SOURCE: "Simone de Beauvoir: From the Second World War to The Second Sex," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 39-51.

[In the following essay, Houlding discusses the influence of the Nazi Occupation of France on Beauvoir's intellectual development and philosophical insights in The Second Sex. According to Houlding, "Through her exposure to the nature of women's everyday lives during the Occupation, Beauvoir first began to perceive the active construction of femininity."]

In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir referred to the Second World War as a pivotal moment in her life, a time when her ways of interacting with the world underwent permanent transformations. Until 1939, Beauvoir had refused to believe that the trauma of war could come to interrupt the life she had so carefully constructed: "Je refusai furieusement d'y croire; une catastrophe aussi imbécile ne pouvait pas fondre sur moi." It was through the war that Beauvoir came to perceive her "historicity," that is, the force of history in the shaping of individual lives. Years later, in a 1985 interview with her biographer Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir would criticize her pre-war attitude: "À vrai dire, je ne suis pas fière de ce que j'étais alors—trente ans et toujours égocentrique. Je regrette qu'il ait fallu la guerre pour m'apprendre que je vivais dans le monde, pas en dehors."

The Occupation and the Second World War precipitated a generation of French intellectuals toward political engagement. Le Deuxième sexe was published only four years after the war in 1949. Beauvoir undertook her study of the feminine ideal in the wake of the Occupation. In this paper, I will consider what led Beauvoir to incorporate questions of gender within the post-war project of engagement in the world.

Commenting on the reception of Le Deuxième sexe, Toril Moi has remarked upon what she terms the "political isolation" of the book in 1949, finding it

curiously out of step with its own historical moment, written as it was at a time when Western capitalism was kicking women out of the factories in order to hand their jobs over to the boys back from the war, and published just as the West was about to embark on that most antifeminist of decades, the 1950s.

Within this global representation of Western capitalism, Moi's transposition of Rosie the Riveter from the United States to France is misleading, since the particular conditions of occupied France had not transformed the traditionally agrarian French economy into the booming American model of industrialized military production.

In addition, French women had not played as prominent a role in the wartime workplace as their American counterparts. In direct contrast to the American model, women in France were actively recruited as workers after the war in order to shore up the depleted national workforce and the desperate national economy. Among the political measures taken toward national recovery by liberated France, women "were finally granted the right to vote and to run for public office, and the Constitution of the Fourth Republic enshrined the right to work in its articles." The Liberation was seen as "the moment to bring women into full participation in the polity and equality of the workplace." It must be said, though, that postwar social programs were implemented under the assumption that women's true place was within the family, where wives remained subordinate to their husbands, the legal chefs de famille.

Moi's second displacement, that in which she projects Le Deuxième sexe forward into the 1950s, is more central to my argument here, however. Because of the enormous impact of Le Deuxième sexe in its American incarnation as The Second Sex in 1953, there has been a tendency to date the work and its influence from that time. Yet, in observing that the text central to the elaboration of late twentieth-century feminism appears oddly out of step with the 1950s, we do not account for the fact that Le Deuxième sexe stepped into history directly out of World War II and the German Occupation of France. It is precisely the genesis of Le Deuxième sexe in occupied France, with its specific gender conditions and historical configurations, that we have overlooked.

Rather than an eery prediction of the house-bound 50s, or a clarion call to the women's movement of the 70s, Le Deuxième sexe responded above all to the experience of the 40s. Closing the French decade in 1949, it is literally a post-war work, a work that Beauvoir could not have written before the lessons of the war years. For France, this was a decade defined by war, defeat, and occupation by the eternal enemy. For French women, it was a decade in which it was virtually impossible to avoid what Denise Riley has termed "gendered self-consciousness," that is, the (self-) recognition that results when women are consistently "named as a sex" within social discourse. In what might now be interpreted as attempts to counter the crisis in masculinity occasioned by the French defeat, the Occupation was the site of relentless attempts to define women's social function and to circumscribe the dangers posed by femininity in a nation controlled by a foreign and unremittingly masculine presence. As recent feminist criticism on women and war has demonstrated, "war throws gender into sharp relief." In an extremely dramatic way, the German Occupation of France exacerbated conventional notions of femininity and politicized the traditionally "feminine" networks of everyday life.

Humiliated by the exode, feminized by the rapid defeat, and by the signing of the Armistice with the Nazis, France did in fact appear to be a country of women in the early years of the Occupation. While the recurrent image of France-as-fallen-woman haunted Vichy discourse, many men, an estimated 1.6 million, were held as prisoners after the defeat, while 92,000 had died in combat. For all its focus on the rights of the family, Vichy legislation actually limited the rights of women as individuals, since the effect of such conservative ideology bound women as wives and mothers even more forcefully to the home. To this day, French families have Philippe Pétain's traditional Catholic leadership to thank for the national holiday known as "La Fête des Mères." Vichy also underwrote the legislation of specific pro-family laws: aid to families was significantly increased; divorce was prohibited for couples married less than three years; adoption laws were broadened in order to reduce the number of childless homes; husbands who abandoned their families were charged with having committed a misdemeanor; and in keeping with this pro-natalist policy, the performing of abortions was punished as a form of treason against the state.

For Simone de Beauvoir, who had scrupulously rebelled against the life of a dutiful French daughter until this point, the Occupation provided an obvious working example of the social and historical construction of gender. Through her exposure to the nature of women's everyday lives during the Occupation, Beauvoir first began to perceive the active construction of femininity. Writing daily letters to Sartre (who was absent from Paris on military duty and then in prison camp until March 1941), waiting in food lines, preparing meals, and attempting to secure the continuity of life for those within her care, Beauvoir herself lived more "like a woman" during the Occupation than at any other time in her life.

Beauvoir briefly discussed the factors which led her to undertake a study of women's condition in La Force des choses. As an admirer of Michel Leiris's L'Âge d'homme, Beauvoir was moved to write an autobiographical work after the war. With Leiris's text serving as a masculine model, she began with a personal question: "Qu'est-ce queça avait signifié pour moi d'être une femme?" At this time, Beauvoir did not feel that being a woman had hindered her in any way: "ma féminité ne m'avait gênée en rien." When Sartre pointed out that she had nonetheless not been raised in the same manner as a boy, Beauvoir realized that the question deserved more thought and, characteristically, took herself off to the Bibliothèque Nationale to study it further. It was then that Beauvoir had the following revelation concerning the "myths of femininity":

Je regardai et j'eus une révélation: ce monde était un monde masculin, mon enfance avait été nourrie de mythes forgés par les hommes et je n'y avais pas du tout réagi de la même manière que si j'avais été un garçon. Je fus si intéressée que j'abandonnai le project d'une confession personnelle pour m'occuper de la condition féminine dans sa généralité.

I want to argue, beyond Beauvoir's analysis, that it was her Occupation experience which led her to pose the initial question of the meaning of sexual difference in her own life, and to seek its answer in the theoretical exploration of gender in Le Deuxième sexe.

In reading Beauvoir's personal texts concerning the war years, it becomes clear that Beauvoir's confrontation with the nature of women's daily lives under the extreme conditions of the Occupation supplied the key impulse to the writing of Le Deuxième sexe; through her wartime encounters and experiences, Beauvoir began, however unconsciously, to take the measure of what she terms in her memoirs a certain "condition féminine." A work of the magnitude of Le Deuxième sexe draws on various origins, among which we must include Beauvoir's first trip to the United States in 1947, her encounters with American women and visits to several women's colleges, her readings on the system of slavery, and the traditional aspects of her love affair with Nelson Algren. Virginia M. Fichera's study of Les Bouches inutiles has also identified Beauvoir's only play, written during the Occupation, as a definite precursor to Le Deuxième sexe. The role played by women's Occupation experiences in the elaboration of Le Deuxième sexe has remained a missing piece around which these other essential elements must be reassembled.

Severe practical hardships did not end for the French with the Liberation nor with the end of the war in 1945. The winter of 1944–45 was the coldest of the war thus far, with supplies of coal and clothing reaching their lowest level. Food rationing continued well beyond 1945, while prices for the basics rose. Bread rationing was reintroduced in December 1945, with the daily allotment decreased to 300 grams, a lesser amount than during the Occupation. A newspaper estimated that the average Parisian diet consisted of 1400 calories per day in March 1946, with this figure also representing a decrease since previous years. In September 1947, women in Le Mans rioted in protest against bread shortages. At the end of the war and for several years afterward, France represented the hungriest and least well-supplied European country other than Italy. Naturally, the everyday hardships occasioned by this lack of necessities fell upon the shoulders of women. This was the atmosphere in which Beauvoir was researching and writing Le Deuxième sexe.

With the mobilization of her two closest male friends Sartre and Jacques-Laurent Bost in the fall of 1939, Beauvoir found herself in familiar but somewhat depleted surroundings. During the drôle de guerre and the Occupation, Beauvoir was to spend a significant amount of her time in the company of women. Her most constant companions, all members of the extended Family constructed around the Beauvoir-Sartre couple, were drawn from the circle of young women who revolved around the couple in their various roles as lovers, friends, students and protégées. Much of Beauvoir's memoirs of the time, her recently published journals, and the letters to Sartre involve the intrigues created by the shifting configurations of these relationships.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Beauvoir's recording of her daily life during the early months of the war is her breathtaking level of activity. For Beauvoir, as for most of the proverbial "women who wait," the previously impressive demands on her time and attention increased with the coming of war. Beauvoir continued to carry out her teaching duties until 1943. With the absence of many male teachers from Paris in the fall of 1939, her workload was significantly increased while her salary did not change. As she recalled in conversation with Bair:

Le bon peuple de Paris devait continuer à éduquer ses enfants et, maintenant que tous les hommes étaient appelés à se battre, on attendait des femmes qu'elles fassent leur devoir patriotique et assument les postes des hommes sans aucune compensation financière. Je me rappelle m'être dit que ce n'était pas juste que j'aie une telle surcharge d'élèves sans toucher un franc de plus.

Bair reminds us that as many as eight people often depended upon Beauvoir's salary for their well-being during the war.

Perhaps due to the feminine company in which she necessarily found herself, even the seemingly indifferent Beauvoir came to realize more fully the meaning of a woman's public appearance during the war. In its very restrictions, the Occupation drew attention to the demands and the significance of women's fashion. As Dominique Veillon notes in her study of the French fashion industry under the Occupation, the first winter of the war occasioned the birth of the adjective "utilitaire" to describe the element of practicality that now governed certain fashion choices. Upon the death of her father in 1941, Beauvoir and her mother made use of his clothing coupons and old clothes. For herself, Beauvoir had an unflattering dress and coat made up out of a heavy overcoat of her father's. Each one of the few items in her wardrobe was threadbare from use by the end of the war. As many women took to wearing men's trousers during the winter months, Beauvoir wore her ski pants and ski boots as daily apparel. However, even during the record cold temperatures of 1942–43, female instructors were required to wear dresses in the classroom.

Beauvoir was one of many women who learned how to ride a bicycle during the war. Still, these utilitarian aspects of the Occupation years were recuperable within the fashion system: for example, in the summer of 1941, the newspaper Paris-Midi sponsored a contest for the most beautiful cycling outfits. With each new development in women's wear, the magazines of the day debated the fine line between reason and fashion. In June 1942, Marie-Claire's "Ten Commandments for the Parisienne" warned female readers: "La jupe-culotte, tu porteras à bicyclette seulement." Beauvoir's trademark turban was yet another sign of the practical times, as trips to the beauty salon became increasingly expensive and shampoo increasingly rare. Here too, French unwillingness to sacrifice femininity entirely during wartime is illustrated by a striking double photograph taken by Lee Miller: as women at the Salon Gervais sit under hairdryers with manicurists in attendance, two young men—"les forçats du bigoudi"—ride bicycles in the basement to generate electricity for the dryers above. Images such as this, with its division of labor along gender lines, demonstrate the degree to which it was essential that the notion of femininity and the sacrifices made in the name of Parisian glamor survive during a time of national crisis.

Accustomed to an austere lifestyle, Beauvoir confided in her journal on 5 September 1940 that she adapted easily to the restrictions of Occupation life: "Personnellement, ça m'amuse un peu la modicité des ressources qui me sont offertes; j'ai toujours aimé imaginer des situations où il fallait arranger sa vie presque sans matière: extrême pauvreté, ou maladie, ou village, ou province." Despite this initial enthusiasm, Beauvoir discovered over the next five years that the "challenges" of women's lives during wartime could prove to be exhausting and demoralizing. With Sartre's release from prison camp in the spring of 1941, he and Beauvoir resumed their communal life by renting rooms in the same hotel and meeting for meals together. As dining in restaurants became unaffordable, Beauvoir took on the ever more challenging tasks of purchasing and preparing food for herself, Sartre, and various members of the Family. The Occupation was the only moment of her life during which Beauvoir actively participated in the daily concerns of a typical French housewife:

J'avais peu de goût pour les tâches ménagères et pour m'en accommoder je recourus à un procédé familier: de mes soucis alimentaires, je fis une manie dans laquelle je persévérai pendant trois ans. Je surveillais la sortie des tickets, je n'en laissai jamais perdre un; dans les rues, par-delà les étalages factices des magasins, je cherchais à découvrir quelque denrée en vente libre: cette espèce de chasse au trésor m'amusait; quelle aubaine si je trouvais une betterave, un chou!

As she sat in her room writing while dinner simmered on the burner, Beauvoir momentarily shared in the modest pleasures afforded by the interiority of women's domestic lives:

Je me rappelle, au début de décembre, une fin d'après-midi où le couvre-feu—fixé à 6 heures, à la suite d'un attentat—me claquemurait dans ma chambre. J'écrivais; dehors c'était le grand silence des déserts; sur le fourneau cuisait une soupe de légumes qui sentait bon; cette odeur engageante, le chuintement du gaz étaient une compagnie; je ne partageais pas la condition des femmes d'intérieur, mais j'avais un aperçu de leurs joies.

Wartime conditions made Beauvoir more aware of "la condition des femmes d'intérieur," although she herself had deliberately chosen to live outside of the restrictive domestic space by avoiding both matrimony and maternity. Within these passages, Beauvoir is also sure to maintain her distance from the "joys" of housekeeping by implying that her glimpse of domesticity's fleeting pleasures did not still the pen in her hand.

If Beauvoir often appears in her memoirs to be innocently playing at the role of French housewife, referring half-ironically to these years as her "femme de charge" period, she does not go so far as to glamorize the labor and sacrifices involved. In the first months of the Occupation, she was infuriated by her father's complaints of hunger and hardship because she knew that it was taken for granted that "it was [her] mother who stood in the queues all day long trying to find enough for him to eat, shorting herself to give him more." It is also clear that, with Beauvoir fulfilling her "wifely" duties, Sartre was never expected to share household responsibilities and indeed was often shielded from certain realities of Occupation life: "Quant à Sartre, nous lui dissimulâmes la vérité." While Beauvoir did her best to disguise the unsavory food that she was obliged to put on the table, packages of food sent from the provinces often arrived with the meat in an advanced form of decay. Beauvoir attempted to salvage what she could, cleaning maggots out of pork, rinsing beef in vinegar, heavily seasoning the stewpot so as to camouflage any telltale signs: "D'ordinaire, je réussissais mon coup; j'étais mortifiée quand Sartre repoussait son assiette." On one particular day, however, Sartre arrived home to discover Beauvoir unwrapping a piece of rotting rabbit, seized it from her hands and rushed downstairs to throw it out. Unbeknownst to Sartre, Beauvoir was to retrieve it later, soak it in vinegar, cover it in herbs, and serve it to him for dinner.

In 1985, Beauvoir also admitted that, in spite of Sartre's vehement principles against black-market dealing, she was sometimes forced by hunger and necessity to purchase goods there without his knowledge. While she clearly enjoyed the special occasions on which she acted as hostess for friends such as Michel and Louise Leiris, Camus, and Picasso, Beauvoir also recognized the costs of taking on such a role permanently. Bair writes that after the war ended Beauvoir never cooked again, a highly unusual accomplishment for any woman, and especially so for a woman born in 1908.

Until the Second World War, Beauvoir had considered herself an exception in her discontent with the roles of wife and mother traditionally accorded to women. When the Occupation brought her into contact with a slightly older group of women whose lives were more conventional than her own, Beauvoir began to take stock of the similar obstacles they had each encountered along the way:

Soudain, je rencontrai un grand nombre de femmes qui avaient passé la quarantaine et qui, à travers la diversité de leurs chances et de leurs mérites, avaient toutes fait une expérience identique: elles avaient vécu en "êtres relatifs."

Although Beauvoir felt at the time that, as an unmarried woman without children, she had escaped being trapped within the traditional model, her interest in the socially-determined patterns of women's lives had nonetheless been focused.

Beauvoir makes another vital connection in this passage of La Force de l'âge concerning the extent to which the war years transformed prewar abstractions into concrete realities:

Sur bien des points, j'avais réalisé combien, avant la guerre, j'avais péché par abstraction: qu'il ne fût pas indifférent d'être juif ou aryen, à présent je le savais; mais je ne m'étais pas avisée qu'il eût une condition féminine.

Beauvoir had learned during the war years that whether one was Jewish or Aryan could matter immensely, and that such distinctions were not mere abstractions. Although she would not articulate her wartime intuition until after the Liberation, Beauvoir had also witnessed the difference gender made during the Occupation.

The ideological connections between anti-semitism, racism and sexism would prove to be essential to Beauvoir's opening argument in Le Deuxième sexe. During the war, Sartre drafted a "Constitution" for the post-war period to be sent to Charles de Gaulle, which included the protection of religious, cultural and linguistic rights for Jews. Whereas Beauvoir felt at that time that no individual or culture should benefit from "special" treatment, Sartre argued that the specificity of "le fait juif" must be recognized and protected. Beauvoir was eventually to agree with him on this. Both Sartre's work on "the Jewish question" and Beauvoir's project on "the Woman question" reflect this change in attitude toward oppression which the war had provoked.

In the introduction to Le Deuxième sexe, Beauvoir makes numerous references to cultural stereotypes surrounding European Jews, African American slaves, and women:

Refuser les notions d'éternel féminin, d'âme noire, de caractère juif, ce n'est pas nier qu'il y ait aujourd'hui des Juifs, des Noirs, des femmes: cette négation ne représente pas pour les intéressés une libération, mais une fuite inauthentique. Il est clair qu'aucune femme ne peut prétendre sans mauvaise foi se situer par-delà son sexe.

Beauvoir makes clear distinctions between forms of oppression in terms of race, class, and gender. However, for today's reader, certain similarities remain powerful and telling. The Holocaust and slavery were both systems in which no "after" could be envisioned, in which the fundamental assumption was that European Jews and African American slaves would not go on to testify to the conditions of their lives. Jews were not to have survived. Slaves were not considered capable of constructing a meaningful narrative. How then would these stories be told? What form would the witness's testimony take? Regarding female testimony, Beauvoir could not have foreseen when writing this introduction that her readers would come to speak in terms of "before" and "after" Le Deuxième sexe itself. Nor could she have known that her decision to study "la condition féminine" rather than herself alone would so undeniably result in a work that set generations of women's testimony and writing in motion. Le Deuxième sexe provided precisely an analysis of women's condition through which female testimony could occur.

In the recent Yale French Studies issue devoted to her work, Beauvoir is celebrated as the "witness to a century," in recognition of the fact that "her autobiography 'begins' back in 1908 with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and goes up to 1970 with All Said and Done," continuing through to 1980 with the account of Sartre's last years in Adieux. In considering Le Deuxième sexe as Beauvoir's first contribution to twentieth-century feminism, we are obliged to rethink the role of the war years in the decades of women's history that followed. Le Deuxième sexe draws on her position as an eyewitness to the Occupation years. It was at this time that Beauvoir witnessed the process through which women become a gender, a process compellingly identified in Le Deuxième sexe: "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient." The Second World War did not just make of Beauvoir a historical subject, it made her a woman as well.