Simone de Beauvoir Understood the Link Between Gender and Class Oppression
The Second Sex is rightly celebrated as a classic work of feminist theory. But it’s often forgotten that Simone de Beauvoir saw it as a socialist text carefully anatomizing the relationship between gender and class oppression.
Simone de Beauvoir explicitly warned us against the tendency to emphasize identity-based differences over and against the inequality generated by capitalism. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
When Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, Le Nouvel Observateur’s cover carried the headline “Women, You Owe Her Everything!” This was a male editor’s audacious revision of philosopher Élisabeth Badinter’s article “Women, You Owe Her So Much!”
It is almost impossible to imagine men ever being told that they owe one particular person everything. The cult of Simone de Beauvoir and the accreted legends surrounding her two-part 1949 essay The Second Sex have developed in the context of a profoundly sexist world.
Contrary Readings
Beauvoir always seems to be a few things all at once. She is an icon of sexual independence but also Jean-Paul Sartre’s faithful, betrayed, subservient girlfriend; a pioneering feminist but also an honorary male and enduring misogynist; a card-carrying leftist but also a lipstick-clad bourgeoise; a committed anti-colonialist and supporter of Algerian independence but also the embodiment of white Parisian chic, a cultural export. And on it goes.
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.