tribute to
the woman who, with the publication of her book The Second Sex in 1949, laid the foundation for the modern
women's liberation movement. THE MAIN characters in Simone De Beauvoir's first novel, L'Invitec, written in 1943, are women. Six years later, in 1949, she published The Sccond Sex, the book in which she challenged the whole female condition. So it is as a fighter for women's rights and a feminist that she will be chiefly remembered.
Her death on 14 April at the age of 78 brought tributes from feminists all over the world and 5,000 people, mainly women, turned out to her funeral procession in Paris to pay their respects.
Across the political spectrum everyone was claiming that her contribution through The Second Ser was more important and more lasting than all the philosophical works of her life-long companion, Jean Paul Sartre. When the book was published, though, it provoked a great deal of hostility from some quarters. And well it might, tor with tremendous vision De Beauvoir had set out,
'De Beauvoir embodied
the fearlessness by which
the women's movement is
characterised' almost twenty years in advance, the main ideas upon which the women's liberation movement was to stand.
The principal arguments in the book were accepted today). She explained that the majority of women have always been ex cluded from running the world and have been denied an autonomous existence. Cultural myths have been perpetuated to back this up and regenerate the subjcction of women through generations. The family and marnage are oppressive institutions. Taboos and absence of sexual freedom are also the results of this. The position of women is not given but comes from society itself; in the amous phrase from the book, We are not INTERNATONAl. No. 4. May/une 1986)
on the notion that since the idea of l'eternal feminine' is nothing but a trap, nothing is pre-determined and everything is possible.
When she wrote the book, De Beauvoir claimed that it was not meant to be an agitational or propaganda work and contessed herself "perplexed' at the hostile response even from some of her closest collaborators.
When the women's movement did Gnally emerge De Beauvoir embraced it with open arms torit gave true meaning to what shehad written. She praised that movement because "it wanted to act without waiting'. And this is the key to De Beauvoir's contribution. From her books there is a sense of this being theage of woman. Once you reject the notion of womanhood as given and static, then everything and anything does become possible and women can act. Of course existentialist themes are brought in but these do not contradict a Marxist and feminist strategy in this context. Women are objects, according subject and object, they must transcend their position through action.
De Beauvoir's female characters are not victims, they act. Sometimes they act blindly and mistakenly and in great solitude and isolation but they change and develop. The Woman Destroyed, published in 1968, shows most clearly the search for tominism in day-to-day life. In an interview with Francis Jeanson published by Gallimard in
In this regard Do Beauvoir embodied the
fearlessness be which the women's move-
ment is characterised. No subjcct was taboo
for her, including her long standing rela-
tionship with Sartre. The Letters to Castor
published after his death reveal, of course,
that the couple's theory of contingent and
main relationships favoured his needs more
than hers and muse have caused her some
pain. But whatever the successes or failures
De Beauvoir continually strived in public
and in her private life to reject the institu-
dions of marriage, the family and given
Womanhood.
From 1968 onwards political activity
became more and more important tor De
Beauvoir. With a small group of women she
publically declared that she had had an
abortion when it was illegal in France.
During the Algerian war she spoke up not one against the war but in support of the
'When the women's movement emerged De Beauvoir embraced it with open arms' NI.tand, dong with many others some of "hom lose their jobs and livelihoods, was banned from the media as a result. In 1974. she founded the Mouvement du Droit des Pommes and wasclosely involved in drawing up legislation with the ministry for women's rights, established by the Socialist Party in government. (The new government of the right have abolished this ministry and in stead set up a ministry for the rights of man!)
Finally, who Simone De Beauvoir offers us as feminists and as socialists is hope. Ata time when the forces of reaction seem to be on the offensive and contemporarics of De Beauvoir have renounced their left-wing or feminist past (as is the case with Betty Friedan, author of another seminal work of the women's movement, The Feminine Mystique), she remained a feminist and a socialist to the end. This is testimony itself to the fact that the women's movement will carry on and will not die.
Appreciations of De Beauvoir came from across the political spectrum in France including from Prime Minister jacques Chirac, who claimed that her death marked theend of an era. Asteminists we know how wrong he is. What De Beauvoir stood for
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