Simone de Beauvoir: From the Second World War to The Second Sex

Sim one de Beauvoir: From the Second W orld W ar to The Second Sex Elizabeth A . H oulding I N H ER M EM OIRS, Simone de Beauvoir referred to the Second W orld W ar as a pivotal m om ent in her life, a tim e when her ways of interacting with the world underwent perm anent transform ations. Until 1939, Beauvoir had refused to believe that the traum a of war could come to interrupt the life she had so carefully constructed: “ Je refusai furieusem ent d ’y croire; une catastrophe aussi imbécile ne pouvait pas fondre sur m oi.” 1It was through the war that Beauvoir came to perceive her “ historicity,” that is, the force of history in the shaping o f individual lives.2 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 q u ’il ait fallu la guerre pour m ’apprendre que je vivais dans le m onde, pas en dehors.” 3 The O ccupation and the Second W orld W ar precipitated a generation of French intellectuals tow ard political engagem ent. L e D e u x iè m e s e x e was published only four years after the war in 1949. Beauvoir undertook her study of the feminine ideal in the wake of the O ccupation. In this paper, I will consider what led Beauvoir to incorporate questions of gender within the post-war project o f engagement in the world. Com m enting on the reception o f L e D e u x iè m e se xe, Toril Moi has rem arked upon what she term s the “ political isolation” o f the book in 1949, finding it curiously o ut o f step w ith its ow n historical m om ent, w ritten as it was at a tim e w hen W est­ ern capitalism was kicking w om en o u t o f the factories in order to h and their jo b s over to the boys back from the w ar, and published ju st as the W est was a b o u t to em bark on th at m ost antifem inist o f decades, the 1950s.4 W ithin this global representation o f W estern capitalism , M oi’s transposi­ tion o f Rosie the Riveter from the United States to France is misleading, since the particular conditions o f occupied France had not transform ed the traditionally agrarian French economy into the boom ing Am erican model of industrialized m ilitary production.5 In addition, French women had not played as prom inent a role in the Vo l . X X X III, N o . 1 39 L ’ E s p r i t C r é a t e u r w artim e workplace as their Am erican counterparts.6 In direct contrast to the Am erican m odel, women in France were actively recruited as workers after the war in order to shore up the depleted national w orkforce and the desperate national econom y.7 Am ong the political m easures taken tow ard national recovery by liberated France, women “ were finally granted the right to vote and to run for public office, and the C onstitu­ tion o f the Fourth Republic enshrined the right to work in its articles.” 8 The Liberation was seen as “ the m om ent to bring women into full par­ ticipation in the polity and equality o f the w orkplace” (Jenson 272). It m ust be said, though, that postw ar social program s were implemented under the assum ption that wom en’s true place was within the family, where wives rem ained subordinate to their husbands, the legal c h e fs d e fa m ille (Jenson 273). M oi’s second displacem ent, that in which she projects L e D e u x iè m e se x e forw ard into the 1950s...