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Simone de Beauvoir: Mother of Modern Feminism?

By

Lutfi Hamadi

Research Paper

Submitted to

The Third Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship

The International Academic Forum

LibrAsia 2013

Osaka-Japan
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Simone de Beauvoir: Mother of Modern Feminism?

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role the French author and

philosopher Simone de Beauvoir has played in the development of women’s movement

in general and feminist intellectual achievements in particular. To this end, this paper

explores Beauvoir’s intellectual struggle to urge women to get rid of the manacles of the

patriarchal system, which has long imprisoned them within its norms and values,

denying them the freedom and autonomy they deserve as equal human beings. To show

Beauvoir’s significance in this respect, the paper traces her influence on feminist

academics and authors, with special emphasis on the notable feminist critic Kate Millet

for the simple reason that many critics consider the latter’s masterpiece Sexual Politics as

the foundation of what is called radical or second wave of feminism, minimizing or even

ignoring Beauvoir’s effect.

The diversity of motivation, method, and experience among feminist academics

have led Robyn Warhol and Diane herndl to entitle their remarkable book Feminisms,
using a plural form. Feminism is a discourse that involves various movements, theories,
and philosophies which are concerned with the issue of gender difference, the advocacy
of equality for women, and the campaign for women's rights and interests. In short,
feminism can be defined as the belief that women have equal political, social, sexual,
intellectual and economic rights as men do.
Most feminists and critics divide the movement historically into three waves. The
first wave, referring to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was originally
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interested in the promotion of equal contract and property rights for women. This wave
focused later on gaining political power, particularly the right of women's suffrage.
Almost after achieving these goals by the mid of the twentieth century, joining the
personal and the political, the second wave took a new track, emphasizing on women's
right to bodily integrity and autonomy, abortion and reproductive rights, including access
to contraception and quality parental care. So, feminists saw women's cultural and
political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women to understand aspects
of their personal lives as deeply politicized and as reflecting sexist power structures. In
brief, it can be said that the second wave of feminism began with a radical view towards
matters related to woman's position, while the first wave was mainly interested in civil
rights. In her "Radical Feminism and Literature: Rethinking Millet's Sexual Politics",
Cora Kaplan sees that patriarchy, according to radical feminists, was a "political
institution' rather than an economic or social relation and political institutions were in
their turn conceived as hierarchical power relations" (157). Kaplan adds that feminists in
the sixties needed an ideology that seemed to turn the world upside down, an ideology
that would represent "the alienating conditions in which people lived" (160), so most of
them chose Marxism. Beginning in the early 1990s, third-wave feminism emerged as a
response to what was considered failures of the second wave. Feminists of this wave see
that there has been over emphasis on the experiences of upper-middle-class white
women, so they disagree on the second wave's essentialist definitions of femininity. This
wave adopts an ideology which focuses more on the interpretation of gender and
sexuality, challenging the second wave on what is good or not for females, although they
themselves have disagreement on whether there are important differences between the
sexes, or whether the gender roles are social more than biological.

Throughout years of development, a variety of movements have emerged from

feminism, most important of which are socialist and Marxist feminisms, radical
feminism, liberal feminism, black feminism, psychoanalytical feminism, postcolonial
and third-world feminism, post-structural and post modern feminism. At another level,
feminist theory is an extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical fields,
encompassing work in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology,
economics, women's studies, literary criticism, art history, psychoanalysis, and
philosophy.
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Regardless of all differences and trends in feminism, it is almost certain that

feminist theories have become of the most important in the field of literary criticism. In
an article in Modern Age, Anne Babeau Gardiner writes, "according to one Modern
Language Association survey, feminist criticism in recent times has had 'more impact on
the teaching of literature' than any other school. It is claimed to be 'already an
indispensable part of the study of literature' in universities in Britain, Canada, and the
United States" (1).
It was during the second wave that feminists started to show interest in women's
literature, noticing how this literature was ignored and shunted off the mainstream
despite the fact that among women writers were some of the most important of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, feminist academics and thinkers
turned their interest not only towards analyzing male's literary works in innovative ways
but also shedding light on women authors and the literature they produced, re-evaluating
in the process the preconceptions inherent in a literary canon dominated by male beliefs
and male writers.

Although it was published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The

Second Sex, together with her other writings and activities, was a source of aspiration for
radical feminism, which started to crystallize in the 1960s. In fact, the remarkable role
Beauvoir has played in the history of women's emancipation is undeniable, despite the
neglect and harsh criticism she has undergone for a long time, and the attempts to restrict
discussion to her relationship with her close lifetime friend, Jean Paul Sartre. In this
respect, Karen Vintges tries in her Philosophy as Passion to prove “The independence of
[Beauvoir’s] thinking because her work is usually seen as a footnote or a an expansion of
Sartre’s original existentialist philosophy” (5).The Second Sex, which is a detailed
analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism, has
always been considered the bible of women's movements all over the world and has
placed Beauvoir, according to The Guardian, as the "mother of modern feminism and a
champion of sexual freedom who shocked Paris with her threesomes and passionate
bisexual affairs (1). In Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, Elizabeth Fallaize sees
that Beauvoir's name "has come to be synonymous with the feminist voice of the
twentieth century" and that "her life and writing have continued to inspire passionate
debate" (1). In his The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch
thinks that "While Beauvoir's argument that in patriarchal cultures man is the norm and
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woman the deviation has become a commonplace of feminist theory, in 1948 it was
revolutionary" (1404). In an article in The Independent, Gemma O'Doherty quotes a
newspaper headline in 1986 reading, "Women, you owe her everything!", asserting that
The Second Sex, "an encyclopedic analysis of women's oppression, is still considered the
greatest feminist tract of all time" (1). According the Guardian, The Second Sex
"catapulted the writer to worldwide fame and spurred a feminist revolt within the French
middle classes that spread to the United States and as far as Japan" (6)
It is worth mentioning that when Beauvoir wrote this book, she believed that the
overthrow of capitalism would bring about the liberation of women and make them
men's equals. However, she reconsidered this position years later, and, as Alison T.
Holland says in "Simone de Beauvoir and the Women's Movement" she "had come to
realize that socialism would not lead to the emancipation of women” and that "the
emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the
class struggle" (4).
The Second Sex was published in 1949 in two volumes and was so controversial
that the Vatican put it, together with her novel, The Mandarins, on the Index of
prohibited books. Adopting the existentialist precept that existence precedes essence,
Beauvoir contends that one is not born a woman, but becomes one. In the chapter entitled
"Facts and Myths", she analyzes women from a variety of perspectives, including the
biological, psychoanalytic, materialistic, historical, literary and anthropological. In the
second book, she examines women from their own lived experience, showing the
processes through which women internalize the ideologies of otherness that relegate
them to immanence and to the position of being man's other.
In the introduction, she tries to find a definition of woman according to the above
mentioned fields to conclude that none of them is sufficient. Some, she says, consider
woman as a womb, while they describe certain women as not women just because they
don't share "in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity" (marxists.org.
2), although biologically they are. Criticizing women who would like to behave like men
and deny their womanhood and feminine weakness, she criticizes the notion that
considers woman a mystery and asserts that this gives man a justification to evade facing
his ignorance of what a woman really is. Indirectly referring to the image given to
woman in literary works, she wonders whether woman is an angel, a demon, or an
actress. Her answer is that a human being is to be measured only by his acts, so a peasant
woman is described a good or a bad worker, and an actress has or does not have talent.
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Consequently, Beauvoir believes that the problem lies in the definition of a woman.
Defining oneself, she says, a woman must start that she is a woman, while a man never
needs to do that. The relation "of the two sexes", Beauvoir argues, "is not quite like that
of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is
indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas
woman represents only the negative" (3).
In a historical preview, Beauvoir shows how the ancients believed that the
absolute human type is the masculine, whereas woman was imprisoned in her body,
which has always been seen as a hindrance. Beauvoir supports her perspective referring
to ancient philosophers and thinkers. Aristotle, for example, considered that the "'female
is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities'", while St Thomas saw that woman is
an "imperfect man" (3). Plato, she says, thanked God for two things: being free and being
a man, not a woman. Beauvoir continues her reasoning to conclude with her brilliant,
innovative idea that woman has always been “the incidental, the inessential as opposed
to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the Other" (4).

It is worth remembering, as Lisa Appignanesi says in her "The Heart of Simon de

Beauvoir", that this term, "the other", coined by Beauvoir, and The Second Sex "served
as the source for those discourses of the "other" which shaped the identity and orientalist
politics of the 1980s and 1990s." In his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, Edward Said
clearly refers to Beauvoir's notion to describe how Western thinkers and writers have
always seen the East as the primitive, weak, and feminine "Other", juxtaposed with the
civilized, strong, and masculine West. Just as man, according to Beauvoir, needs the
inferior "Other" to establish his superiority, the West, according to Said, needs the
primitive "Other", the Orient, in juxtaposition with "Us", the civilized Occident.
Comparing women to other minorities like Negros, Jews, or even proletarians, she
argues that, unlike these groups, women's subjugation to men isn't a result of historical
event or a social change. It has always been there. Women's situation is much worse as
"legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the
subordinate position is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth" (qtd in Selden 535).
In a lengthened analysis of biological and scientific studies of human beings __
males and females __ and animals, Beauvoir asserts the negative and incorrect concepts
adopted by many philosophers that even by nature, a female is the other. According to
Hegel, for example, she says, "the two sexes were of necessity different, the one active
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and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one" (marxists.org
18).
Concerning psychoanalytic point of view, Beauvoir criticizes Freud's view, which
she believes is based upon a masculine model, arguing that if it is true that woman envies
man his penis and wishes to castrate him, she may do that "only if she feels her
femininity a mutilation; and then it is a symbol of all the privileges of manhood that she
wishes to appropriate the male organ" (57). Similarly, in another chapter, Beauvoir
explores the point of view of historical materialism, showing that the socialist theory
has given women a chance to get rid of the oppression they have long undergone.
Nevertheless, she believes that the theory has failed to explain several important
concepts, which underlie the theory such as the origin of the family or the institution of
private property, thus Beauvoir's call for an attempt that goes beyond the limits of
historical materialism, contending that such problems "concern the whole man and not
that abstraction: Homo Oeconomicus (51). At the same level, Beauvoir is not convinced
of Engels' attempt to reduce antagonism of the sexes to class struggle; nor does she
accept regarding woman simply as a worker, or even bringing the sexual instinct under a
code of regulations. Beauvoir concludes that "we reject for the same reasons both the
sexual monism of Freud and the economic monism of Engels" (54).
Beauvoir also explores the image given to women in literature __ a point that
becomes a basic theme in many works by eminent feminist authors and thinkers that
followed Beauvoir, though some of them completely ignore her, while others harshly
criticize her. This influence Beauvoir has imprinted in later feminists' works will be
lighted on later in this paper.
According to women’s image in literature, Beauvoir believes that "Literature
always fails in attempting to portray 'mysterious' women" (qtd in Leitch 1412). Under
the influence of the mysterious image fabricated about women in reality and in some
theories, novelists have usually tried to show women as "strange, enigmatic figures",
although at the end of a novel, it appears that they are rather "consistent and transparent
persons" (1412). Such images, or myths, are to Beauvoir the production of patriarchal
society for purposes of justification, no more or less. To support her point, she quotes the
French poet, Jules Laforgue, saying "Mirage! Mirage! We should kill them since we
cannot comprehend them; or better tranquilize them, … make them our genuinely equal
comrades, our intimate friends" (1413).
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For Beauvoir, to see woman equally as a human being doesn't necessarily

impoverish man's experience, make her less romantic, or destroy the dramatic
relationship between the sexes; "it is not to deny the significance authentically revealed
to man through feminine reality, it is not to do away with poetry, love, adventure,
happiness, dreaming. It is simply to ask that behavior, sentiment, passion be founded
upon the truth" (1413). In this respect, Beauvoir attacks those who think that modern,
liberated women are not women at all, because to be a true woman, she has to be the
“Other”, as patriarchy wants her to be. Even those men who claim to be open-minded
and liberal may accept woman to be equal, still they want her to stay inessential. In short,
Beauvoir criticizes those who can't "contemplate woman as at once a social personage
and carnal prey” and tells them that only when they "unreservedly accept the situation
into existence, only then will women be able to live in that situation without anguish
[and only then] Laforgue's prayer will be answered" (144).
In a clear call for action, she emphasizes that "society, being codified by man,
decrees that woman is inferior: she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying
the male's superiority" (marxists.org 57). According to psychoanalysts, Beauvoir argues,
woman tries to drag man into her prison by keeping his symbol of masculinity under her
control. Now woman endeavors to escape from this prison, to end her immanence, and to
emerge into the light of transcendence. It is now man's battle not to let her go and keep
her under his sovereignty. Yet, says Beauvoir, women sometimes use the sexual means
to keep man by their side, and, at the same time want respect and modern esteem. In
other words, they play both roles: the self and the "Other", which confuses man, who
also doesn't play the game fairly. The solution, she believes is in recognition of each
other as equal or the struggle will go on. In order to reach such recognition, Beauvoir
calls not only for equal training, employment, and payment, but more important for a
marriage based on a free agreement that the contracting parties could break at will, free
maternity, contraception, abortion, and paid pregnancy leaves.
Interestingly enough, Beauvoir committed to her views, so she never got married,
built her relation with Sartre on freedom to have other relations, declared she had
abortion to support women's rights, and actively participated in women's movements of
the 1960s and 70s .
However, though remarkable, groundbreaking, and unprecedented, The Second
Sex has caused ambivalent response in France. While some consider it the bible of
feminism, others attack it as masculinist, especially in relation to its controversial
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accounts of biological sex and motherhood. In an article in Simone de Beauvoir Studies

in 2008, Ursula Tidd believes that Beauvoir was cast off adrift as a "first wave" feminist
because the 1970s and 80s French feminism mainly depended on psychoanalysis and
semiotics, in addition to the negative effect her intellectual and personal partnership with
Sartre has brought about. Moreover, Tidd, as many other academics and critics, thinks
that bad English translation of Beauvoir's The Second Sex had also made her writings
and philosophical arguments concerning gender obscure to Anglophone readers.
However, Tidd assures that the "discovery in the early 1990s of Beauvoir's
phenomenological approach to understanding gender, combined with a recognition of her
original syntheses of existentialism, Hegelianism, Marxism and anthropology in Le
Deuxieme Sexe, has led to a major re-evaluation of her contribution to feminist thought"
(2). So, according to Tidd, this has led to acknowledgement of her importance and
influence. The psychoanalytic Writer Elisabeth Roudinesco, for example, asserts that
Beauvoir is "the first thinker in France to link explicitly the question of sexuality with
political emancipation" (qtd in Tidd 3). Other feminist philosophers and historians such
as Genevieve Fraisse, Margaret A. Simons, Christine Delphy, and many others, have
acknowledged the importance of formulation of woman as "Other", concepts of gender
as a "becoming", and the body as situation in The Second Sex. Through her two books
Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an intellectual Woman and Feminist Theory and
Simone de Beauvoir, the well-known feminist Toril Moi has highly contributed to this
recognition of Beauvoir's achievements and her influence on radical and on
contemporary feminism. Tidd quotes Moi arguing that "Beauvoir's concept of the body
as situation is a crucially original and often overlooked contribution to feminist theory"
(5). Moi also believes that Beauvoir's ideas enabled her "to avoid dividing up lived
experience into the traditional subject /object binary and hence to acknowledge the
possibility of subject __ subject relations within the self __ other dynamic" (5). On
celebrating Beauvoir's centenary in January 2008, Moi writes in The Guardian that
Beauvoir, "the greatest feminist thinker of her century, is a phenomenal achievement"
(1). Moi argues that although The Second Sex was a source of inspiration and insight for
countless women even before the women's movement, "major writers of the women's
movement – Betty Friedan, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer __ barely mention Beauvoir,
as if to deny the influence of a threatening mother figure" (1), while other dominant
"French theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray were openly hostile to
Beauvoir" (2). In this respect, Alison Holland quotes Moi writing, "By becoming
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intellectuals, such women have made themselves the true daughters of Beauvoir: no
wonder that many have felt the need to separate themselves from such a powerful mother
imago" (9). Briefly and directly Moi insists that "Everyone who cares about freedom and
justice for women should read The Second Sex" (2).
In an interview in Society with John Gerassi in 1976, Beauvoir mentions the
neglect she receives from some feminist writers, and she mentions Kate Millet as an
example. Without showing any blame or anger, She modestly says that such feminists
"may have become feminists for the reasons I explain in The Second Sex; but they
discovered those reasons in their life experiences, not in my book" (1). Surprisingly
enough, in Beauvoir and The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons quotes Millet saying
nineteen years later that “She ‘couldn’t have written Sexual Politics without [The Second
Sex]’” and that “’Now I realize that I was probably cheating all over the place’” (145).
Interestingly enough, Millet's most famous work, Sexual Politics, which brought
her to fame in 1970, clearly reflects the influence of Beauvoir's The Second Sex. This
book, which offers a comprehensive critique of patriarchy in Western society and
literature has, in fact, striking similarities to Beauvoir's book. Vincent Leitch sees that
the selection from The Second Sex which he includes in his anthology "heavily
influenced Kate Millet's 1970 feminist classic, Sexual Politics"(1405). He also believes
that Beauvoir's criticism of discourses about women such as psychoanalysis and biology
in her attempt to tear down patriarchal myths "empowered second-wave feminists to
construct new discourses about women to counter those from which women's voices had
largely been excluded" (1405).
A close look at Millet's Sexual Politics shows that even the divisions and subtitles
of the book, chapter 2, for example, are in more than one way similar to those in The
Second Sex, with some additions such as ideology, sociology, and class. In her attempt
to prove that the relation of the sexes is a political one, Millet takes races, castes, and
classes as examples of how relationships are power-structured and how one group is
controlled by another. Except perhaps for directly considering this “politics”, her
discourse is not much different from Beauvoir's comparison between the sexes and the
blacks or the Jews, where as Millet says, such relationship "involves the general control
of one collectivity, defined by birth, over another collectivity, also defined by birth" (2).
As Beauvoir traces patriarchal culture starting from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas,
Millet also sees that the relation of the sexes throughout history, and even "super natural
authority, the Deity, 'His' ministry, together with the ethics and values, the philosophy
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and out of our culture __ its very civilization…is of male manufacture (3). Again like
Beauvoir, Millet criticizes theories that consider biological differences and physical
strength naturally lead to man's supremacy, arguing that the point lies "in the acceptance
of a value system which is not biological" (5). She adds that “Endocrinology and
genetics afford no definite evidence of determining mental-emotional differences …
[which] even raises questions as to the validity and permanence of psycho-sexual
identity" (6). To Millet, this identity is, therefore, postnatal and learned; in other words,
it is the result of "socialistion" and "the conditioning of early childhood" (9). Isn't this the
core of The Second Sex that "one is not born a woman"? Similar to Beauvoir's view of
the role of religions in reinforcing patriarchy referring to St. Augustine’s writings, Jews'
prayers, and others, Millet discusses "the Catholic precept that 'father is head of the
family,' or Judaism's delegation of quasi-priestly authority to the male parent" (10).
In addition, Millet criticizes the courtly and romantic love which has granted
characteristics on women such as virtues and confined them within narrow spheres of
behavior, while Beauvoir contends that "The times that have most sincerely treasured
women are not the period of feudal chivalry nor yet the gallant nineteenth century" (qtd
in Leitch 1413). In another striking similarity to The Second Sex, we read in Sexual
Politics that "Patriarchal Legal system in depriving women of control over their bodies
drive them to illegal abortions" (19) __ a view that was considered scandalous when
Beauvoir wrote it twenty years earlier. It is needless to say that Millet's discussion of
what she calls "a fear of the 'otherness' of woman" (21) is clearly Beauvoir's innovative
term. Even Millet's discussion of Freud and his theory of "castration" echoes Beauvoir's
detailed analysis and criticism of psychoanalysts' views towards women. Millet's
discussion that the "uneasiness and disgust female genitals arouse in patriarchal societies
is attested through religious, cultural, and literary proscription" (22) is just a part of
Beauvoir's lengthy analysis of the difference between myth and reality concerning the
feminine body (qtd in Leitch 1408). Even the "Myths" of Pandora and Eve, which Millet
discusses in page 25, are referred to in The Second Sex such as in the introduction
(Marxists.org 8).

Another point that shows Beauvoir's influence on Millet's Sexual Politics is

political and economic position of women. In the introduction to The Second Sex,
Beauvoir writes that men still "hold the better jobs, get higher wages, despite a few rights
achieved by women, and have more opportunity for success that their new competitors.
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In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolise the
most important posts…they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children
tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past __ and in the past all
history has been made by men" (marxists.org 7). Millet, in her turn, shedding light on the
same point, cites examples and statistics to illustrate man's dominance" in such fields
(Millet, 16). In The Second Sex, also, Beauvoir explains the common use of the terms
"man" and "woman" where the former designates human beings in general, and the latter
represents only woman (qtd in Selden 533-534). Millet explains this idea of patriarchal
language considering that "despite all the customary pretence that' man' and 'humanity'
are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured than in practice,
general application favors the male far more often than the male as referent, or even sole
referent, for such designations" (Millet 29).
A final similarity worth mentioning between the two books is the image of
women in literary works. It is true that Beauvoir, unlike Millet, doesn't muse on this
issue with detailed examples, as Millet does, yet, she discusses it enough to make her
point. Criticizing the unrealistic image given to women in the "gallant" nineteenth
century, Beauvoir positively sees how the "heroines of Laclos, Stendhal, Hemingway are
without mystery" (qtd in Leitch 1413). She criticizes “the savage indictments hurled
against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the
tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well
founded, often it is gratuitous, but in truth it more or less successfully conceals a desire
for self-justification” (qtd in Selden 535-536). Echoing Virginia Woolf in A Room of
One's Own and "Professions for Women", while exploring women's literature in the
West, Beauvoir tries to unearth the reasons why no woman has written books such as
The Trial, Moby Dick, Ulysses, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a patriarchal society. She
reasons that "Women do not contest the human situation, because they have hardly
begun to assume it" (536). Few are women writers, she thinks, who "have traversed the
given in search of its secret dimension" (536) such as Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and
Katherine Mansfield, who have questioned death, life, or everyday contingence and
suffering. What limits women to be as great as the few rare male artists is not a special
destiny; it is rather lack of liberty. To Beauvoir, "Art, literature, philosophy are attempts
to found the world anew on a human liberty: that of the individual creator” (536), so she
wonders how someone who is deprived of liberty, restricted by education and custom,
and whose attempts to find one's place in this world are too "arduous" would be able to
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achieve such a task of recreating the world. She quotes Marie Bashkirtsev, who believes
that deprivation of simple freedom such as walking and sitting in gardens alone, without
a companion, "is enough to make your wings droop. It is one of the main reasons why
there are no women artists" (536-537). Beauvoir calls this "the free spirit" women is
denied, and that's why "in order to explain her limitations it is woman's situation that
must be invoked and not a mysterious essence" (537). To be free, to use Virginia
Woolf’s words, women need to kill their angels, or phantoms, so that they can write, not
depend on their charm for a living, and reject their sole role to soothe, flatter, and
comfort males. Beauvoir emphasizes her point by criticizing misogynists who assert that
woman could not create anything worthwhile because she is neurotic, reminding them
that "they are often the same men that pronounce genius a neurosis" (537).
Undoubtedly, Millet's discussion of this issue is so comprehensive while
criticizing Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence, trying to illustrate men
writer's use of sex to degrade and undermine women. In a rare reference to Beauvoir, and
while discussing what she calls Lawrence's insistence on "celebration of the penis" and
"on inherent female masochism", Millet says, "It is no wonder Simone de Beauvoir
shrewdly observed that Lawrence spent his life writing guidebooks for women" (qtd in
Eagleton 137). In addition, Woolf's and Beauvoir's references to the hurdles which
women writers had to face throughout history, as well as the negative image of women in
Western literature, have definitely inspired some eminent feminists to write notable
works, shedding light on significant women writers, who have long been ignored in a
patriarchal literary community. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British
Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, and Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar's The
Madwoman in the Attic are just two examples on many remarkable works that throw
new light on these issues.
The purpose of showing the influence of Beauvoir on Millet's Sexual Politics is
not to underestimate Millet’s remarkable work, or to cast doubts on her artistic talent and
potential, as the role she has played in the development of the feminist movement and
feminist literary theory is undeniable. What this comparison is trying to do is to show
that Beauvoir's innovative ideas and her monumental analysis of women's conditions,
aggressively though criticized by some feminists and other critics, have definitely, as
Romain Leick says in "A fresh Look at Simone de Beauvoir”, “established the
theoretical underpinning of modern feminism" (1). If this and many other similar
testimonies mean something, it is that Beauvoir's influence is not limited to Kate Millet,
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but it extends to other feminists of various trends and interests. Despite all criticisms,
Vincent Leitch asserts that "The Second Sex, revolutionary in its own time, offers a
powerful analysis of the status of women and remains a foundational text for feminist
theory" (1405).
As a matter of fact, Beauvoir’s influence is obvious in many other feminists'
works even though this influence is sometimes seen negatively. In her article “Feminist
Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to the Celebration of Decadence” in First
Journal Principles, Anne Gardiner explores Judith Bennet's views of patriarchy,
concluding that these views go "back to Simone de Beauvoir, who, in The Second Sex,
presented women's nature as something constructed by patriarchy" (2). In addition, Ruth
Robbins' reasons that "among the oppressions women have endured…[are] physiological
oppressions which attack women by virtue of their bodies" (Gardiner 2), which
obviously resonates The Second Sex. Gardiner pursues her comprehensive analysis,
showing the differences between two trends of feminist criticism as whether to adjust
tothe great canon of Western literature by adding to it remarkable women's works, or to
eliminate this canon altogether. While analyzing these differences and feminists’
contributions to the debate, Gardiner, a conservative, admits not understanding at first
"Why young feminist scholars would even consider giving papers on de Sade, but I soon
learned that they were in lockstep behind Simone de Beauvoir, whose essay "Faut-il
Bruler Sade ?' had rehabilitated the pornographer as a serious writer" (6). Gardiner even
goes further to assert that "Following the lead of de Beauvoir, [Julia] Kristeva incredibly
ranked de Sade as on a par with Shakespeare and Racine" (6). Criticizing what she calls
“contemporary celebration of decadence” in women's studies and the "negative" effect of
Lacan's theories, Gardiner sums up that "There is a direct line connecting Simone de
Beauvoir __ who first took up the perversions of de Sade as a subject for feminist literary
criticism __ with Ruth Robbins, Judith Bennett, Rita Felski, Leila Rupp, and all the other
feminist ideologues who use their learning, university positions, and moral values" (8).
In her turn, in an article in Time, entitled "The Real Truth of the Female Body",
Barbara Ehrenreich criticizes what she calls celebrating "the menopause with a
generation of 'grrrls' (1). However, unlike Gardiner, Ehrenreich doesn't ignore or deny
the achievements the feminist movement has been able to attain, and even criticizes the
persisting view of seeing the 'female' as cannotating "the oozing, bleeding, swelling, hot-
flashing, swamp-creature side of the species, its tiny brain marinating in the primal
hormonal broth", which, according to her reflects the historical view towards women
 Hamadi 15

from Aristotle to Freud. There is no need to prove that Ehrenreich's words are almost
Beauvoir's.
No matter how positively or negatively Beauvoir's role in feminist movement and
feminist literary criticism is seen, hardly is there a serious academic study on feminism
without acknowledging Beauvoir's essential role as a turning point not only in academic
and literary studies but in the position of women as well. After Beauvoir, it would not be
that easy to ignore women's writings again and shunt them off the mainstream. Nor
would Shakespeare's sister of Virginia Woolf go mad or kill herself without being able
to write any word as she would have done in a misogynistic patriarchal world of the past.
 Hamadi 16

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