Simone de Beauvoir Abroad: Historicizing Maoism and the Women’s Liberation Movement

A critical analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Long March, this article argues that de Beauvoir’s experience of Maoism, social realist literature, and socialist feminism influenced her political theory and practice during the cold war. What differentiated de Beauvoir among French Maoists in the 1960s and 1970s was her attention to Chinese socialist feminists and the ways in which their activism advocated for gender and class equality, putting pressure on cultural articulations of women’s productive and nonproductive labor. In turn, I argue that de Beauvoir’s focus on Chinese socialist feminism informed her relationship with the women’s liberation movement, both in the United States and in France.