The Intimate Life of the Nation

This chapter reconstructs how the public was introduced to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's most famous work, and considers its critical reception. It mentions reviewers and critics who saw themselves as custodians of literary standards and public taste, and held very firm and contrasting views on the broader reading public. It elaborates how the reviewers and critics' views provide new ways to understand Beauvoir's arguments and the expectations that took shape around her. The chapter describes The Second Sex as an eight-hundred-page manuscript that challenges philosophical argument, literary criticism, history, and social science, as well as provide a detailed description of sexual and bodily experience. It points out how The Second Sex was considered ahead-of-its time with its narrative of the philosophical reconsideration of the female condition or situation.

Second Takes on The Second Sex

This chapter recounts Simone de Beauvoir's interview with the magazine France Observateur regarding the future of women and feminism in France in 1960. It talks about Marie Craipeau, Simone de Beauvoir's interviewer, who plainly considered the future of women dim and expressed how women are disappointingly traditional, slow to “adapt” to a rapidly changing world, and ill-at-ease with modernity. It also explains how women were easily dissuaded from taking on ambitious projects and readily diverted from assuming self-sovereignty or facing their freedom. The chapter describes Beauvoir's vexed relationship with the members of her public, which was a recurring theme of her career as a writer, an engaged intellectual, and a feminist. It emphasizes how the 1960 France Observateur interview reiterated Beauvoir's earlier diagnosis in The Second Sex of the contradictions of femininity and political repercussions.

Couple Troubles

This chapter talks about an Austrian woman who had been reading Das andere Geschlecht or “The Other Sex,” and sent Simone de Beauvoir her reflections on the sections concerning marriage. It describes the Austrian reader as passionate, appreciative, not a philosopher, and casts Beauvoir's argument in terms very much her own. It also references other letters to Beauvoir concerning marriage that loomed over the lives of the letter writers as much as the Algerian War loomed over the Republic. The chapter recounts how marriage was an almost inescapable lifelong drama with many ramifications as broad social and cultural changes in the 1950s and 1960s helped create a wave of unhappiness about marriage. THe chapter mentions unmarried people who were implicated in marriage's galling legal and economic dependencies.

Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Midcentury Sex

This chapter mentions Alfred C. Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the most prominent research on sexuality that François Mauriac associated with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It analyses Kinsey and his team of American scientists' investigation of sexual acts, practices, inclinations, and tastes they had discovered among their fellow citizens. It also talks about critics who were deeply invested in the role of literature, and the responsibility of the writer who warned that The Second Sex and the Kinsey report debased the public. The chapter likens The Second Sex and the Kinsey report to the “erotic jungle” of American popular culture and fashion magazines, and to a world of commerce, sensationalism, and prurience. It explores the scholarly study of sexuality and the public's fixation on the subject that situates The Second Sex in the larger history of contemporary culture.

Shame as Political Feeling

This chapter focuses on Djamila Boupacha, which was a book about political intervention from a public intellectual that reported on Djamila Boupacha's trial and gathered testimony on other cases of torture. It cites sections of Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance from 1963 that dealt with the Algerian War and excavates several layers of memory, feeling, and experience. The chapter explains how The Force of Circumstance addressed both Beauvoir's intimate public and her fellow intellectuals. It refers to Beauvoir's memoir, The Prime of Life, which had come out in the fall of 1960, right after the Boupacha scandal, and emphasizes how Beauvoir wrote The Force of Circumstance in deliberate philosophical detail, expressing her antiwar politics and political feelings.

Readers and Writers

This chapter elaborates how Simone de Beauvoir burst into the world of literary stardom in the 1950s. It begins with Mandarins from 1954, Beauvoir's novel about postwar French intellectuals' political, literary, and ethical debates, and their love lives, which won many readers and gained a blizzard of publicity. It also cites the novels, plays, and philosophical essays on justice, ethics, and morality that Beauvoir has written as an accomplished writer. The chapter talks about Beauvoir's publication of her reflections on her travels through the United States, America Day by Day, which was dedicated to Richard and Ellen Wright. It describes the outcome of Beauvoir's hard work as an epic of postwar existentialism and its attendant anguish, a readable and serious fare that fueled the mid-twentieth-century expansion of book publishing.

Sexual Politics and Feminism

This chapter covers letters to Simone de Beauvoir simmering with grievances about stifling marriages, constrained choices, the grind and boredom of housework, the absence of contraception, serial pregnancies, criminalized abortion, and the affective burdens of family throughout the 1960s. It recounts the French legislature that legalized contraception, women that swelled the ranks of labor unions, and books on the female condition that filled bookstores in 1967. It also mentions the explosion of student radicalism and enormous general as the most distinctive features of France in May 1968. The chapter discusses that feminism transformed and renamed women's liberation, which emerged with immense force in the aftermath of this movement. It highlights the movement of the French press called the Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (MLF) which emerged in 1970.

The Algerian War and the Scandal of Torture

This chapter explains how Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs were thoroughly intertwined with the Algerian War and with some of the most dramatic years of the French Republic. It looks at Beauvoir's writing from 1954 to 1962, which brought a tidal wave of correspondence and show how her relationship with her readers deepened and became more difficult. The chapter highlights readers who shared Beauvoir's political feelings on the French state's war against Algerian nationalism, the revelations of torture in that war, and historical memories of Nazi imperialism and brutality during World War II. It mentions Djamila Boupacha, the young Algerian militant that was arrested, tortured, and raped by the French military in 1960, who sent a letter to Beauvoir. The chapter also covers letters that came from soldiers who were either conscience-stricken or fiercely unapologetic about the war, and from social workers and schoolteachers who felt implicated in the French state's actions.

Conclusion

In the spring of 1968, Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, American feminists representing the New York Radical Women (1967) came to Paris bearing just published copies of their new newspaper Notes from the First Year. Firestone and Koedt wanted to deliver a copy to Beauvoir in person. They went away disappointed. As Firestone wrote her sister from Paris: “Anne and I went to see S de B. on Sat … She wasn’t home & a horrible woman concierge barked at us that we need an appointment date.”...

Introduction

This chapter discusses the search for personal and collective self-knowledge, the multiplying cultural incitements to discourse about the self and sexuality, and the disconcerting transformation of gender roles, and expectations in postwar France and beyond. It talks about the readers' letters to Simone de Beauvoir, asking advice on marriage, love, and birth control. It also uses the letters to examine the relationships that bind readers to authors and vice versa. The chapter explains how the letters disclose an exceptionally interesting author–reader intimacy, one that was consciously nurtured by Beauvoir and her readers. It explores the psychological processes of projection, recognition and misrecognition that invent an interlocutor and style oneself as a confidant that spin out inner monologues.