Beauvoir's Time/Our Time: The Renaissance in Simone De Beauvoir Studies

Abstract

SINCE THE EARLY SECOND WAVE, Simone de Beauvoir and her work have provided something of a Rorschach test for feminist theory, with dif ferent generations and genres of feminism each projecting their own pre occupations upon her. First hailed as Mother of Us All and as the author of the so-called Bible of Second Wave feminism, she was mainly treated in the 1970s as an icon or held up as an ideal. But although in the 1970s many feminists found personal inspiration in The Second Sex as well as in Beau voir's life, relatively few engaged seriously with the book as a major theo retical work. Mary Dietz's later observation that like the Bible, The Second Sex seems to have been much worshiped, often quoted, and little read clearly had some truth to it.1 For many it seems to have been Beauvoir's life that was the more important. This was a life that (at least as Beauvoir presented it in her autobiographical volumes) appeared as an ideal for the would-be liberated woman. Her free union with Jean Paul Sartre; her re fusal of housework, marriage, and motherhood; and her intellectual seri ousness and creativity-all were worthy of emulation. However, in 1979, a scholarly conference was held in New York to com memorate the thirtieth anniversary of the original French publication of The Second Sex in 1949; and twenty-five years ago, in the summer of 1980, the