New Left Review I/156, March-April 1986

Kate Soper

The Qualities of Simone de Beauvoir

review

‘For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it.’ Often quoted as they are, these opening sentences of The Second Sex can still amaze. Yet on reflection one can come to agree with their author in some sense, or at least to see what she meant. For the subterranean forces that were to erupt as modern feminism were still so far buried in 1949 that their rumblings were scarcely audible even to the more sensitive ear; and what Simone de Beauvoir then meant by ‘feminism’ was a surface discourse about a segment of reality supposedly so culturally marginal that ‘to spill more ink on it’ might well have seemed disproportionate—the mark of some intellectual obsession or lack of balance.

’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’