Abstract: Published before Simone de Beauvoir's recent death, these two books express the general renewal of feminist interest in her work which has taken place over the past few years. After almost twenty years of feminist activism in the West, it is now as if the present generation of feminists have reached the stage where we feel confident enough in our own political tradition to be able, finally, to challenge the book hailed as the first, crucial document of the new women's movement: The Second Sex. First published in 1949, The Second Sex was right from the start curiously out of step with its own historical moment. Written at a time when there was no feminist movement to speak of in France, and when western capitalism was busy kicking women out of the factories in order to hand their jobs over to the boys back from the war, Beauvoir's demand for work and careers for women would seem to be a classic case of bad timing. In fact, The Second Sex was published just as the West was about to embark on that most anti-feminist of decades, the 1950s, the era of starched petticoats, ponytails and the big Hollywood bust. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Anita Ekberg, presumably symbolizing the Good Mother as well as the Warrior's Rest, were the female idols of the day. Ordinary women were not only expected to stay at home, have babies and live up to the role as supermum, but actively to enjoy the process. This, then, was a decade during which many middle-class women secretly turned to The Second Sex for support in their struggle for the right to want more in life than just home, babies and bust. For Beauvoir's uncompromising message to women was clear: motherhood and marriage alone can never make a woman happy. Women should expect to be able to exercise their imagination, their intellect, their administrative and organizational talents and not only their nurturing and caring capacities. In the early 1950s, however, her devastating critique of the oppression of women was too radical to be easily accepted by women thoroughly in the grips of patriarchal ideology. Betty Friedan, whose own powerful denunciation of the stifling effects of the female
Publication Year: 1943
Publication Date: 1943-01-01
Language: en
Type: book
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Cited By Count: 34
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