correspond to existentialist self-assertion, Beauvoir had no other recourse but to relegate them to the passive, the imminent, the animal, the not-human” (Feminist Theory 111, n. 23). See also Nye’s essay “Preparing the Way for a Feminist Praxis,” in which she argues that Beauvoir’s allegiance to Sartre’s philosophy prevented her from developing a robust notion of oppression. In chapters 5 through 7, I provide what I take to be overwhelming evidence against this view.

19. Indeed, the easiest way to put some initial conceptual if not overtly philosophical distance between Sartre and Beauvoir is to recall his association in Being and Nothingness of immanence in all its horror with the holes and slime he explicitly associates with the feminine. One might also wish to pay attention to the fact that perhaps his most memorable example of what he famously calls “bad faith” is that of a woman who goes out with a man and then pretends she doesn’t know that his wining and dining her is to compensate her in advance for the sexual favors she then, according to the conventional understanding of what a “date” is, owes him. Sartre’s most extended discussion of immanence and its relation to holes and slime and women occurs in part 4 of Being and Nothingness, in section 3 of chapter 2, “Quality as a Revelation of Being.” At one point, he writes, “Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine revenge.” (777). Shortly thereafter, we find: “The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’ It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution” (782). For the “date” example of bad faith, see pp. 96–97.

20. See, particularly, Hipparchia’s Choice, which grows out of earlier essays, such as “Operative Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism,” bits and pieces of which are woven into strikingly new cloth in the book’s “Second Notebook.” It is very important for me to acknowledge here that this book, a brilliant and, to my mind, highly underappreciated meditation on women and philosophy, more than half of which takes Beauvoir and The Second Sex as its subject, constitutes the best discussion (or perhaps I should call it a demonstration) I know of the difficulty of committing oneself simultaneously to the demands of feminism and those of philosophy. Le Doeuff’s achievements are all the more impressive given the almost total dismissal of Beauvoir by the most influential French feminist philosophers over the last thirty years; I find her heroism and originality under the circumstances almost unbelievable.

Unlike virtually every other French reader of Beauvoir, Le Doeuff aligns the significance of The Second Sex with Beauvoir’s philosophical aspirations and achievements. I am of course in absolute agreement with her on this point. But in her envisioning these achievements as measurable mainly over and against those of Jean-Paul Sartre—a vision astonishing enough, given the cold reception of Beauvoir by her French daughters and granddaughters and her dismissal as Sartre’s handmaiden by virtually anyone who cares to comment on the two—Le Doeuff turns out to have in important respects a different emphasis from mine. The relative lack of explicit reference to Le Doeuff’s work in the present pages belies the enormity of her influence on my own thinking about feminism and philosophy. From the beginning, I have conceived of the present book as something of a response to Hipparchia’s Choice and other of Le Doeuff’s writings, notably her wonderful essay “Women and Philosophy” (cited in n. 22, this chapter).

21. “Operative Philosophy,” p. 149.

22. The oblique relationship of women to philosophy, a relationship both enabled and encumbered by desire, is perhaps the great theme of Le Doeuff’s work. The most concise expressions of her views on this subject are in the brilliant “Women and Philosophy.”

23. The paper from which these two quotations are taken was later incorporated into chapter 6 of Moi’s book Simone de Beauvoir. The first quotation is dramatically transformed in the book and reads as follows: “There is in Beauvoir’s theory a productive tension between her initial, highly reified concept of alienation, and the more mobile and fluid outcome of the process in the case of little girls. The result is that her theory of female subjectivity is far more interesting and original than her rather too neat and tidy account of male psychological structures” (160). The second is replaced by the following: “There are strong biographical reasons for Beauvoir’s misguided admiration of the male (unconscious idealization of the father, admiration for Sartre, and so on), yet the main rhetorical source of Beauvoir’s touching confidence in the penis would seem to be metaphorical.” (162).

24. I do not mean to deny either that “biographical reasons” are sometimes, even often, at the foundation of Beauvoir’s views or that the unconscious plays a role—even a very large role—in her work. In The Philosophical Imaginary Michèle Le Doeuff convincingly shows how various wishes, desires, and fears often surface in the most rigorous of philosophical texts, in the forms of images, examples, tone, etc.; I see no reason to suspect (a) that Beauvoir inhumanly fails to have such wishes and desires or (b) that her unconscious fails to manifest itself in her work. What I am attempting to draw attention to, rather, is the rapidity with which Beauvoir’s critics tend to jump to the conclusion that she is out of control of what she is saying. I am also suggesting that this feature of the reception of The Second Sex has to do with the idiosyncratic way, to be explored in this book, in which Beauvoir pioneers the writing of philosophy as a woman.

1. My use of the word “us” here—and “you” later in this chapter—is meant to signal not that I’m taking a certain audience for granted but that one of my aspirations in this book is precisely to find my audience.

2. The word “honorable” is meant to exclude those who tolerate the feminist intervention in philosophy merely because they lack the power to do anything about it and would scarce risk appearing “politically incorrect” by challenging it publicly.

3. I do not mean to imply that no prefeminist philosophical writings have explored this possibility. Any number of philosophers have implied or argued that women’s bodily constitution prevents them from thinking rigorously; and others—perhaps most famously John Stuart Mill, in his remarkable Subjection of Women—have denounced this view. Further, phenomenologists from Hegel to, notably, Merleau-Ponty (in what I would argue in another context is his spectacularly underappropriated work in, especially, The Phenomenology of Perception) have at least tacitly and sometimes explicitly worried about the body as, at least, the interface between mind and world. And of course scores of philosophers, even analytic ones, have had their say about the nature of sex and love. What hasn’t been taken seriously—until feminism—is the idea that certain facts about one’s body might have a decisive bearing not only on the state of one’s mind but indeed on what should count as philosophical truth.

4. Robert Pippin, in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, examines this growing sense and argues (convincingly, I think) that “postmodernism” represents less a revolt against modernism than a furtherance of it.

5. Various inflections of the idea that Beauvoir contradicts herself are to be found in the work of, for example, Kristana Arp, Toril Moi, and Michèle Le Doeuff (all of whom argue that the contradictions they see in The Second Sex are often surprisingly rich and productive), as well as Penelope Deutscher and Mary Evans (who disagree).

6. I am all in favor of political manifestos. My point is that they are surely more effective when they are written for and directed at the public and not at a smallish audience of professional philosophers.

7. As will become clear later in this chapter, I believe that the sort of subliming I’m gesturing at occurs even in the most intractably antimetaphysical conceptions of philosophy; to argue philosophically against “metaphysics” ordinarily constitutes the doing of metaphysics. Cressida Heyes, in Line Drawings, also gets her bearings in her discussion of many of the issues raised in this chapter (particularly in the concluding discussion of the feminist debate between essentialism and antiessentialism) from Wittgenstein, although her approach and conclusions are importantly different from mine.

8. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Influential books in feminist ethics in recent years—not all of which exemplify at every turn the approach I’m worrying about in this section of the chapter—include Rosemary Tong’s Feminine and Feminist Ethics, Laurie Shrage’s Moral Dilemmas of Feminism, Bat-Ami Bar On’s and Ann Ferguson’s edited collection Daring to Be Good, Patrice DiQuinzio’s and Iris Marion Young’s edited collection Feminist Ethics and Social Policy, and Virginia Held’s edited collection Justice and Care.

9. I will just step over the not irrelevant fact that Rorty is trying to convince us of the need to prophesy in a new idiom by deploying arguments in the old.

10. MacKinnon’s most systematic treatment of sexual harassment is to be found in her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women.

11. I want to pass along Hilary Putnam’s observation that an especially interesting instance of such reconception is to be found in Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life.

12. Rorty, p. 236, quoting MacKinnon in Feminism Unmodified, p. 126.

13. “Feminists and Philosophy,” p. 59.

14. In addition to Nussbaum, feminist philosophers who take the view that, to put the point in its mildest form, it’s far too early to abandon traditional philosophical methods in favor of specifically feminist strategies include Louise Antony, Helen Longino, and Charlotte Witt, all of whom have articles in the volume of essays that occasions Nussbaum’s New York Review piece (A Mind of One’s Own, edited by Antony and Witt). This is not to imply, of course, that such thinkers would second Nussbaum’s view in her New York Review of Books article; indeed, Antony and Witt are the editors of the volume under review, although Nussbaum excludes their papers (and Longino’s) from her attack.

15. I thank both Bill Bracken and Ken Westphal for, independently, helping me put this point this way.

16. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pp. 263–264. My attention was drawn to this passage by Michèle Le Doeuff, who quotes it on pp. 189–190 of her “Women and Philosophy.”

17. See, e.g., Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman; Maria C. Lugones and Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You!”; bell hooks, Talking Back; Jean Walton, “Re-placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse”; Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir; and Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures.

18. There is a huge literature on “essentialism” in feminist philosophy and, of course, in philosophy in general. The term “essentialism” (as well as it’s alter ego “antiessentialism” and its close cousin “social construction”) is not used in any clearly consistent way in feminist debates. I will use the term “essentialism” as I have specified above: to refer to the idea that there is some philosophically pertinent feature that binds all women and makes them different from men.

19. Gilligan’s most influential book is In a Different Voice.

20. See, e.g., Lorraine Code’s What Can She Know? and Susan Bordo’s “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy.”

21. In chapter 2 of this project, I will look at Simone de Beauvoir’s diagnosis, or what I read as her diagnosis, of why it is hard to do, why it is hard to talk about “the woman question,” as it was termed in her day, without making metaphysical claims right and left.

22. My goal here is not, of course, to provide a careful explication or evaluation of Butler’s views. This means, regrettably, that there will be no room in my brief consideration of Butler to discuss the enormously important galvanizing effect she has had in, particularly, queer studies. What I have to say about Butler will be limited here to how her work helps us assess the viability as feminist philosophy of something we might call philosophy of sex and gender.

23. For a thought-provoking discussion of Butler’s baffling decision to, as it were, deconstruct rather than ignore the “sex/gender distinction,” as it has been called since the publication of Gayle Rubin’s watershed essay “The Traffic in Women,” see Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 30–59.

24. See especially chapter 8, “Critically Queer.” See also Butler’s response to the criticism that her thinking has the paradoxical effect of undercutting the idea that “women” are oppressed in “Response to Bordo’s ‘Feminist Skepticism and the “Maleness” of Philosophy’”; and see also the following note.

25. See, e.g., Bordo, “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy.” The Butler article cited in the previous note is a rejoinder to this essay.

26. The translation of the last clause is Toril Moi’s. The French reads: “cette verité constitue le fond sur lequel s’enlèvera toute autre affirmation.”

27. From “Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir par Madeleine Chapsal” in Francis and Gontier, p. 385. My translation. For more on Beauvoir’s use of the word “situation” (situation in French), see chapters 5 through 7.

28. La Force des Choses, 1:257. My translation.

1. Francis and Gontier, p. 471. My translation. This is part of a speech Beauvoir delivered in Japan in 1966. An English translation of this speech appears under the title “Women and Creativity” in French Feminist Thought, edited by Toril Moi, pp. 17–32.

2. The French reads: “Un grand cri rageur, la révolte d’une âme blessée, ils l’auraient accueilli avec une condescendance émue; ne me pardonnant pas mon objectivité, [mes lecteurs masculins] feignaient de ne pas y croire. Par exemple, je m’en pris à une phrase de Claude Mauriac parce qu’elle illustrait l’arrogance du premier sexe: ‘m’en veut-elle?’ s’est-il demandé. De rien: je n’en voulais qu’aux mots que je citais” (La Force des Choses 1:263–264).

3. See, e.g., A Pitch of Philosophy, especially chapter 1, “Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice.”

4. This accusation drives, for example, Elizabeth Spelman’s “Simone de Beauvoir and Women: Just Who Does She Think ‘We’ Is?”

5. Toril Moi, whose command of the secondary literature on Beauvoir is unparalleled, reports that “the great majority of American feminists criticize Beauvoir for being male-identified in some way or other, and for failing to appreciate the virtues of women” (Simone de Beauvoir 182). In fact, despite a consensus that The Second Sex is the founding document of modern feminism, any number of commentators have criticized its depiction of women. The British writer Stevie Smith, for example, said of Beauvoir in an early review of the English translation of the book: “She has written an enormous book about women and it is soon clear that she does not like them, nor does she like being a woman” (602–603; this remark is quoted in Deirdre Bair’s introduction to the 1989 Vintage edition of The Second Sex, p. xiv). Mary Evans, a British sociologist and author of a well-known study on Beauvoir, now more than a dozen years old, has written that “whilst de Beauvoir claims that much of her work is concerned with the overall condition of women, she turns away from many of the issues which are central to women’s lives” (Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin 395). The idea that Beauvoir exalts men above women is also to be found in an influential book on feminist philosophy by Jean Grimshaw; see her Philosophy and Feminist Thinking, pp. 45–46.

6. In highlighting this important role that the female body plays in The Second Sex, I mean to take issue directly with those of Beauvoir’s contemporary readers who claim that Beauvoir undervalues women’s bodies, although I do not elaborate on this challenge here. For a different way of defending Beauvoir along these lines, see Debra Bergoffen’s argument in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir that the central philosophical achievement of The Second Sex is a reexamination and revalorization of sexual reciprocity. See also Moi’s powerful argument in What Is a Woman? (59–83) for the claim that Beauvoir’s understanding of the body as a “situation” is central to her achievements in The Second Sex. (In chapter 4 I briefly touch on Sartre’s use of this term and in chapters 5 through 7 I discuss its metamorphosis in Beauvoir’s writing from her early philosophical works through The Second Sex.)

7. Examples of feminist philosophers who are critical of Descartes, in addition to Susan Bordo, whose work I’m about to address, include Catharine MacKinnon (see especially chapter 5 of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State), Hilary Rose in Love, Power, and Knowledge, Jane Flax in “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious,” and Genevieve Lloyd (see especially The Man of Reason, pp. 39–50).

8. Bordo’s essay, published in 1986, was distilled from a late draft of a larger project, published in book form the following year under the title The Flight to Objectivity.

9. In painting this picture Bordo relies particularly heavily on the work of historian Owen Barfield.

10. The classic texts here are Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering and Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur. In using the words “in our culture” I mean simply to gesture at the fact that Chodorow and Dinnerstein take themselves not to be talking about immutable processes but about what happens to boys under certain social configurations.

11. “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” 444. Bordo borrows the phrase “drama of parturition” from José Ortega y Gasset’s Man and Crisis.

12. And why not the “female” anymore? The cosmos from which Renaissance man was separated is identified by Bordo as female. In what sense if any was it feminine? Why do men recreate the world as “masculine” and not as male? Bordo does not address these sorts of distinctions.

13. Here I do not mean to be implying that Descartes saw philosophy in these terms; this is, rather, a claim about Descartes’s legacy.

14. Bob Scharff, in commenting on an early version of this material, nicely summed up Bordo’s approach to Descartes in identifying it as uncritically “diagnostic” and pointing out its essential aversion to taking Descartes’s experience seriously (i.e., to a phenomenological approach to the Meditations).

15. For the biographical material in these paragraphs I am relying on chapter 1 of Bernard Williams’s Descartes. For Descartes’s correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, see Andrea Nye, ed., The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to René Descartes.

16. For instance in the third meditation, on p. 27.

17. The question of what “able” is supposed to mean here is addressed later in this chapter.

18. Hatfield puts Descartes’s aspirations this way: “He was hoping to help the reader discover, through the process of meditation, a source of impersonal, objective judgments that lies hidden in the intellect. The meditator is to sift through his own experience until he arrives at that which compels assent, and thereby to discover what lies behind the possibility of universal agreement in such subject matters as mathematics and logic” (69–70).

19. As I shall argue at the end of chapter 7, Beauvoir’s conception of objectivity is remarkably close to the one I have attributed to Descartes. In the present chapter I am doing the groundwork to show that this resemblance is not just a mere coincidence. I should observe, however, pace correspondence with Bob Scharff, that this formal claim—the claim that objectivity can be seen as a form of subjectivity—leaves open the question not only of what subjectivity is (and here Beauvoir and Descartes will scarcely agree) but also of what sorts of things thinkers can or are likely to come to agree or disagree about.

20. The lines I’m about to cite are from the first and second meditations, pp. 12–23.

21. I am of course compressing the chain of reasoning in meditation 1 here, since the relationship between the dreaming and evil-demon arguments (and how they get overturned as the Meditations proceeds) is not directly relevant to my aims here.

22. The view that historians of philosophy have sorely underestimated the importance of the wax example in establishing Descartes’s interest in arguing for the epistemological primacy of the intellect over the imagination and the senses is made vivid and compelling in the work of John Carriero. See “The Second Meditation and the Essence of Mind.”

23. See chapter 3, especially n. 12, for more on Sartre’s interest as a young philosopher in Husserl’s work.

24. In the new wave of critical literature on Beauvoir that has appeared in the last ten years or so, one finds essay after essay aiming to position her philosophy pretty much exclusively in relation to that of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. A common view is that Beauvoir is far less philosophically dependent on Sartre and much more indebted to Husserl or Merleau-Ponty than has been assumed. The proliferation of this view is understandable, given the astonishingly small amount of philosophical attention that Beauvoir’s writings were paid until the 1990s. My position, which it is a central goal of this project to express and support, is that identifying Beauvoir’s philosophical forebears and comrades is of less import than articulating her way of appropriating other philosophers’ work—a method, I claim, that develops from Beauvoir’s making her womanhood the subject of a philosophical investigation in The Second Sex.

25. For Sartre, of course. For more on Beauvoir’s attempts to play Sartre’s disciple, see chapter 5.

26. La Force de l’Age, pp. 253–254. My translation. This passage is to be found in the English translation of this book, The Prime of Life, on p. 178.

27. “La Femme et la Création,” in Francis and Gontier, p. 471. My translation. An English translation of this speech appears in Moi, French Feminist Thought, under the title “Women and Creativity”; the passage I quote here is to be found on pp. 28–29.

28. See chapter 1 for a more sustained discussion of this declaration.

29. Beauvoir makes the same point in a somewhat different way in the third volume of her autobiography: “Far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of twenty on, accumulated the advantages of both sexes; after She Came to Stay, those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in the masculine world, and as a woman; this was particularly noticeable in America; at the parties I went to, the wives all got together and talked to each other while I talked to the men, who nevertheless behaved toward me with greater courtesy than they did toward the members of their own sex. I was encouraged to write The Second Sex precisely because of this privileged position” (The Force of Circumstance 189).

30. I am hugely indebted to Stanley Cavell for helping me to word my intuitions in this section of this chapter. A central suggestion of his was that I anchor what follows in this discussion with the idea of Beauvoir’s question replacing or displacing that of Descartes. In suggesting a relationship between Beauvoir’s question and Descartes’s, I am fully mindful of the very different roles these questions play for each thinker. My goal is to use the displacement of Descartes’s question with Beauvoir’s as an emblem of her inheritance of and challenge to certain features of his—and thus the male mainstream’s—way of doing philosophy.

31. Treatise, p. 269.

32. See especially part 4, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” e.g., p. 437: “I said there is no general, everyday alternative to skepticism concerning other minds. Now I will say: I live my skepticism.”

33. I thank Bob Scharff for a detailed and very helpful set of comments on an early version of this chapter.

1. Beauvoir was the ninth woman—and the youngest person—ever to pass the French agrégation (the equivalent of achieving a Ph.D. in philosophy). For a discussion of the significance of these facts see chapter 2 of Toril Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir. See also Beauvoir’s own account of her becoming an accredited philosopher in the fourth book of her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

2. I discuss Beauvoir’s denials that she had the wherewithal to do philosophy at greater length in chapter 2. In her lifetime Beauvoir published four more or less straightforwardly philosophical books, two of which (L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations [1948] and Privilèges (also published under the title Faut-il brûler Sade?[1955]) are collections of essays. Of Beauvoir’s two extended straightforwardly philosophical works, the more famous in this country, perhaps because it’s the only one of the four books fully translated into English, is The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); the other is Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944). The Ethics and Pyrrhus are the focus of chapter 5.

3. The charge that Beauvoir lacked philosophical originality is almost always linked to her loyalty to Jean-Paul Sartre. The question of Beauvoir’s philosophical originality is one of the themes under discussion in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret Simons, a collection of critical essays mostly by philosophers. See my review of this volume in the feminist philosophical journal Hypatia.

4. Mary Evans, for example, criticizes Beauvoir for her “uncritical belief in what she describes as rationality, her negation and denial of various forms of female experience, and her tacit assumption that paid work and contraception are two keys to the absolute freedom of womankind,” all of which suggest that Beauvoir stands for “a set of values that place a major importance on living like a childless, rather singular, employed man” (in Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin, pp. 56–57). I discuss the issue of Beauvoir’s supposed “masculinism” in chapter 2.

5. One of the readers engaged by Columbia University Press to evaluate the manuscript of this book took me to task for my “continuous references to the arguments that Beauvoir is a mere echo of Sartre and to the claims that Beauvoir is not doing philosophy,” which, it was claimed, “dates the manuscript” since “these debates are no longer current.” This reader suggested that instead of situating myself “as someone who is saving Beauvoir from these attacks,” I should “acknowledge that Beauvoir has already been saved; that she has successfully been reclaimed by philosophers.” This is something that I cannot acknowledge, however, because of my sense both that the vast majority of philosophers, male and female, feminist and otherwise, continue not to take Beauvoir seriously and that this failure has to do at least in part with something internal to Beauvoir’s writing, so that the question of her status as a philosopher—like the question of the philosophical status of the writings of Nietzsche, or of the later Wittgenstein—will perpetually be an issue: a genuine appreciation of her philosophical significance will require continued fresh acts of appropriation of her work. It follows that I do not see myself as someone who is saving Beauvoir from attacks, although of course I find these attacks both regrettable and ungrounded—if not surprising.

6. Sartre refers to “Hegel’s failure” on, for example, p. 338 of Being and Nothingness. I discuss his use of this term at greater length in chapter 4.

7. Note that I am not claiming, as Richard Rorty does, that what’s valuable about such an idiom is (just) that it provides for political change. As I said in my discussion of Rorty in chapter 1, I’m all for political change. But the point I’m making here is that, as I read Beauvoir, she is attracted to those texts in the history of philosophy whose terms and concepts allow her to do her own philosophical work. (For the record, let me note again that perhaps no piece of philosophical writing, if I can identify Beauvoir’s magnum opus as such, has had a more massive and positive political impact than The Second Sex.)

8. There is a list of these works in n. 2 of the present chapter.

9. I thereby disappoint Ken Westphal, who is convinced that if I were to do so, I would see how uncannily The Second Sex maps on to Hegel’s Phenomenology.

10. The notes are published under the title Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel. The English translation of the notes was published in 1969 under the title Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

11. The first volume of Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology was published in 1939; the second in 1941. For more on the history of the reception of Hegel before and during this period, see Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, especially p. 56; Vincent Descombes, especially chapter 1; and Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire, especially chapter 2.

12. Being and Nothingness had begun to take shape in 1933–34, a year Sartre spent in Berlin studying the philosophy of Edmund Husserl at the French Institute. In Beauvoir’s notorious version of the story of Sartre’s first encounter with Husserlian phenomenology (in The Prime of Life, the second volume of her autobiography), we find Sartre turning “pale with emotion” as Raymond Aron, himself at the time studying Husserl at the French Institute, sang the master’s praises during a round of drinks: “You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (112). Beauvoir reports that Sartre instantly went out to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and purchased a copy of Emmanuel Lévinas’s book on Husserl and soon after “took the necessary steps to succeed Aron at the French Institute.”

13. Prime of Life, p. 363.

14. The quotation is from Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, p. 273, n. 16. For informed speculation on Beauvoir’s interest in Hegel, see Michèle Le Doeuff’s “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line.”

15. Unless there is an indication to the contrary, quotations from the Phenomenology are from the Miller translation.

16. The fact that it’s not obvious what Hegel means by “moment” is treated as a philosophical opportunity, as we shall see later, by both Sartre and Beauvoir.

17. It’s tempting for anyone familiar with Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology to read these three moments as “dialectically” related. That is, one might be inclined to read the third moment as a product of the inherent tension between the first two: in primary self-consciousness the “I” is seen as independent and absolute; in secondary self-consciousness it’s seen to be dependent on independent objects; in tertiary self-consciousness this tension is negotiated and resolved. But even if something like this is right, there’s still the question of how to understand, as it were, just who this self-conscious being is and how the dialectic actually plays itself out. These are the interpretive issues that intrigue both Sartre and Beauvoir, albeit in (as I will argue) quite different ways.

18. I am grateful to Frederick Neuhouser for pointing out to me in conversation that my way of rendering this part of the dialectic is somewhat at odds with the—or at least a—standard reading of Hegel, in which the desire for objective self-certainty predates the encounter with the other self-consciousness. On the standard reading, what spurs this desire—or better, perhaps, what determines the form this desire takes—is the history of failure on the part of primary self-consciousness to satisfy its desires permanently. The satisfaction achieved after each individual act of consumption evanesces, which goads primary self-consciousness to desire the ultimate object—one, that is, whose satisfactions would never wane. On the reading I am offering, however (which, again, is the rendering of the dialectic I believe to be most suited to illuminating Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it), primary self-consciousness does not yearn for anything other than its transient satisfactions until it encounters another self-conscious being. And I might as well confess that I am not sure where in Hegel’s text proponents of the standard reading find evidence for their interpretation. (But see n. 27 below.) I am very grateful for an extremely detailed set of comments on an early version of this chapter from Ken Westphal and hope he will forgive me for persisting in bucking this standard reading of Hegel’s conception of pre–self-conscious desire. (For Westphal’s own detailed views, see his Hegel’s Epistemological Realism.) I am encouraged in my iconoclasm by the highly suggestive work of Bill Bracken on desire and recognition; see his Becoming Subjects.

19. In chapter 4, I will argue that this wish actually governs Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s picture of self-consciousness

20. A main goal of chapter 7 is to support this claim.

21. Hegel’s word for what I’m calling “overcoming” is the famous aufheben, often translated as the neologistic word “sublate.” Most famously, the dialectical movement in the Phenomenology transpires according to Hegel via sublation, a process whereby a certain tension (between, say, a general theory and specific facts) is overcome, though the elements in tension are somehow preserved, in transformed form, precisely through this overcoming.

22. In chapters 5 through 7, I demonstrate how Beauvoir, in the wake of this gap, is struggling unsuccessfully in The Ethics of Ambiguity to show how what she identifies as genuinely moral human relationships are possible, a project that gets off the ground, in my view, only in The Second Sex. In any event, the idea that the outcome of the encounter with the other is, at best, ambiguous and that this ambiguity has important moral implications plays a central role in Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel.

23. The paradoxical nature of the mediating role of the other, who provides the only means for the objective confirmation of another being’s being-for-itself precisely through regarding that being as an object, will also predominate in Beauvoir’s (but not Sartre’s) appropriation of the dialectic.

24. Kojève, Introduction, p. 12. This English translation by James Nichols matches Kojève’s French practically word for word.

25. I was tempted in writing what follows to use male pronouns to denote the master and female pronouns to denote the slave for three reasons: (1) for clarity’s sake; (2) because the terms “master” and “slave” are metaphors borrowed by Hegel from actual human relationships, so that calling either figure an “it” at this stage would be jarring—which may be why Hegel begins using the personal pronoun (“he,” exclusively, of course) at this juncture; and (3) to anticipate Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic. At heart, of course, I was faced with the usual problem of how to use third-person pronouns in what was supposed (by me, if not by Hegel) to be a sex-neutral context. But to address this problem by sexing the slave female would be in effect to deny exactly what I claimed in chapter 2 is Beauvoir’s ground-breaking intervention in the philosophical tradition, an intervention, I meant and mean to suggest, that implies that (as I have put it) we cannot understand the word “man”—or masculine pronouns—in philosophy apart from bringing ourselves to address the question of what a woman is. (That I was tempted to overlook my own discovery—to suppose that I knew what I was talking about in judging Hegel’s context “sex-neutral” and that merely making some pronoun switches is enough to render a context sex-neutral is—I hope—a sign of just how hard it is to appropriate the work of Beauvoir.) Therefore, in what follows of my rendering of Hegel (which, again, is supposed to be just a rendering) I use masculine pronouns to denote both the master and the slave.

26. This idea of the morally advantageous position of the slave is, as I’ve already mentioned, important for Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel. For Sartre, on the other hand, I will claim, what’s of interest in the master-slave dialectic culminates in the idea of a fight to the death between two subjectively self-certain beings, so that he sees no need to concern himself with the dialectic from this point on. This means that for him the question of which position, master or slave, is morally advantageous doesn’t even arise. In stopping before this morally momentous section of the master-slave dialectic—before the most dramatic exercise of freedom—Sartre misses what’s most compelling, even by his own standards, in Hegel’s depiction of a being’s struggle to find a measure of stability in its conception of itself as being-for-itself. I have much more to say about these matters in chapter 4.

27. Perhaps Hegel’s use of the concept of permanence here is what encourages supporters of the standard reading I referred to in n. 18 above.

28. This is of course the moment of the master-slave dialectic that will most excite and exercise the young Marx, who will use it to develop his view that labor is at the heart of our “species-being” and to denounce the abstractness of Hegel’s formulation of this insight. See, e.g., his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” especially the section entitled “Estranged Labor.” (See Tucker, pp. 66–125.)

29. The French is esclavage.

1. This way of phrasing things—and it’s not unique in this respect—is no doubt traceable to Heidegger, whose influence on Sartre’s way of appropriating the master-slave dialectic, while central, is also beyond the scope of my project.

2. Why this is so—why “vice” and “curiosity” have dropped out of the picture as motives—is a question I’ll address later in this chapter.

3. I will follow the conventions of Sartre’s translator, Hazel Barnes, in capitalizing his term “Other” and both italicizing and capitalizing his term “Ego.” These conventions will be useful in distinguishing Sartre’s notion of “other” from Hegel’s and his notion of “ego” from Freud’s.

4. Here, of course, Sartre is piggybacking on Heidegger’s conception of authenticity in Being and Time. For more on the relationship between Sartre’s conception of shame and Heidegger’s conception of guilt, see the following note.

5. Anyone familiar with Being and Time will notice Sartre’s pointed indebtedness to Heidegger in this passage, especially in the direct borrowing, so to speak, of the idea that human beings are primordially “fallen.” (Heidegger will go out of his way to deny the association of being fallen with the biblical myth of Adam and Eve—but it is a complicated denial.) What distinguishes Sartre’s view from Heidegger’s is not only his substitution of the concept of shame for Heidegger’s guilt (Schuld) but, more relevantly for my purposes, his insistence that to be “fallen” is not only to be “thrown” à la Being and Time into a particular life situation but also to “need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am.” For Sartre, in effect, every encounter with the Other is an encounter with what Heidegger calls das Man, the “they”: it is not just that I am seduced, as Heidegger puts it, by das Man but that I recognize myself to be the object that I am in the Other’s—any Other’s—eyes. Like Sartre, Beauvoir will resist Heidegger’s efforts to banish the subject-object duality from our ontology. But, as I will argue in chapters 5 through 7, she will in effect make a philosophical career of denying that the Other’s mediating role in my being what I am must take the form of degradation, fixedness, or dependence.

6. While my goal in discussing Sartre’s views in this detail is to contrast the pessimism and even paranoiac qualities of his views with the optimism and hope of Beauvoir’s, it would be perverse of me to fail to acknowledge the interest of much of what Sartre says about love. It strikes me that the paradox Sartre identifies here is a close cousin of the one Groucho Marx hit upon in his old line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would want him as a member; in both instances, a certain familiar horror of suffocation, automatism, and lack of recognition is evoked.

7. Sartre refers on p. 491 to what he calls “the triple destructibility of love.” I have just rehearsed the first and, to my mind, most compelling argument Sartre adduces in support of his view that (what he calls) love “holds … the seeds of its own destruction” (491). This first argument, to be more specific, is the only one that concerns itself with what is internal to Sartre’s depiction of the love relationship. The other two arguments have to do with contingent circumstances, and I’ll therefore just mention them here. The second reason love is bound to fail, Sartre says, is that I am always conscious of the fact that at any moment the Other may stop loving me and may regard me, again, as just another object in his universe. And the third reason that love is unstable as a relation with others (a reason Sartre discusses at some length on pp. 490–491) is that if my lover and I are the object of a third person’s Look then my lover (and myself) are once again instantly fixed as objects, in the eyes of all three of us.

8. See the example of the homosexual (an example any contemporary person of decent sensibilities will now find problematic, to say the least) on pp. 107–108.

9. In 1983, three years after Sartre’s death, his adopted daughter, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, published two of the twelve Notebooks for an Ethics that Sartre worked on from roughly 1947–48 (not coincidentally, as we shall see, the period during which Beauvoir was beginning to write The Second Sex). For an interesting discussion of the Notebooks in relation to Being and Nothingness, see Thomas Anderson’s Sartre’s Two Ethics, especially chapters 2 through 5.

10. Because the locus of objectivity isn’t always in me, it follows, as Sartre is eager throughout Being and Nothingness to insist, that his picture is not strictly speaking solipsistic, in the way that his teacher Husserl’s system (as articulated in, e.g., Cartesian Meditations) is often thought to be.

11. The other important text of this period is the novel Nausea, in which Sartre explores the epistemological ramifications of his metaphysics. While, as will be seen, these ramifications are far from irrelevant to my purposes, the play No Exit is more pertinent to my central task of trying to understand Sartre’s take on Hegel. The explicit philosophical underpinnings of both of these literary works are amply developed in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s earlier philosophical works, most of which were either polemics against his teacher Husserl’s way of doing phenomenology (especially in Cartesian Meditations) or incipient attempts to lay out a philosophical psychology grounded in a radical rejection of Freud’s idea of the unconscious are, as it were, dialectically incorporated or otherwise sublated in Being and Nothingness. These early works include The Transcendence of the Ego, The Emotions, and The Psychology of Imagination.

12. The English translation of Huis clos (which is an expression meaning “closed door” and is used almost exclusively to refer to “in camera” juridical proceedings) strays rather far from Sartre’s prose in its attempt to make his characters believable to an English-speaking audience. While the drama of the play is magnificently rendered in the English version, the translation’s lack of literalness poses a problem for anyone interested in Sartre’s specific word choices. I therefore modify the translation as needed and indicate when I am so doing. In this passage I make a simple change in punctuation: the translator’s final ellipsis is replaced by Sartre’s period.

13. That the eye is an enormously important symbol for Sartre is evidenced not only in Being and Nothingness, in which, of course, it is the instrument of “the Look,” but also in numerous scenes in No Exit, as when Estelle reminds Garcin, “You will be under my eyes constantly” (77), or Inès accuses Estelle of needing “the desire of a man in the eyes of a man” (84), or Inès taunts Garcin by declaring, “I am nothing but the look that sees you” (91), or Garcin refers to “all these looks that eat me up” (93; all citations from the French and all my translation).

14. There is no doubt that the task of proving that something—specifically, one’s very sense of oneself—is not a dream is a reference to Descartes in the Meditations. I discuss a further connection between Cartesian skepticism and Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel later in this chapter.

15. My translation of Sartre’s response to a question posed to him in an interview as quoted in Contat and Rybalka, pp. 238–239, and in Noudelmann, pp. 194–196.

16. I would not be displeased were this account also to suggest certain connections between Freud’s work and that of Hegel; but on this front I will pretty much let Freud’s text speak for itself. Moi also finds Freud’s “On Narcissism” useful in understanding what she calls “the primary structuring fantasy” of Being and Nothingness; see Simone de Beauvoir, p. 105.

17. Much has been made, especially in the wake of Jacques Lacan’s readings of Freud’s work (see, e.g., Lacan’s Seminar, book 1, pp. 129–142), of the somewhat confusing use Freud makes in “On Narcissism” of the terms “ego ideal” and “ideal ego,” an example of which is to be found in the passage from “On Narcissism” I’m about to cite. For my purposes, exploring this distinction is beside the point; and for simplicity’s sake I will consistently use the term “ideal ego.”

18. This set of ideas evolves in Freud’s work in the decade or so following “On Narcissism” into the concept of the superego. See, e.g., the second chapter of The Ego and the Id (1923).

19. Freud adds, provocatively enough for my purposes: “The complaints made by paranoiacs also show that at bottom the self-criticism of conscience coincides with the self-observation on which it is based. Thus the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience has also placed itself at the service of internal research, which furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual operations. This may have some bearing on the characteristic tendency of paranoiacs to construct speculative systems” (96).

20. For Sartre’s polemic against Freud and his attempt to develop an alternative psychoanalysis, see, e.g., Existential Psychoanalysis and also pp. 727ff. of Being and Nothingness (section 2 [ “‘Doing’ and ‘Having’: Possession”] of chapter 2 [“Doing and Having”] of part 4 [“Having, Doing, and Being”]).

21. Sartre explicitly makes such a connection between the Look and the cogito. See, e.g., p. 376: “What the cogito reveals to us here is just factual necessity: it is found—and this is indisputable—that our being along with its being-for-itself is also for-others; the being which is revealed to the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others. The Cartesian cogito only makes an affirmation of the absolute truth of a fact—that of my existence. In the same way the cogito, a little expanded as we are using it here, reveals to us as a fact the existence of the Other and my existence for the Other.”

22. The idea that we ought to take seriously Descartes’s fear of madness and to link it with his expression of skepticism is articulated and studied throughout Stanley Cavell’s philosophical work. See e.g., “Being Odd, Getting Even” and part 2 of The Claim of Reason.

23. In another context, in fact, I would be inclined to flesh out this claim by contrasting the abstract inexorability of Being and Nothingness with the political grounding of certain of Sartre’s later pieces of writing. I would like to imagine, of course, that the shift I’m positing in Sartre’s understanding of how to do philosophy had much to do with his appreciation of Beauvoir’s philosophical achievements in The Second Sex.

1. Robert D. Cottrell in his book on Beauvoir provides another example of this reading. What he calls “the two slender postulates” on which the “mammoth edifice” that is The Second Sex rests “are enunciated in the introduction and are derived from concepts elaborated by Sartre in L’Etre et le Néant, a book to which Beauvoir frequently refers as if to a sacred text whose validity and authority no right thinking person could question. ‘The perspective I am adopting,’ she announces at the end of the introduction, ‘is that of existentialist ethics’” (95).

2. It is of course true that Sartre often alludes in Being and Nothingness to the fundamental absurdity of our lives. This implies that the idea that we are not “justified” is at the heart of his philosophy. But my point is that Sartre is not interested in the problem, as it were, of justification; and he certainly does not make justification a central issue in his early work. Beauvoir, on the other hand, is centrally concerned with this problem in both Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity. (My thanks to Ken Westphal for encouraging me to address this matter here.)

3. Toril Moi also interprets Beauvoir’s use of the term “existentialist ethics” as signaling Beauvoir’s investment in her own earlier works, particularly The Ethics of Ambiguity. See Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 148–150ff.

4. Céline T. Léon, in “Beauvoir’s Woman,” for example, argues that “not only does Beauvoir take her cues directly from Sartre’s nauseous distaste of a world whose grasp eludes him, but she indirectly accepts as given the binarities [sic] of Oedipal culture—man/woman, activity/passivity, culture/nature. Notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary, her desire remains based on a lack, a stasis, and she never moves away from the cultural stereotypes she attacks” (145–146).

5. For essays tracing Beauvoir’s thought to that of Husserl, see Karen Vintges, “The Second Sex and Philosophy,” and Eleanore Holveck, “Can a Woman Be a Philosopher?” For those tracing her thought to Merleau-Ponty’s, see Sonia Kruks, “Simone de Beauvoir” and Kristana Arp, “Beauvoir’s Concept of Bodily Alienation.” I discuss the tendency to link Beauvoir’s name with those of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in a somewhat different light in chapter 2.

6. Le Doeuff, “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line,” p. 64. All Le Doeuff quotations in this section are from this source. In a recent book whose relative popularity reveals just how much work remains to be done in the difficult task of judging the relationship of The Second Sex to the work of Sartre, Kate and Edward Fullbrook write from the bafflingly illogical stance that a condition of Beauvoir’s being an original thinker must be her having invented Sartrean existentialism; and they try to show how all the important points from Sartre’s one-thousand-page book are captured in the first sixteen pages of L’Invitée, from which they claim Sartre shamelessly stole on his leaves from the war.

7. See La Force des Choses, 1:98; see Force of Circumstance, 1:67. Quoted in Le Doeuff, “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line,” p. 64.

8. Bergoffen, “Out from Under: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of the Erotic,” p. 185. All quotations of Bergoffen in this section are from this source. This material is developed in Bergoffen’s book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.

9. I discuss Bergoffen’s understanding of Beauvoir’s work in The Second Sex as a “philosophy of the erotic” in somewhat more depth in chapter 7.

10. I thank Frederick Neuhouser, as well as Steven Affeldt, Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Paul Franks, Arata Hamawaki, and Katalin Makkai for the excellent suggestions they gave me for the improvement of this chapter.

11. All translations are my own. This opening exchange between Pyrrhus and Cineas is from p. 10.

12. It is tempting to see the Beauvoir of Pyrrhus et Cinéas as in effect attempting to act out this very fantasy vis-à-vis Sartre. That Beauvoir would have been horrified at this possibility is one measure of the philosophical shortcomings of Pyrrhus et Cinéas, which I will characterize below in rather different terms.

13. See, e.g., the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, especially the second section.

14. I agree with Eva Lundgren-Gothlin (over and against Sara Heinämaa, for one), that The Second Sex is deeply indebted to Being and Time, although of course I have not made Beauvoir’s relationship to Heidegger a central subject of this book. See Lundgren-Gothlin’s “Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le Deuxième Sexe” and my “Being-with as Being-against: Heidegger Meets Hegel in The Second Sex.”

15. The concept of the appel is a central one for Heidegger, particularly in Being and Time. In unpublished work, Lundgren-Gothlin has written suggestively about the notion of the call or the appeal as Beauvoir uses it in The Second Sex. As Moi has pointed out to me in private correspondence, Sartre recurs to the concept of the appel in his book Qu’est-ce que la Littérature (What Is Literature?) published in 1948, i.e., at the time Beauvoir was working on The Second Sex. Here, in marked distinction to his conceptualization of the ontology of human relations, Sartre claims that “to write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language. … The writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of the work.” I have more to say about the congruity between Sartre’s understanding of writing as something of a conversation and Beauvoir’s understanding of reciprocity (including the reciprocity between a writer and reader) at the end of chapter 7.

16. After reading a draft of this chapter, Paul Franks and Bill Bristow reported to me their sense of a remarkable affinity between Beauvoir’s conception of our actions as “appeals” to the Other and Fichte’s understanding of human action as “summons” or “invitation.” Franks in particular suggested that it’s as though Fichte is being rediscovered through Beauvoir via Sartre via Hegel.

17. Obviously, some situations that I have a hand in bringing about will not be, or be seen as, mine. But one needn’t take on the hoary topic of intentionality in action, or even of responsibility, in order to appreciate the basic point I’m attributing to Beauvoir here: that human beings are sensitive to the way in which the things they do are subject to the objectifying judgment of other people.

18. This is also Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. See, e.g., his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the first volume of Either-Or, the first part of Stages on Life’s Way, and Fear and Trembling.

19. Of course, a work’s unraveling of itself needn’t take the form of a certain self-accusation; I, for one, read both J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as hugely philosophically productive exercises in reductio ad absurdum. But in both of these instances, I would argue, the undoing of a certain kind of philosophy is meant to have a therapeutic effect, as if to drop scales from our eyes. No reader of Pyrrhus, however, would make such a claim on its behalf.

20. See the later parts of this chapter as well as chapter 6 for a discussion of this self-criticism.

21. The only one of these essays ever published in English is “Œil pour Œil,” which appeared under the title “Eye for Eye” in the journal Politics in 1947. See Francis and Gontier for an excellent annotated bibliography of Beauvoir’s writings through 1979.

22. The question was posed by Deirdre Bair. See Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 269–270.

23. See, e.g., pp. 104–105 of Ethics.

24. The Ethics of Ambiguity, pp. 17–18. I will occasionally take the liberty of modifying certain passages in the English translation. In such cases, I will as usual use the abbreviation “TM” to indicate that I have done so, and I will reference the appropriate pages in the original French (in this case, p. 26).

25. I’m using capitalization here, even though neither Beauvoir nor the translator of the Ethics do, to highlight the fact that these categories are supposed to constitute types of people.

26. See chapter 4 for a brief discussion of Sartre’s remarks on love.

27. An example: In trying to show that there are “two ways of surpassing the given,” one amounting to a rebellion against limitations on human freedom and the other constituting a mere change of scenery, Beauvoir says: “Hegel has confused these two movements with the ambiguous term ‘aufheben’; and the whole structure of an optimism which denies failure and death rests on this ambiguity; that is what allows one to regard the future of the world as a continuous and harmonious development; this confusion is the source and also the consequence; it is a perfect epitome of that idealistic and verbose flabbiness with which Marx charged Hegel and to which he opposed a realistic toughness” (84).

28. I recall Vintges’s alluding to Beauvoir’s discussion of women in the Ethics in her Philosophy as Passion, although I cannot now find the exact passage, which failure perhaps confirms my recollection that Vintges, too, finds this discussion not to be particularly noteworthy.

29. It is in a section of Being and Nothingness called “Freedom and Facticity: The Situation” that Sartre implies that “being-a-Jew” is not a situation, that it is, indeed, “nothing outside the free manner of adopting it” (677). (I discuss this remark briefly in chapter 4.) It’s also in this section that he defines the “situation” as something that’s unique from person to person: “There is no absolute point of view which one can adopt so as to compare different situations; each person realizes only one situation—his own” (703). Here are two quotations from the part of Beauvoir’s autobiography in which she discusses certain tensions between Sartre’s views and her own: “I remembered how once I had said to Olga [a close friend of hers and of Sartre’s] that there was no such thing as ‘a Jew,’ there were only human beings: how head-in-the-clouds I had been!” (Prime of Life 366); and “[Sartre and I] discussed certain specific problems, in particular the relationship between ‘situation’ and freedom. I maintained that from the angle of freedom as Sartre defined it … not every situation was equally valid: what sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve? Sartre replied that even such a cloistered existence could be lived in several quite different ways. I stuck to my point for a long time, and in the end made only a token submission. Basically I was right. But to defend my attitude I should have had to abandon the plane of individual, and therefore idealistic, morality on which we had set ourselves” (Prime of Life 346).

30. I am grateful, once again, to Steven Affeldt, Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Paul Franks, Arata Hamawaki, and Katalin Makkai for getting me to see the irony in Beauvoir’s allegiance to Sartre in her early philosophical work.

1. Judith Butler, in “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” credits Beauvoir for inventing the idea of a radical distinction between (biological) sex and (constructed) gender. This credit is not exactly a form of praise. See Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 30–57 for a helpful assessment of Butler’s fateful reading of Beauvoir. For essays accusing Beauvoir of an insidious reliance on biology in her definition of womanhood, see, e.g., both Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Second Sex, Second Thoughts,” and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, “The Female Vagabond and the Male Mind.”

2. Karen Vintges attributes the mass of facts and details in The Second Sex to Beauvoir’s interest in existential phenomenology—that is, to the philosophical methods of (in particular) Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and, of course, Sartre, methods Vintges claims are inspired by what she calls “Hegel’s empirical phenomenology of history” (Philosophy as Passion 142; and see all of chapter 9). Put in simple terms, phenomenologists work from the inside out: they start from their experience and work from it to philosophical insights. Vintges understands Beauvoir in The Second Sex to be starting with women’s experience, particularly her own; “us[ing] elements from the thinking of various philosophers”; and then “systematiz[ing] them into a specific theoretical perspective, a reconciliation of existentialism and ethics” (146). My project might be seen as an attempt to specify what exactly “systematization” and “reconciliation” come to in The Second Sex and why one might find Beauvoir’s method of philosophical appropriation to have its own interest, both feminist and philosophical. (I note here, too, that Vintges and I agree that the standard reading of Beauvoir’s relationship to Hegel, on which she just maps relations between men and women onto the master-slave dialectic is untenable. In Vintges’s words, “Beauvoir’s theory deviates on essential points from the Hegelian system.” Vintges further observes, quite astutely, that the feminist standpoint theory that developed in the wake of The Second Sex has been driven in many of its incarnations by exactly the sort of clichéd Hegelian picture that both she and I fail to find in Beauvoir’s work.)

3. I would argue that Beauvoir’s first published novel, L’Invitée (1943, i.e., six years before the appearance of The Second Sex), also suffers from what I have identified here as a lack of grounding in the ordinary. Beauvoir in effect simply places her central characters, Françoise and Xavière, in a theory-driven, book-long Sartrean-style fight to the death: incredibly, Françoise actually kills Xavière at the end. (The fight that leads to Xavière’s demise is in fact so Sartrean that Kate and Edward Fullbrook were inspired to convince themselves that Beauvoir beat Sartre, who was simultaneously working on Being and Nothingness to the existentialist punch; see their Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.) In a chapter on L’Invitée in her book Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi proposes that “if L’Invitée is a melodramatic novel [as she thinks it is], it is above all because existentialism is a melodramatic philosophy” (99). My slightly different view is that the melodrama of L’Invitée is a product of Beauvoir’s not yet having found a way to square her desire to chronicle the everyday with her investment in the philosophical ideas she is just beginning to explore in her novel—and especially those she inherits from Hegel, who supplies its epigraph: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” See Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, chapter 4. For Beauvoir’s own later criticism of the “contrived” nature (in Beauvoir’s words) of L’Invitée, see The Prime of Life, pp. 268–274).

4. This is one of the many places in which the extent of my debt to Toril Moi is difficult to acknowledge adequately. Having come back to The Second Sex for the first time since I had started my philosophical training, I was overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of Hegel for Beauvoir but also was disconcerted by the relative paucity of work on the Hegelian aspects of The Second Sex. When Moi learned of my interest in the subject, she asked Eva Lundgren-Gothlin to send me the page proofs for the English translation of Sex and Existence, still at the time available only in Swedish. I found the two chapters Lundgren-Gothlin generously sent me, one called “Hegel and Kojève” and the other “The Master-Slave Dialectic in The Second Sex,” enormously galvanizing, and I am deeply grateful to her for allowing me an advance look at this work. In the time since I began work on the present chapter, not only Sex and Existence but also two other serious philosophical studies of Beauvoir, by Vintges and Bergoffen, have appeared. The latter two books both acknowledge Beauvoir’s interest in Hegel, although his place in her thinking does not play an especially prominent role in either work.

5. In fact, what Lundgren-Gothlin says in spelling out what it means to enter into the dialectic is that women have neither demanded recognition nor participated in work. But on the rendering of Hegel that I provided in chapter 3, participating in work is not a prerequisite, per se, for “entering into” the dialectic, although it is necessary for its progression (and self-surpassing). Still, I agree with Lundgren-Gothlin that part of Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic involves the way in which she construes both the need for women to work and indeed what “work” will mean in this context.

6. Lundgren-Gothlin helpfully cites several examples of critical essays insisting that Beauvoir’s Hegel is Sartre’s and that this is a problem with The Second Sex. See pp. 275–276, n. 2.

7. This idea of reciprocal recognition, while obviously signaling the influence of Hegel is, Lundgren-Gothlin claims, “mediated via the French tradition of Hegelianism, and particularly by the interpretation of Kojève” (67). My rendering of the master-slave dialectic in chapter 3 is of course predicated on the same claim. Lundgren-Gothlin herself provides a rendering of the dialectic in “Hegel and Kojève,” chapter 3 of her book Sex and Existence.

8. In order to get to the part of this paragraph I am most interested in highlighting, I am here deleting two or three more of Beauvoir’s examples of how people have regarded the “foreign,” “different,” “native,” etc., as “others,” as well as an appeal to Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

9. This is Heidegger’s signature term for the idea, to put it crudely, that a basic fact about what it is to be a human being is that one is “with” other human beings. Beauvoir’s investment in the concept of Mitsein, which appears repeatedly throughout The Second Sex demands further study from those who care about their work. Lundgren-Gothlin, in “Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology,” makes a valuable start on this project; she argues that Beauvoir’s concept of ambiguity turns on her appropriation of Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein and of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit). See also my “Being-with as Being-against: Heidegger Meets Hegel in The Second Sex.”

10. The verb se poser, which I’m rendering “to pose,” is the French cognate of the German sich setzen, ordinarily translated in English as “self-positing.” Sich setzen is the term coined by Fichte—and appropriated by Hegel—to describe the distinctive activity of subjectivity. This implies that one of the questions about what it is to “pose” as a subject is a question about how Beauvoir’s se poser is to be read against Hegel’s sich setzen. I am grateful to Frederick Neuhouser for alerting me to this implication, which is obviously centrally relevant to my project of exploring Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s writing.

11. I am for the moment postponing certain obvious questions here, among them those about what it is to “pose” as a subject, how claims to recognition are lodged, and what recognition and reciprocity look like.

12. Beauvoir uses the lowercase (“other”) to denote the nonabsolute or relative other and the uppercase (“Other”) to denote the absolute other—i.e., to denote woman.

13. See, e.g., Lundgren-Gothlin’s argument on pp. 71–74 of Sex and Existence.

14. In a note to this passage (276, n. 7), Lundgren-Gothlin provides a list of scholars who argue that in The Second Sex Beauvoir suggests that woman plays slave to man’s master. There is plenty of evidence in The Second Sex for Lundgren-Gothlin’s claim that Beauvoir characterizes women as acknowledging men’s claims for recognition without a struggle. One need look no further than the beginning of part 3 of the first book of The Second Sex, entitled “Myths,” in which, as Lundgren-Gothlin puts it, “the basic elements of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in Kojève’s interpretation are recapitulated” (69). It is in these pages, for example, that Beauvoir warns that “to assimilate the woman to the slave is an error. There were women among the slaves, but there have always been women who are free, that is to say, invested with a religious and social dignity. They accepted the sovereignty of the man and he did not feel threatened (menacé) by a revolt that could transform him in his turn into an object. The woman thus appeared as the inessential who never turns back (retourne) into the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity” (141, TM; LDS 1:239).

15. The reference to “existentialist ethics” occurs on p. xxxiv; the other quotation, the translation of which I have modified, on p. xxxv (LDS 1:31). I discuss Beauvoir’s use of the phrase “existentialist ethics” in chapter 5.

16. A number of Beauvoir’s critics in recent years have vigorously denied that her depiction of these variations is adequate, and they have faulted her, specifically, for what they regard as her white, middle-class, Eurocentric bias, a bias they say casts serious doubts on her claim that we can talk about a single and singular “woman’s” situation. This criticism rests largely on an underinterpreted—that is, insufficiently philosophical—conception of what Beauvoir means by “situation.” If you take the view that in surveying women’s lives from prehistory to the present Beauvoir aspires (and must aspire) to prove via empirical evidence that all cultures have certain concrete elements in common, then of course she will appear not only exclusionary (since needless to say she doesn’t discuss all cultures) but even a bit mad—which may be why this criticism is frequently linked with the suggestion that Beauvoir is in some fundamental way out of control of her writing in this text. Again, if you imagine that her bearings are largely empirical, you will be exercised by book 2 of The Second Sex, in which Beauvoir takes a more finegrained look at women’s (present-day) lived experience; you will say—and it is often said by her critics—that Beauvoir leaves out certain kinds of experience and particularly the experience of poor women and women of color. For the record, my view, which it is not my purpose to document here, is that given that The Second Sex was written fifty years ago Beauvoir is almost unbelievably sensitive to the variety of experiences that women have had throughout history. But, again, if you construe her as trying to make an empirical point about similarities among women’s lives, then you predestine yourself to find what she’s doing inadequate—as you would find the Meditations seriously problematic if you thought that Descartes were trying to doubt all of his knowledge through empirical means alone, on a case-by-case basis. A representative instance of the kind of criticism of Beauvoir I’ve been contesting in this paragraph is to be found in Spelman’s “Simone de Beauvoir and Women.”

17. That there is a further specification of what Beauvoir means by “relationship of reciprocity”—namely, the idea that it is something that can be marked by friendship or hostility and that in any event is “always in tension”—will be discussed later in the present chapter.

18. Not surprisingly, then, Lundgren-Gothlin spends a good deal of time on this passage, as will I. Occasionally, I will discuss variations in our responses to it. The passage is to be found in The Second Sex on pp. 139–141 and in Le Deuxième Sexe in volume 1, on pp. 237–239. Most paragraph breaks are mine; I will signal the exceptions in notes. Beauvoir’s paragraphs in The Second Sex are uncharacteristically long, and they also manifest her (this time characteristic) fondness for connecting lots of clauses with semicolons. (These features alone go a long way in accounting for many readers’ sense of the book as messy and unwieldy, but also “breathlessly exciting,” as Elizabeth Hardwick puts it [49].) In the long quotation that follows, I have transformed most of Beauvoir’s clauses into sentences, and I have inserted paragraph breaks into what is a two-page opening paragraph in the original text.

19. In French as in English, the word for “man” can be used to denote both sexes. I have chosen to use male pronouns here, both for simplicity’s sake and because in Beauvoir’s view women, insofar as they are women (and what I mean by this will become clearer in the following pages), largely have not participated in the processes Beauvoir is describing.

20. I should perhaps use the pronoun “it” instead of “her” to denote “Nature”: Beauvoir would use the pronoun elle here regardless of the point she’s trying to make, since the French word for “nature” takes the feminine article. On my interpretation of what Beauvoir is trying to do in this passage this coincidence is fortuitous since, as we shall see shortly, she goes suggest that men harbor fantasies about appropriating women in the wake of the dissatisfaction and disappointment they experience as a result of their failure to appropriate “Nature” successfully.

21. The phrase “the unhappy consciousness” (which, in a typical instance of the severe shortcomings of the English translation of The Second Sex, is rendered “the unfortunate human consciousness” by the hapless translator Parshley) of course comes right out of Hegel’s Phenomenology. As the master-slave dialectic develops, the slave figure becomes conscious of the conflict between his inherent ontological freedom as a thinking subject (the truth of his being “for-itself”) and his quotidian status as a worker (his tmaterial life as “in-itself”). His consciousness of this conflict produces the “unhappy consciousness,” a state of mind or spirit in which the slave is, in Robert Pippin’s words, “unable to accept the status of its relation to the world and others, and unable to rest content with its mere ability to demonstrate to itself the unsatisfactory character of its status” (Hegel’s Idealism 165). What Beauvoir is describing, then, is an inner conflict, the origin and resolution of which, as she will shortly suggest, is the encounter between self and other.

22. Even Lundgren-Gothlin misses this idea; she claims that what Beauvoir says is that reciprocity requires “recognition of one another as subjects in friendship and generosity” (my emphasis).

23. This astute translation of se surmonte is Lundgren-Gothlin’s.

24. Too, it ought to be obvious that in the background of this idea lies the Hegelian conception of what’s unsatisfying for self-consciousness about the mere consumption of Nature.

25. I’m about to quote what constitutes for Beauvoir the second paragraph of the “Myths” section of The Second Sex; this is where she puts the first paragraph break, in other words, of this section. I will here divide this second paragraph into two. For more on my splitting up of Beauvoir’s paragraphs in the long passage I have been examining, see n. 18 above.

26. Until further notice, all quotations from Lundgren-Gothlin are from p. 74 of her text.

27. In chapter 7 I explore Beauvoir’s grounds for the claim that woman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her own life.

28. The verb “redouter,” meaning to fear or dread, carries overtones of awe; one might use it, for example, to speak of fear of one’s boss, or of God.

29. Quotations from Lundgren-Gothlin in the present paragraph are from p. 75 of Sex and Existence.

30. Lundgren-Gothlin appears not to be taking account of this fact when she writes that woman “has never been an enslaved equal, but has always been an Other.”

31. One can intuit that in those centuries in which the master treated the slave as an absolute Other, the slave was also an object of fear for the master. Then the question would become: Why and how did the institution of slavery give way for the most part, while the institution, as it were, of misogyny did not? Addressing this question is a central task of chapter 7 of this book.

1. Parshley’s translation of these last sentences of the “History” section of book 1 of The Second Sex is particularly egregious. Where Beauvoir claims that woman sees and chooses herself [se choisit] not “en tant qu’elle existe pour soi,” Parshley writes that she does so not “in accordance with her true nature in itself”—which is of course the opposite of what Beauvoir means to say. Then when Beauvoir says that we have to go on to describe the way men have dreamed women because “son être-pour-les-hommes” is important, Parshley writes that what’s crucial is “what-in-men’s-eyes-she-seems-to-be”—thereby obscuring any connection between Beauvoir’s hyphenated phrase and the term “being-for-others.”

2. By “in significant part” I mean to signal that Beauvoir’s understanding of women’s situation is not confined to those aspects of women’s lives that are determined by their relations to men. She claims, for example, that the body itself is a situation (TSS 36). While I address this claim in the present chapter, it is not my aim to give a full analysis of it. (See Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 59–72, and Julie Ward, “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of Body in The Second Sex,” for more sustained discussions.) Let me stress once again that the purpose of this book is to make a case for the idea that feminist and other philosophers have reason to take an interest in Beauvoir’s way of grounding her appropriations of other philosophers’ work in her own experience, and particularly her own experience as a woman. I have tried to fulfill this aim by looking at two of Beauvoir’s forebears whose influence on her is, I think, particularly underappreciated. But I do not mean to imply that my reading of The Second Sex is complete; indeed, for me to claim that it is would be to belie precisely what I find exciting about Beauvoir’s philosophical procedures.

3. Those who are inclined to accuse Beauvoir of a certain homophobia at this juncture would do well to remember that her concern in The Second Sex is to explore what it means to be a woman and, particularly, how being a woman differs from being a man. At this juncture she is concerning herself with the asymmetry in men’s and women’s roles in reproducing the species and not with sexual experience in general.

4. Abortion did not become legal in France until 1975; to this day, it is illegal beyond the tenth week of pregnancy. In April 1971, Simone de Beauvoir (along with the writer Marguerite Duras, the actresses Catherine Deneuve and Simone Signoret, and other French celebrities) would sign the so-called “Manifesto of the 343,” which said, “A million women have abortions in France each year. Because they are condemned to secrecy, they are aborted under dangerous conditions. If done under medical control, this operation is one of the simplest. These millions of women have been passed over in silence. I declare that I am one of them, I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to birth-control methods, we demand freedom to have abortions.” See Claudine Monteil, Simone de Beauvoir, especially chapter 2, for a fascinating account of the woman’s movement in France during this period.

5. See, e.g., Evans, chapter 3.

6. Beauvoir was notorious for her own horror of having and caring for babies. But in interviews, especially toward the end of her life, she was at pains to insist that her own lack of desire to have children did not play a role in her admonishing women to consider carefully the possibility of opting out of motherhood. Tellingly enough, Beauvoir warned that, given the demands placed on mothers in our culture, having children frequently constituted for women a form a slavery. When asked, for example, by Yolanda Patterson in 1985 what advice she would give to women who wanted both to have children and to “maintain their own identity and independence,” Beauvoir said, “One must really follow one’s deepest desires. Otherwise one feels unfulfilled. … But one should be very careful not to become enslaved” (332). And in an interview (one in a famous series) with Alice Schwarzer in 1976 she said, “I think a woman should be on her guard against the trap of motherhood and marriage. Even if she would dearly like to have children, she ought to think seriously about the conditions under which she would have to bring them up, because being a mother these days is real slavery” (73).

7. Beauvoir’s use of the notion of alienation in this context itself constitutes an appropriation, namely of the work of Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan (and, for that matter, Sigmund Freud). Even though this ought to be obvious to anyone familiar with the writings of these figures, there is work to be done in specifying the terms of this appropriation. This is work that Toril Moi (and, to my knowledge, no one else) has undertaken in the sixth chapter of her Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, which is entitled “Ambiguous Women: Alienation and the Body in The Second Sex.” Like Lundgren-Gothlin, Moi is troubled by what she sees as a pervasive androcentricity in Beauvoir’s understanding of women’s “immanence.” Like me, she argues that Beauvoir’s writing in The Second Sex reflects the splits and contradictions she claims characterize women’s lives, although, as will soon be seen, Moi and I disagree about exactly how these splits and contradictions are reflected. Indeed, readers may well find it useful to compare what I have to say especially on this subject with Moi’s writing on ambiguity and alienation, particularly since I go over much of the ground in The Second Sex that she explored first. Moi writes, “If Beauvoir argues that women under patriarchy are torn by conflict and inner strife, the very texture of her book reveals this to be no less true for herself than for other women. The Second Sex enacts the very contradictions described by Beauvoir; confirming her analysis, her text also undoes it. The deepest paradox of all is that the most powerful antipatriarchal text of the twentieth century reads as if it is written by a dutiful daughter only too eager to please the father” (177). (The first volume of Beauvoir’s autobiography, covering roughly the first two decades of her life—through the beginning of her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre—is entitled Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.)

Moi traces Beauvoir’s use of the term “alienation” not to Lacan and Marx, but to Lacan and, plausibly enough, Hegel. She characterizes Beauvoir’s relationship to both figures as one of “free elaboration” (157) or “free development” (159), and she seems to find Beauvoir’s license in both cases problematic. For example, she writes, “To discern the Hegelian influences in Beauvoir’s argument, however, is not to claim that she is being particularly orthodox. Freely developing the themes of recognition and the dialectical triad, Beauvoir entirely forgets that for Hegel, ‘recognition’ presupposes the reciprocal exchange between two subjects” (159). And again: “Attentive readers may already have noticed that her text moves directly from the Lacanian theory of the alienation of the child in the gaze of the other to the rather different idea that boys and girls alienate themselves in their bodies. Unfortunately, Beauvoir makes no attempt to relate Lacan’s view to her own” (163).

8. The paper she cites is Lacan’s “Les Complexes familiaux dans la Formation de l’Individu.” In her exhaustive history of psychoanalysis during its first one hundred years in France, Elisabeth Roudinesco reports that a year before publishing The Second Sex Beauvoir telephoned Lacan, some five years before he began to conduct the ongoing seminar that would make him famous, and asked him to discuss the possibility of a link between sexual difference (and “female sexuality” in particular) and women’s emancipation. “Flattered, he told her they would need five or six months [the English translation of this passage, amusingly enough, says five or six years] of discussion to clarify the issue. Simone was not inclined to spend that much time listening to Lacan for a work that was already fully documented. She proposed a set of four interviews. He refused” (512). For a reading of Lacan’s conceptualization of infantile desire that dovetails with my reading of Beauvoir’s account, see William Bracken’s Becoming Subjects, especially chapter 4.

9. It’s not, again, that the infant is presumed by Beauvoir to harbor some sort of preexisting image of himself; it’s that he reacts to the abandonment (of, e.g., weaning) by looking for himself in the other’s reflection. This reaction to what in Hegelian terms we might call a crisis of self-certainty is itself, I think, essentially Hegelian. The difference between Beauvoir and Hegel, I am claiming, is that Beauvoir regards the infant as directly desiring self-petrifaction—thinghood—while Hegel suggests that the (formerly) subjectively self-certain being wishes to find in the other’s eyes an image of himself as essentially “for-itself,” so that the desire for self-petrifaction is, at best, deeply hidden.

10. I’m putting the word other in quotation marks here to flag the fact that my use of this concept here is not precisely that of any of the authors I’m discussing in this context.

11. Answering the question of why this is demanded of little boys and not little girls will require our coming to see how Beauvoir explains our investment in a certain picture of what it is to be a grown-up little boy, that is, a man. Certain feminists, prominently Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, have famously argued, in their appropriations of the “object-relations” school of psychoanalysis, that the demand that boys become independent is to be explained in large part by the fact that they are raised in a sexist culture by women, from whom the culture forces them to distinguish themselves. One of the minor motivations of the present section of this chapter is to distinguish this approach from that of Beauvoir.

12. Parshley translates “il peut au moins partiellement s’y aliéner” as “he can at least partially identify himself with it.” Throughout this crucial section of Beauvoir’s text, Parshley tends to translate the French word for “alienation” as “projection” or “identification.” This is an instance of the kind of translation that makes Beauvoir’s use of terms such as “alienation” seem cribbed and arbitrary to many English readers.

13. I don’t think we need take as a sign of an incorrigible racism on Beauvoir’s part her failure to note that some black people are women, or that some women are black. Her obtuseness here is compatible with the idea that black women’s lives are perhaps torn in different ways from those of white women. (This is in fact the thesis of Angela Harris’s critique in “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory” of the way white women have conceptualized black women—namely, as merely doubly oppressed, rather than as differently oppressed.) For evidence that Beauvoir was ordinarily far more sensitive to the insidiousness and complexities of racism, see her numerous discussions of the situation of American blacks in America Day by Day.

14. See, again, both Evans and Leighton for versions of this charge.

15. Poulain de la Barre wrote two astonishingly progressive books advocating women’s liberation from sexual oppression, De lÉgalité des deux Sexes (1673) and De léducation des Dames pour la Conduite de l’Esprit dans les Sciences et dans les Mœurs (1674). Beauvoir’s quotation comes from the former and is quoted on p. xxvii of The Second Sex.

16. I should note, however, that in 1943, during the German occupation of France, Beauvoir was “expelled” from her job after the mother of one of her students, Nathalie Sorokine, accused her of “corrupting a minor.” In her autobiography Beauvoir writes, “My name was restored after the Liberation; but I never went back to teaching” (Prime of Life 428).

17. For a discussion of Beauvoir’s achievements as an “intellectual woman,” see Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, especially part 1.

18. See Bergoffen, “Out From Under: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of the Erotic,” material that is developed in her book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. See also my brief discussion of Bergoffen in chapter 5.

19. Again, this is certainly true of forms of nonheterosexual erotic love, although given Beauvoir’s preoccupations in The Second Sex she is concerned to focus on the perils and promises of relationships between women and men. For the record, book 2 of The Second Sex contains a chapter on lesbian experience.

20. Many feminists have suggested, for instance, that fathers ought to take a more active part in the rearing of their children. As I mentioned above, Nancy Chodorow comes to this conclusion through an “object-relations” analysis of children’s relationships to their mothers; see her book The Reproduction of Mothering. Another familiar feminist line of argument is that women’s special “ways of knowing” ought to be acknowledged, explored, and culturally validated; see, e.g., Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing. In the last decade or so, the idea that gender is “socially constructed,” an idea that of course takes its bearings, however loosely, from The Second Sex, has produced a spate of books and articles suggesting that individual acts of defiance or “performances” against sex and/or gender norms can disrupt these norms more easily than if they were biologically determined; by far the most influential of these writings is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (although Butler in her later book Bodies That Matter claims that this [common] reading of Gender Trouble oversimplifies things).

21. I don’t deny, and neither does Beauvoir, that social conditions can be so horrific that one doesn’t have the luxury to undertake this encounter with the self. Indeed, as I have been stressing throughout this book, one of the most dramatic differences between Beauvoir’s understanding of human freedom and Sartre’s is that only Beauvoir takes oppression seriously. By speaking of one’s most “fundamental” nemesis, I mean to suggest that even when one enjoys the most marked genuine political freedom, the struggle with self that I take Beauvoir to be detailing in The Second Sex remains.

22. Interestingly, Sartre in 1948, when Beauvoir was writing The Second Sex, explicitly endorsed the idea of authorship as an invitation to the reader’s act of judgment. See his What Is Literature?, especially the middle two chapters. (I thank Toril Moi for pressing me to acknowledge this fact at this juncture.) The irony is that Sartre’s depiction of the author-reader relationship finds no correlate in his ontology in Being and Nothingness; indeed, as I have argued, there is no room for such a relationship in that book’s understanding of things.

23. The idea of “conversation” as an emblem of what is possible in relationships between human beings is another hallmark of the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, who is particularly interested in the forms that conversation takes (or does not) between men and women, especially as epitomized in two genres of film he calls the Hollywood comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman. (See, respectively, his Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears). In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome Cavell identifies the mode of conversation he is interested in as a central feature of a way of understanding the ethical life, alternative to the standard choices of utilitarianism and deontology, an alternative he calls “moral perfectionism.” The conversation that distinguishes perfectionism is evident in places as diverse as the discussion among friends that comprises Plato’s Republic, Kant’s vision of a Kingdom of Ends in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the exchange between “interlocutors” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. My instinct is that The Second Sex, which I’m claiming is to be read as an appeal for conversation in the Cavellian sense, belongs in this company; this is a claim I hope to flesh out and support in more depth in forthcoming work.

24. In this context I recall Cavell’s memorable observation that “among friends the taking of pleasure is an offer of pleasure, and the showing of pleasure at pleasure offered is the giving of pleasure” (Contesting Tears 10).

25. At the very end of The Second Sex, Beauvoir suggests that social revolution is one—but only one—of the prerequisites for the improvement of women’s—and men’s—situations: “We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman’s economic condition alone is enough to transform her. This factor has been and remains primordial in her evolution. But until it has brought about the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires, the new woman cannot appear” (TSS 725, TM; LDS 2:655).