Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Writings ed. by Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann (review)

This volume, the sixth in the excellent Simone de Beauvoir series, brings together a diverse range of short texts by Beauvoir either originally published in English, or translated here for an anglophone readership. Starting with articles published during her 1947 lecture tour of the United States, the book ends with one of her very last publications, the preface to Milhoud —a 1986 autobiographical same-sex love story by an anonymous author who shortly after publication died of the then scarcely mentioned AIDS. Beauvoir’s sense of her responsibility as a public intellectual continued until her death. Each text or set of texts is introduced and contextualized by one of a team of eminent Beauvoir scholars, and some texts (including the famous 1972 interview with Alice Schwartzer) are retranslated for this edition to correct inaccuracies and misinterpretations. The compilation of this mix of little-known and more familiar ‘feminist writings’ is not only useful, it also inflects our perception of Beauvoir’s feminism. Three points emerge clearly — not new observations, but persuasively confirmed here. One is Beauvoir’s consistent interest in addressing a broad (particularly female) public rather than those already self-identified as feminist: the American articles composed as she researched and wrote Le Deuxième Sexe, and in some cases neatly summarizing some of its central arguments, appear in the fashion magazines Flair or Vogue, while the Nouvel Observateur hosted many of her texts on sexual inequality, contraception, and love in the 1950s and 1960s, and on the new feminism of the early 1970s. Her famous (and still compelling) analysis of Bardot was published in Esquire magazine. Secondly, this collection comprehensively refutes any notion that Beauvoir ‘converted’ to full-blown feminism under the influence of the Mouvement de libération des femmes: her pre-1968 texts demonstrate her anticipation of key second-wave themes including the politics of reproduction, sexuality, and the political nature of personal experience (‘victims of a carefully orchestrated mystification’, she wrote in 1961, ‘[women] think they are dealing not with a system but with people; [ . . . ] parents, a certain boss, their husbands, themselves’, p. 92). Thirdly, Beauvoir’s enabling, even-handed support for different, sometimes conflicting groups within the emerging feminist movement becomes very apparent, as she works with Gisèle Halimi on the Bobigny trial, presides over the Ligue des droits des femmes, opens the pages of Les Temps modernes to an aesthetically radical form of feminist writing very different from her own rigorously rational prose, and in the early 1980s supports Yvette Roudy’s (failed) anti-sexist bill. Her introduction of the column on ‘le sexisme ordinaire’ in Les Temps modernes (the preface to which is translated here) dates from 1973, almost forty years before Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism website appeared in the UK. Beauvoir’s contribution to feminism is vast, varied, and immensely productive; this volume represents another vital step in the production of an exhaustive edition of her work.