Texts (1940s) by Simone de Beauvoir

Introduction

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher and writer, best known for her association with existentialism, along with Jean-Paul Sartre. Two years before she published her famous book of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, Beauvoir spent four months traveling throughout the United States. In her diary of those travels, America Day by Day, she demonstrates how her encounters with the politics of race and gender in the U.S. shaped her thinking about identity and existentialism.

 

A Very Short Glossary of Existentialism

Existentialism is a (primarily) 20th-century school of philosophy that considers the ethics of human life and action, in the absence of a higher power. Existentialism often gets a bad rap as being nihilistic, viewing life as meaningless--but, quite to the contrary, much of existentialist philosophy attributes great significance to human action, and strives to understand its meaning.

The following terms either appear in the "Introduction" to The Second Sex, or are implicit in its reasoning.

- Transcendence: the projection of the self into the world and the future--through projects--that opens up the possibility of freedom; being a subject, the One*

- Immanence: being stuck in an established position without the possibility of freedom; being an object, the Other*

* All humans are both transcendent and immanent, but social practices and codes serve to emphasize the transcendence (freedom) of some--making them subjects--while emphasizing the immanence (dependence) of others--making them objects.

- Bad faith: the evasion of freedom and the responsibility of selfhood, in favor of being an object (cf. Sartre)

- Mitsein: how the self is socially, publicly created rather than existing entirely by itself (cf. Heidegger)

 

Photo by Elliot Erwitt (1949) © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Questions to guide your reading...

America Day by Day

- What experiences does Beauvoir have in the U.S. that explicitly inform her thinking about race, here? What kinds of inequality strike her?

- How does she differentiate between the ideas of black America as a "caste" and as a "race"? Do you find the idea of "caste" helpful in thinking about the problematic position of mixed-race people in the U.S.?

- How does she explain the prevalence of the characterization of oppressed races as "lazy"?

- Why was the struggle for liberation more freeing for women than the liberation itself, according to Beauvoir?

- How does she see gender politics in the U.S. shaping sexual culture and mores?

"Introduction" to The Second Sex

- What are the differences between the terms feminine, femininity, female, and woman, as she uses them?

- If men and women both have bodies, why are women seen as tied to their bodies (limited by them) while men are not?

- What makes women politically different than other oppressed groups?

- How does Beauvoir draw connections between the position of women and the position of African-Americans?

- Why isn't she interested in "happiness," but rather in "freedom"?