Simone de Beauvoir ‘ Le Deuxième Sexe’, le livre fondateur du féminisme moderne en situation

Ouvrage dirigé par Ingrid Galster. Paris, Champion, 2004. 519 pp. Pb €20.00. This indispensable volume emerges from one of several conferences marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication in 1949 of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe. Ingrid Galster's project was ambitiously commensurate with the Beauvoirian epic that it seeks to situate and elucidate: specialists working in the relevant fields covered by Le Deuxième Sexe were invited to provide a critical commentary on each of its chapters by reconstructing the question(s) to which Beauvoir had sought to respond and analysing the research corpora available to her. The unavailability of some of the original speakers at the conference held in Eichstätt in November 1999 has necessitated some less specialized substitutions in the final volume; nevertheless it constitutes a major resource on the genesis, construction and context of Beauvoir's groundbreaking study, benefiting from consultation of its partial manuscript currently available at the BNF. Not all contributors approach the task in the same way, yet this is mostly beneficial to the volume as it becomes greater than the sum of its parts, succeeding in situating Le Deuxième Sexe in its ideological moment and indicating its continuing relevance to contemporary debates on sex and gender. Written ‘au fil de la plume’ in just over a year and dispatched to a succession of typists (whose possibly first encounter with feminism was to decipher Beauvoir's notoriously difficult handwriting), Le Deuxième Sexe emerges here as ‘une révélation, pas une source’ (Kate Millett). As Michèle Le Dœuff notes, Le Deuxième Sexe emerged in part from the political impact of French women gaining the right to vote in 1944 and provided an analysis of women's situation in an increasingly internationalist post war context. Despite the inevitable lacunae of Beauvoir's research, conducted ‘à grande vitesse’ with time off for the sociological and personal excursion that became L'Amérique au jour le jour, contributors demonstrate here the originality of Le Deuxième Sexe — despite its denunciation on publication by a pro-natalist, ‘machiste’ PCF or a Catholic Church unable to countenance women assuming their political and sexual freedom. For example, Gothlin highlights Beauvoir's controversial readings of Engels and the young Marx's theory of alienation in the chapter on ‘matérialisme historique’; elsewhere in a set of largely excellent chapters on the ‘Mythes’ section, Beauvoir emerges as an astute cryptologist of the patriarchal literary imaginary as it shapes the ‘vécu’ of gender relations. Here, Suleiman notes, of Beauvoir's reading of Breton, that she aligns herself with the post-war challenge to the dominance of metaphor in poetic language, advocating instead a poetics of the concrete that might represent woman's reality. Analyses of the most controversial chapters of Le Deuxième Sexe — on biology and sexuality — provide fresh approaches, nevertheless acknowledging, in Lavers' words, that sexuality was ‘une véritable aporie’ for Beauvoir both politically and personally, causing her to generate her own myths in turn, like any ‘privilégiée’. Nevertheless, Badinter, among others, recognizes her courage in tackling the question of woman's oppression in patriarchal society at its roots and, as Schor argues, Beauvoir's acute yet ambiguous challenge to Republican universalism remains ‘à l'ordre du jour’

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