WOMEN IN REVOLT

Her official biographer, deirdre bair, reports that Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in fourteen months--on amphetamines and "never sleeping." That explains a lot. Although there are flashes of wit and erudition, the book is a tangle of facts, theories, lists of names, and pronouncements about women from the beginning of time, drawn from social science, biology, religion, philosophy (primarily existentialism and Marxism), and literature. It also contains a lot of sweeping declarations: "In all civilizations and still in our day," says Beauvoir, "woman inspires man with horror: it is the horror of his own carnal contingence, which he projects upon her." In marathon sessions at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Beauvoir gathered together every scrap of information she could find on the topic of women and jammed it all into the book.She made no effort to distinguish relevant from irrelevant material. In a brief section on the history of women from the 16th through the 18th century, she spends 22 lines on a plot summary of an obscure 16th-century play. A few pages later, she devotes 24 lines altogether to five giants of the Enlightenment: Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, Montesquieu, and Helvetius. They were all passionate defenders of women’s rights and crucial to the movement that would lead slowly, inexorably to the liberation of women in the West. Beauvoir mentions in passing that these philosophers viewed women as "human beings equal to those of the strong sex," which would seem to contradict her claim that, "In all civilizations…woman inspires man with horror." Women inspired men like Diderot, Voltaire, and Condorcet with admiration and respect.

-Christina Hoff Sommers
Dec 8 2010