Sex, Love, and Letters by Judith G. Coffin

Author:Judith G. Coffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

New Readers

The Second Sex was now framed by scores of other books on women and “femininity,” by studies of Beauvoir, and by Beauvoir’s own memoirs, which detailed her gradual discovery of the female condition and its significance, stressing the importance of the book that few had actually read. Enthusiasts of the memoir now turned back to The Second Sex.40 These “second takes” on The Second Sex convey a sense of heady excitement and change. “I don’t think anything like this kind of feminism has ever been written before,” wrote an animated young man from the United States. “You have put the whole question of feminism on a new plane of understanding—and … even explained feminism and enabled us to understand what was wrong with it before.” He felt no need to elaborate on feminism’s shortcomings, for Beauvoir had done that effectively in the text: “feminism” was narrow, bourgeois, a quarrel, and associated with formal rights. He plainly appreciated Beauvoir’s “fraternal” mode of address, her commitment to broadly humanist causes, her ability to articulate the existential dimensions of the struggle, and her warnings about the reverberations of women’s discontent. He was grateful to her for spelling out the relationship between his domestic unhappiness and structures of inequality. He put the insight he had gained in comically self-referential terms: “I am suffering because my wife resents my domination.”41

A male student from Brussels wrote that he “had always been for the emancipation of women, but only as a revolutionary tactic. Now, your personal experience had definitively convinced me of your conclusions in The Second Sex.”42 Readers praised the book as broad, or encyclopedic: “I am dazzled [émerveillé] by the synthesis of the social and the sexual.” They repeatedly referred to Beauvoir’s “lucidity,” which was both sociological and psychological, and which they set against the muddy chaos of their own thoughts and feelings. They admired the striking combination of Olympian overview and “personal analysis” that was so “close up and true to life.” Indeed, “no one had done that this way before you.”43

Feminist activists thanked her for helping them find a new footing in a perplexing political world. Two British women wrote:

For some time now we have been discussing the idea of bringing together, in book form, the thoughts of some of our outstanding English women of left wing opinion, on the position of women in present day society. We have, however, been confused as to a unifying theme, and have been so much inspired by your work which has helped to clarify our thoughts … about the socialist approach to woman and her role in society.44

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