Beauvoir and Belle by Kathryn Sophia Belle;

Author:Kathryn Sophia Belle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here Beauvoir is not only comparing the ways in which the ambitions of American Black (men) and (white) women are discouraged and/or denied altogether, she is also calling attention to the external and internal struggles within oppressed groups, specifically (white) women, Black American (men), and also Black African (men) who come to France. This is one of the few instances when Beauvoir’s focus on the race/gender analogy is not primarily on Black (men) in America, insofar as she also names Black (men) from Africa coming to France. Still, she persists in contrasting the experiences of (white) women with Black (men) without mention of Black women. Before examining critiques of this analogical approach to racial and gender oppression, let us take up a few more considerations of the influences between Wright and Beauvoir, and then between G. Myrdal and Beauvoir.

In “Owned Suffering: Thinking the Feminist Political Imagination with Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright” (2000), Vikki Bell argues, “De Beauvoir’s use of Wright is heuristic not sociological, rhetorical not empirical, and it is in this sense that the argument functions to strengthen de Beauvoir’s point through association.”32 Unlike Bell, who emphasizes Wright’s influence on Beauvoir in terms of “Wright’s sociological thought” and “his broadly Marxist perspective,” Margaret Simons emphasizes Wright’s philosophical contributions and impact on Beauvoir.33 She argues that “Wright’s influence on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy, [includes] . . . providing her with a theory of racial oppression and liberation that she utilized as a model in constructing the theoretical foundations for radical feminism in The Second Sex.”34 Simons reads Wright and Beauvoir as holding “a shared concept of the oppressed Other” as well as a similar “focus on the importance of social relations and recognition in the formation of the self.”35 Furthermore, both theorists use phenomenological descriptions of oppression in an effort to challenge pernicious stereotypes.36

For Simons (contra V. Bell), “Wright’s phenomenological descriptions of black experience of oppression provide a methodological alternative to both [G.] Myrdal’s objectifying social science methodology and the economic reductionism of Marxist orthodoxy.”37 Simons explains, “Wright’s philosophical influence on Beauvoir is a subjectivist, phenomenological approach to the study of oppression . . . describing the lived experience of American racism from the standpoint of the oppressed.”38 And then she elaborates, “Wright provides a phenomenology of racial oppression to challenge the claims by segregationists that blacks are happy and contented with their naturally inferior place in society, much as Beauvoir, in the second volume of The Second Sex (entitled Lived Experience), relies on a phenomenological description of women’s experience to challenge the oppressive stereotypes of popular myths and Freudian psychology.”39

As with Beauvoir and A. Myrdal, there are noteworthy similarities and differences between Beauvoir and G. Myrdal. While Simons thinks that Wright probably introduced Beauvoir to An American Dilemma, biographer Deirdre Bair points out that Beauvoir received a copy of the text from Nelson Algren in 1947.40 Beauvoir writes about the text in letters to Algren in which she reflects on what she learns from G. Myrdal about Black people and notes the analogies between Black people and women.

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