Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (review)

In recent years, scholars have begun to take Simone de Beauvoir seriously as a philosopher, rather than only as a novelist and essayist, and Margaret Simons has been at the forefront of that reassessment of her work. This book collects nine essays by Simons and three interviews with Beauvoir, all published between 1979-1998. She first met Beauvoir when working on her doctoral dissertation in Paris, and a moving memorial to Beauvoir opens the book. The book provides an opportunity to grasp the full extent of Simons's insight into Beauvoir's philosophy and contains exciting new work on Beauvoir's 1927 diaries. Her most controversial claim may well be that in Beauvoir can be found a women's moral voice affirming connection. The book is suitable for both Beauvoir scholars and interested students and has a clear, readable writing style. The essays are arranged in chronological order, but certain themes can be usefully traced: the reception of Beauvoir as a philosopher; Beauvoir's views about race, motherhood, and homosexuality; and her influence on other feminists.

It seems a good idea to begin with Simons's careful analysis of the problems with the English translation of The Second Sex. These problems have affected both particular interpretations of Beauvoir's work and the reception of her as a thinker. (She herself was unaware for a long time of the extent of the deletions and distortions.) Simons alerts readers to the fact that The Second Sex is not just translated into English but quite massively edited. These excisions are without notations, and more than ten percent of the work is missing (Simons 1999, 61). Beauvoir's translator, H. M. Parshley, deleted a great deal of women's history, for example, descriptions of the lives of medieval women, which led to an omission of Beauvoir's distinction between freedom and license. This, in Simons's view, is "a serious distortion obscuring Beauvoir's point that never in history have women been allowed the combination of independence and concrete opportunity that defines real freedom" (1999, 63).

Simons shows us that, even more seriously, Parshley renders Beauvoir's philosophical terminology inaccurately and misleadingly, thereby obscuring her ideas and her connections to philosophical tradition. For example, her use of the term "la réalité humaine" is rendered as "the real nature of man," and the notions of in-itself, for-itself, and for-others are hopelessly confused. The most serious distortion, in my view, is Parshley's odd translation of the title of volume two, "L'Expérience vécue" (most accurately: lived experience) as "Woman's Life Today." Simons notes that this has probably contributed to the failure of American phenomenologists to accept Beauvoir's work as phenomenology. I think it can also help account for many English-speaking feminists reading Beauvoir as speaking of woman's nature throughout The Second Sex. It almost seems as if sexism operates in Parshley's editing, as he deleted accounts of women's oppression, but not of men's advantages or their achievements. Yet surprisingly Simons concludes that there is no sexist plot; Parshley was simply a zoologist who thought an understanding of existentialism was unnecessary and did not foresee the interest in Beauvoir that would develop through women's studies and feminist philosophy.

This brings us to the question of whether Beauvoir ought to be regarded as a philosopher, a topic that Simons raises with Beauvoir in the interviews. Beauvoir always claimed that Sartre was the philosopher (Simons 1999, 9), and she was the writer of the two. Such a rigid distinction between philosophy and literature is surprising in someone whose novels are clearly philosophical novels. Beauvoir does accept that she influenced Sartre in literature, and if she and Sartre thought literature was more important than philosophy, then it is not particularly self-deprecating. She notes that Sartre was more attached to his literary...