SOURCE: Altman, Meryl. “Taking Thinking Seriously.” Women's Review of Books 13, no. 4 (January 1996): 9-10.

[In the following review, Altman surveys the project to rehabilitate Beauvoir's reputation in such works as Simone de Beauvoir.]

“But what exactly were you looking for in The Second Sex? A theory, or the voice and support of a big sister?” “What are we looking for in any philosophical text if not the theoretical support of a forerunner? Although, of course, we may not find it.”

(Hipparchia's Choice, p. 133)

The Second Sex is to Western feminism as the Bible is to Western culture: it's been an undeniably powerful text, but even the faithful can't agree about what it says. How can a single text lie behind Sherry Ortner and Gayle Rubin, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Judith Butler? But it does. Its author, more mysterious with every revelation, serves as a screen on which many Western feminists project our utopian hopes and desires, our anxieties and angers and fears. Sometimes we have yearned to see Simone de Beauvoir as half of the perfect intellectual couple, sometimes as the model of perfect rebellion and freedom, sometimes even as a lesbian foremother. We recognize, if uneasily, the authoritative status of The Second Sex, if not for us, for someone. We quote some of its best lines over and over. And, by and large, we have not read it.

Maybe this is changing. Margaret Simons' new anthology, Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, begins simply by taking Beauvoir seriously both as an important figure within the history of philosophy and as a brilliant feminist thinker whose insights into the female condition may help us as theorists and as women at the present moment. It will be useful to all sorts of readers, from the undergraduate struggling through Book One of The Second Sex to those who have been working on Beauvoir for some time. I hope most that it will send people interested in feminist theory back to Beauvoir, back to other parts of The Second Sex besides the Introduction, and will lead some of us to stop relying on versions of her presented in polemics or coffee-table books.

Sympathetic, intelligent commentaries on The Second Sex are crucial because the book opposes, especially to the non-philosophical reader, a million opacities and resistances. In those very opacities and resistances, though, lie its survival, its ability to engender a wide variety of fructifying and divergent feminist arguments, to give us something new every time.

Five of the contributors to Feminist Interpretations—Jo-Ann Pilardi, Karen Vintges, Eleanore Holveck, Sonia Kruks and Michéle Le Doeuff—take up the vexed question of Beauvoir's relationship to existentialism and especially to the work of her companion and lover, Sartre. Beauvoir's work has been caught in a double bind: mainstream philosophers have either dismissed her as a mere footnote to and popularizer of Sartre, or else have attacked her feminism as deviant and unphilosophical; meanwhile, some feminists have seen her as writing “within” Sartre's system, have identified her with its flaws and have accused her of being male-identified.

The volume's loose consensus is that these criticisms miss the mark. Many of the contributors recognize one basic conflict between feminism and Sartrean existentialism: Sartre held that the individual consciousness has absolute freedom to choose in all situations, and created the concept of “bad faith” to explain (and criticize) the failure of individuals to do so. His system on the face of it can't account for, or even admit the existence of, oppression, domination, social control. Vintges, Holveck, Kruks and Le Doeuff (in an essay that postdates and partly reworks the argument of Hipparchia's Choice), all see Beauvoir's philosophy as based on a fundamentally different notion of individual freedom as situated within (and limited by) historical and social given reality, mediated by institutions (such as marriage) and by inequalities imposed on the individual self. Each assigns Beauvoir a different predecessor: Husserl, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty. All four agree that when Sartre wanted to move toward a more politically committed view, he discovered the weakness in his own system and learned from Beauvoir rather than the other way around. (The fact that Sartre never credited or acknowledged her innovations, and that she herself never openly claimed them, is not necessarily an obstacle to these readings.) This section will be especially helpful to those not philosophically trained, who have tended to skip the “existentialist” parts of The Second Sex or regard them as unfortunate excrescences.

A different set of reasons for elevating Beauvoir's reputation at the expense of Sartre's is offered by Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook. “Sartre's Secret Key” gives a shorter and tighter version of the argument presented in their 1994 book, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth Century Legend (Basic Books). Fullbrook and Fullbrook argue that the ideas we know as Sartre's were actually worked out first and fully by Beauvoir in her novel L'Invitée (published in English as She Came to Stay), which Sartre read in manuscript before he ever set down the ideas that became Being and Nothingness; the two then supposedly entered into a Machiavellian conspiracy, lasting half a century, to conceal his mediocrity as a thinker and advance her ideas under cover of his name and fame.

In both the book and this article, the “discovery” of the “key” to the relationship is unfolded in a gratingly self-congratulatory manner, but the new evidence the article presents is fairly thin. Feminist philosophers, among them Kruks, Le Doeuff and Simons, have already argued in print that it was false to say Sartre had all the ideas and Beauvoir merely applied them. Fullbrook and Fullbrook have simply discovered that Beauvoir's autobiography juggles with the dates of composition of L'Invitée, making it look as if Sartre committed certain key ideas to paper before Beauvoir did. Their reading of the two works together displays a troubling disregard for the differences that literary versus theoretical presentation of an idea may make; and it seems odd that they worked not from the manuscript Sartre read, but from the published text of the novel (in English translation, yet) which obviously could have been altered after the two had discussed it.

If the Fullbrooks' contention were true, it would create a different kind of problem. Supposing Beauvoir invented Sartre's early system, is she then responsible for its flaws, and for the phobic images of women many have identified in Being and Nothingness? If not, if Sartre distorted her views so seriously, he must be admitted to have made them fully his. To be fair, it is hard to see how a proper account of collaborative thinking can really be given if we are not to take the word of the collaborators. Le Doeuff reminds us that “No one, neither woman nor man, is an absolute beginning in thought.” But ideas, for Fullbrook and Fullbrook, seem to be not “thought” but commodities, which can be shown to “belong” to one or another person.

Historically, neither Beauvoir nor Sartre has been well-served by middlebrow curiosity into their way of living (as opposed to what they thought and wrote). Philosophy is neither a black turtleneck nor a turban. One thing I like about Simons' anthology is that its contributors bear in mind that Beauvoir was embodied, situated, as a writer—yes, she did live at a certain time, did produce autobiographical writings, did sleep and work with Sartre—without subordinating all other concerns to that of finding out who the mother really was.

Jeffner Allen takes up these discomforts in an article called “a response to a letter from Peg Simons, December 1993.” Allen gives us an informal, open-ended polylogue rather than a traditional philosophical argument, incorporating the voices of friends and some personal narrative as well as poetic fragments and jokes. While noting that a number of myths about Beauvoir's life have been called into question by the posthumous publication of her letters and diaries, she points out that many of these myths were already in question. But she reminds us that any unitary view of Beauvoir we would substitute will also be an exercise in personal or political mythmaking. Allen is the only writer in this book who recognizes complex issues about authorial intention, referring to Beauvoir as “she, she and she” to remind us that no single version of anyone's life has final authority or truth. Her own style, which some may find self-indulgent, is integral to making this point.

I'm not absolutely sure where this leaves us; but it does have the good effect of decentering the discussion, freeing it from something. Allen concludes that “a woman without a movement is like a fish without a bicycle,” hoping (I think) that the question of Beauvoir's relationship to Sartre and to “existentialism” can be set aside, and that we can look instead at Beauvoir's relationships with other women, including her women readers.

Céline T. Léon, in “Beauvoir's Women: Eunuch or Male,” repeats familiar criticisms of Beauvoir's negative descriptions of the female (or feminized) body. Few issues have vexed later feminists more than this one, but where Léon finds these images “puritan,” “phallocratic” and derivative from Sartre, other contributors (Kristana Arp, Debra B. Bergoffen and Julia K. Ward) reclaim them as accurate though depressing representations of the subjective experience of being “woman” under patriarchy—representations which unfortunately are neither outdated nor superfluous.

In its final section, the anthology takes up another set of charges later feminists have made against Beauvoir: that her work was naively liberal, or even apolitical. Margaret Simons' own essay, “The Second Sex: From Marxism to Radical Feminism,” seeks to correct Beauvoir's marginalization by feminist political philosophy, pointing out that Beauvoir offered a philosophical underpinning to radical feminism in the US and to socialist feminism in the UK. Simons sees Beauvoir's work as informed by historical materialism, insisting on the class dimension of any analysis of women's position, yet also critical of Marxism's inability to account for women's separate experiences of oppression. The Second Sex also points out the inability of Freudian theory to account for differences among women, and incorporates its own critique of ethnocentricity. This might not sound like the Beauvoir familiar from attacks on her bourgeois humanism, but it is Beauvoir based on accurate analysis of what she actually wrote.

In “Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Post-Colonial Ethics,” Julien Murphy also challenges accusations of political quietism, arguing that the omission or downplaying of Beauvoir's active support for Algerian independence, by her biographer Deirdre Bair among others, falsifies the true radicalism of her life and her ideas, and leaves us with the impression that she passively followed Sartre around or, worse, left “real politics” to him. Murphy returns convincingly to the superiority of Beauvoir's philosophy to Sartre's when it came to opposing real-world injustices; shows she opposed colonialism early and often, courageously and consistently; and points to Beauvoir's analysis of her own class and race privilege in her essays on Algeria and […] her autobiographical writing, which she began during the Algerian conflict.

None of this will be at all surprising to those who have read Beauvoir carefully and whole. But how many have done that? I asked a historian friend of mine what she thought of Beauvoir; she had never read The Second Sex, because she had gathered from Elizabeth Spelman's work that Beauvoir's analyses were exclusionary, and therefore outdated and irrelevant to her own work on black women. As should be clear by now, I think this is a shame.

While it is crucial to re-establish Beauvoir's credentials as a philosopher, this was not all she was. Toril Moi's book, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, begins to provide a lucid and sympathetic account of the whole Beauvoir “text,” including her life, her autobiographical writings published and unpublished and her fiction, as well as her more theoretical writing. Moi calls her effort a “personal genealogy” rather than a biography; this enables her to pay attention to the difference genre makes, to examine Beauvoir's different presentations of similar ideas and themes in different writings, without singling out one set of writings as the discourse of Truth. Those who know Moi only through her rather tendentious earlier book, Sexual/Textual Politics, may be pleasantly surprised to come upon this sustained work of careful scholarship, textually sensitive, attentive to complexities and concerned mainly to open up, rather than close down, interpretation.

For Moi, “intellectual woman” means “any woman who has ever taken herself seriously as a thinker, especially in an educational context”; it comes also to mean “a woman who refuses to accept the traditional patriarchal division between mind and body, sense and seduction.” Moi reads Beauvoir's ambiguous deference to Sartre, her statement that he, not she, is the true philosopher, in the context of a wealth of historical detail about the French educational system and the French literary establishment which, she reminds us, still disparages Beauvoir as a naive “shopgirl” or an unattractive blue-stocking. It may annoy or discourage us to have to point out that critics discredit a woman thinker by “personaliz[ing] the issues, reduc[ing] the book to the woman,” that “to show any sign of self-satisfaction is [considered] a bad thing in a woman,” that the reception history of Beauvoir's writing still shows her caught within the double bind she herself identified nearly fifty years ago—the text, or the woman, is either too feminine, not feminine enough, or, absurdly, both. It is nonetheless necessary to keep making these points, and I see it as a good sign that Moi's mastery of “high theory” has not blinded her to them; her self-identification as a materialist may explain why.

The true strength of the book is in the individual readings, which are difficult to summarize. I particularly like her reading of L'Invitée as a melodramatic novel in the same way that existentialism is a melodramatic philosophy. Moi's approach to the troubling images of female sexuality in The Second Sex is to show that they rest on a series of unexamined metaphors, and that we may dislike them without having to discard the entire analysis within which they are embedded. Her belief in the Freudian (and the lit crit) doctrine of overdetermination enables her to recognize long-lasting psychoanalytic themes in Beauvoir's life, such as the need to free herself from an engulfing mother by over-idealizing male discourse, or the “dark side” of oscillation between depression and irrational joy, without reducing all Beauvoir's work (or all Sartre's) to a feeble shadow of her “obsessions.”

Moi brilliantly explains Beauvoir's problematic speaking stance in The Second Sex—what many feminists have criticized as “writing like a man”—as “investigating her own marginality from a position of centrality.” This struck a real chord for me. Isn't that where all feminist intellectuals are, even now? When I, who have a job, stand up to say that women are being denied jobs; when I speak and write to say that women are being silenced? It's easy enough for someone to attack me as a liar or a hysteric or as living in the past. This enemy wants me to choose between erasing my own (atypical) experience of the center and erasing what I am privileged to know about the experience of marginality, other women's but also in other contexts my own. My best choice may be (like Beauvoir?) to refuse to choose.

The most surprising aspect of Moi's book is her sympathy for existentialism as the groundwork for Beauvoir's feminism and indeed our own. She sees the phenomenological doctrine of “the personal is philosophical”—which we can see in Sartre's excitement at discovering that one can make a philosophy out of a glass of beer, in the couple's attention to what people say in cafes, in Merleau-Ponty's doctrine of experience as embodied—as instigating and legitimating the attention to the lived experience of women that became crucial to formation of the notion that the personal was political. Moi sees the existentialist doctrine that consciousness is free—that however oppressive our situation may be, we have the choice whether to accept and embrace it or to refuse and resist it—as enabling Beauvoir to envision narratives of liberation, potential equality and hope. These narratives, Moi shows, were what have made The Second Sex a work of empowerment for generations of feminists:

Historically, narratives of freedom have been remarkably effective in producing social change; we abandon them at our peril. To raise the question of liberation in a postmodern intellectual field, however, is immediately to expose oneself to accusations of teleology and other metaphysical crimes: no wonder many feminists are rapidly losing faith in the future of feminism. But to deprive feminism of its utopias is to depoliticize it at a stroke: without a political vision to sustain it, feminist theory will hit a dead end.

(p. 213)

Existentialism has fallen into disfavor with mainstream American philosophy departments; indeed, one ironic precondition for the proper recognition of Beauvoir's contributions may be that Sartre's star seems to have definitively set (fewer people than I would like may be reading to the end of The Second Sex, but who is even assigning Being and Nothingness?). Still, new generations of readers continue to find something in Sartre and Camus, perhaps the same thing they find in Kurt Cobain: they give voice to the hopelessness and sense of absurdity many young people observe about the traditional bourgeois life they are on the threshold of entering. It may even be that feminism and other radical movements can't do without some notion of bad faith or false consciousness, though this idea has fallen into disrepute: if one can't change the world by changing oneself, if one can't begin to change both by thinking about them differently, what on earth do people like me think we're doing when we teach women's studies?

Michele Le Doeuff's Hipparchia's Choice is the earliest chronologically of these three books, but it remains my favorite, for its common sense, its wit and the breadth of its vision. Informally ordered yet tightly argued, it ranges from brief close readings of Aristotle and Husserl to investigation of local 1970s French campaigns for reproductive rights and educational equality, with lengthy (but never self-indulgent) biographical and autobiographical digressions, always in search of the solid ground of shared political realism. Le Doeuff takes on many of the same issues discussed in the other books, and other writers, especially Toril Moi, signal their deep indebtedness to her.

At the heart of the book is a thorough investigation of Sartre's sexism, and of Beauvoir's relation to it. Le Doeuff's main concern is to use Beauvoir and Sartre as a paradigm case to open up some larger issues. Stated simply: what use, if any, is philosophy to feminism, and to women generally? “Philosophy is like military life: either you think it is a good thing, and in that case you should be pleased to see women in West Point and the other military academies, or you think it despicable and support conscientious objectors.” Moving deftly around in the Western philosophical tradition from the pre-Socratics to the post-Derrideans, Le Doeuff argues that “where women are concerned the learned utter, and institutions let them utter, words which fall clearly below their own usual standards of validation.” “Philosophy” has affirmed its own importance and defined its project by creating then despising that which is not philosophy, not rationality, not “thought,” inventing an Other which has been (at various times) slaves, the empirical sciences, the vulgar political sphere, even animals, but most especially women. The logical weak point of any philosophical system, Le Doeuff suggests, can often be found precisely in these places where woman's essential otherness is opaquely and peremptorily invoked (Sartre is an extended example of this, but far from the only one). Feminists can do philosophy a service in pointing these places out—but should we bother?

Le Doeuff answers yes to this, not through an extended theoretical self-justification but by reminding us simply that “the exercise of thought is sometimes a very joyful, or even ordinarily pleasant, activity.” If male philosophers have often deliberately sought to keep women from this exercise, by explicit ban, open ridicule and more subtle means (as in Beauvoir's case), need we acquiesce?

Le Doeuff shows how she and others (including Beauvoir) have been nonetheless drawn to philosophy because it seemed to promise the possibility of thinking and rethinking everything, a discourse of rational human beings in principle open to all, a field where “nothing goes without saying” and every question, however counterintuitive (or even silly) can and should be asked, an answer can be demanded, and appeals to authority or “what has always been” are in principle ruled out. Like Moi, Le Doeuff is concerned to reclaim an ethical space for intellectual women. “For two centuries a feminist has been a woman who does not leave others to think for her, whether it be a question simply of thinking or, more particularly, thinking about the feminine condition or what it should be.”

Feminist theory has done a fairly good job recently of showing that the emperor of Western rationality isn't wearing any clothes; his phallus, unshielded by “objectivity,” is protruding. But have we done as good a job of evolving new ways to read and argue with one another? Not all interactions between feminism and philosophy have been productive, Le Doeuff finds.

It is hard to gain a clear idea of the right way to speak as a feminist woman philosopher, except on some specific questions. On the other hand unfortunate ways of mixing the salt of philosophy with feminism are only too obvious. For the most common philosophical practice comes down to establishing that one is wrong to speak, whatever one says.

(p. 17)

She attacks the woolly-headed alliance between “hyperphilosophism”—whereby feminists deconstruct our own position and terms to the point that we deprive our movement of a language and of the ground to stand on—and the dismissal of reason itself as male and therefore suspect. This alliance, Le Doeuff argues, has led to a fabulous silence, to wheel-spinning complaints about the death of philosophy, and to a disjunction between intellectual feminism and the feminism of the streets. Her chief objection to the bald statement that philosophical rationality is male is not that it is untrue—though she points out that it has not been proved, and asks what it can possibly mean—but rather that having said it one is finished, unable to say anything else, since no conceivable position could be created independent of existing ones.

I can do no more here than suggest the richness of Hipparchia's Choice, which has been unjustly neglected in the States (I came upon it by accident); it should be read by everyone, not just Beauvoir scholars. The books is infused with the same spirit of hope that Moi praised in Beauvoir. In evaluating Beauvoir's contribution to a feminist movement that had not yet begun when The Second Sex appeared, Le Doeuff writes:

A book which puts an end to loneliness, which teaches people to see, has greater and more immediate importance than all the manifestos in the world … A real book offers … the possibility of meeting a voice, an intelligence and a particular kind of generosity. Simone de Beauvoir taught young women that we were to trust ourselves and to send the ball back—we who were too often surrounded by cruel words and glances quick to censure.

(p. 55)

The Second Sex can still put an end to the loneliness of the intellectual woman. Hipparchia's Choice can do it, too.