DeBeauvoir: A Review and a Dream

While the critics lash away (and rightly so) at Simone de Beauvoir's new book, Force of Circumstance, let us instead consider her indisputably great accomplishments. The Second Sex, de Beauvoir's feminist manifesto (first published in 1949), will be remembered with love by millions of people when that longwinded autobiography is just a history graduate student's optional reading.

Certainly one of the nicest things about feminism, and especially Simone de Beauvoir's feminism, is that it is a marvelously amusing subject to discuss. Not only does everyone have an opinion; everyone is an expert. Let us tune in, then, on a non-directed panel discussion in which Simone de Beauvoir is key speaker:

Simone: All through history women have thought of themselves as Other, the second, the inferior, subordinate, dependent, less primary sex. We are moving only now to something different...

Yeats: Ridiculous. History is cyclical.

Samuel Johnson: Vile rubbish. Women in the eighteenth century had all the power. Madame de Stael practically made the French revolution.

Simone: Ah, Madame de Stael was wonderful. But all that salon-power was unofficial, illicit. Out in the real world, the public sphere, there were only men. Who remembers today that Madame de Stael coined the distinction between Classic and Romantic? In school you learn about Napoleon, Robespierre; who in the next generation will remember that Neitzsche's mistress prodded him into writing his greatest book? It's shameful.

Margaret Mead: But you want women to have power in just the same way as men. Don't you see women are different and their spheres of influence are different?

Erikson: Inner space. Outer space.

Simone: No, we do need certain things the same. Humanity has thus far defined itself as male and given all its highest treasures to the male world. It is self-evident that women must first have the same basic social, political, economic rights. Without them women cannot come into even minimal existence as human beings. Women in traditional societies, for instance, are practically animals. You must not rationalize all those horrible taboos, restrictions, even maltreatment. There are women who have never been allowed to step out of doors.

Dr. Graham Blaine: My dear Miss de Beauvoir, even in the modern world there are certain constants of human behavior. It is quite well known that women are by nature more jealous than men, more demanding of love and affection, more monogamous.

Simone: Monogamous! Get him. Marriage is a bourgeois institution, a way of fixing woman as man's property. Sartre and I have worked out one possible alternative: contingent loves with a certain fidelity. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."

Nelson Algren: Will she ever stop talking?

Jeanne Moreau: Yep. A bourgeois institution, and dull.

Arthur Miller: Yes. We'd be better off if we faced up to our own inconstancy.

Simone: I don't really mean to denigrate marriage altogether. For some people, sure. For others, with proper modifications, sure. But in the ideal society, associations between men and women will be freer than that.

Edmund Burke: Don't throw out the good in the old system in your zeal to reform!

Graham Blaine: But marriage is implied in our very anatomy, ordained by God, the foundation of society.

Simone: Nothing is ordained by anatomy. We are conscious beings: there is our greatness.

Phyllis McGinley: You dried-up old hag. What would you know about woman's natural instincts? You never even had a baby.

Gandhi: I understand perfectly, my dear. Transcendence of the flesh.

Simone: Well I don't mean to go that far, exactly. (Whispers from Sartre). Oh yes, wait a minute, transcendence is a good thing. Women must, after having gained this minimum of social and economic equality that I mentioned before, transcend the human condition. They must think of themselves as subject, instead of object; they must stop only embodying life for men and begin living life themselves. They must choose.

Doris Day: But a woman is a woman, you know.

Simone: Okay! But men don't shape their whole lives to fulfill their idea of "masculinity," do they? They are human first. In being male they in no way interfere with their being human: the two go along in the same direction: forward. But as soon as a woman starts trying to live up to her femininity first and foremost, it directly conflicts with her humanity. It pulls her down into sex, torpor, uncreativeness, dependency, subordination. All of these can have a part in her life, but not the basic part.

J. Doe: C'mon, don't you like having doors held for you? Are you so "independent?"

Freud: "Penis envy," I call it.

Cleopatra: Now, Simone, don't be so terribly explicit. Let them think we need them to hold doors for us, it makes them feel more manly. . . But then . . . You know . . .

Brigitte Bardot: (To nearby garage mechanic) Wanna come up to my apartment?

Mothers for a Moral America: Get that woman out of here!

Simone: Bardot is great, isn't she? Perfectly frank sexuality. A little heartless, maybe, a little unemotional, but no trickery, no "feminine wiles," no bangles and baubles. That's why she upsets European men so much: she doesn't keep in her place. They can't ravish her. She meets them on their own ground.

Norman Vincent Peale: But you are taking all the beauty out of the relations between the sexes. Without the male warrior and the female captive princess, what joy will there be in sex?

Claudel: You are sinning against the Virgin Mary, Violaine, Eve, the divine nature of woman, the timeless myths men have created.

Simone: And will create still! We will have new myths to fit new realities. Do you have so little faith in sex, in love, in men and women, to think that they rest on certain traditional safeguards, and will be destroyed without them? Have a little courage that the new patterns will be good, at least as good as ours. Giving and taking, conquering and yielding, will always have a meaning.

Helen Gurley Brown: Careful what you mess around with, Simone. Sex isn't only traditional, its basic. The most fundamental division of the human species. Man-and-woman. One and one makes two. Daddy and mommy. Sperm and egg. You can't get away from all that and with all that comes a lot of other things. Superior and inferior, for instance, stronger--

Socrates, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Rimbaud, Wilde, Gide: What was that, Miss Brown?

Brown: It's all in my new movie. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Susan Sontag: This girl is too much!

Susan B. Anthony: I don't think this discussion is being carried on in the proper spirit. The cause of women's rights is a true and noble one, and should not be confused with the degrading clamor one hears nowadays from certain brazen young women for sexual equality. Let us not be distracted from our work, let us on to full female employment, more girls to medical school--

Simone: You may have been right at one time, but what you are forgetting is the revolution in contraception. Sex is a part of modern woman's birthright, for it is no longer inseparable from procreation, Miss Anthony. It no longer carries with it for women the torturous uncertainties and back-breaking obligations of pregnancy.

Marx: A revolution in control of the means of production!

Simone: I love you. Karl.

Aldous Huxley: But what you are suggesting leads ultimately to testtube babies--the ultimate divorce of sex and procreation.

Chorus: Hell and damnation!

Simone: It could happen. But for the time being, we have to make life as easy as possible for mothers. Let them serve the species for a short term, but don't make that be their whole life.

Valentina Tereshkova: Serve state better than serve species.

Margaret Mead: But motherhood is the highest form of creation. Housework is artistry, cooking is magic. A woman must be a creative genius to fill her role. All of men's accomplishments are but mere compensations for not being able to give birth. Womb envy.

Shakespeare, Mozart, and Einstein: (soft chuckles then breaking into song): Three little frustrated mothers are we...

Master Finley: I often think that a woman's mind is rather like a matzah not kosher for passover...

Assorted Deans: We really can't accept them. They're too great a risk. Even the best of them drop out and get married.

Simone: Oh, everything you're saying is true! There have not been any really great women. Maybe one Joan of Arc here, one Emily Bronte there, but no female Tolstoys, Napoleons, Buddhas. But all of this is in our past, not our future; in our social, economic, political condition, not in our bodies; in our situation, not in our stars. In this we are like other depressed groups who have also not contributed their full share to the culture of mankind. The working classes, the Negroes, the Chinese peasants. But with the liberation and the equality of all of us, with the new fraternity and the new individuality, generations will grow up that will be great!

James Baldwin: And if you think the ones who first escape are a little shrill, a little one-sided, a little extreme in their reaction, just have confidence that the next generation will reap the harvest of our self-consciousness