Surpassing Liberal Feminism: Beauvoir’s Legacy in Global Perspective

Vintges, Karen

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_11

Karen Vintges³

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Abstract

Paradigmatic as Beauvoir’s thinking is for contemporary Western feminism, in the light of global developments, it is important to note that her feminist ideals surpass the dominant forms of Western liberalism in substantial ways. Her positive concept of ‘ethical’ freedom does not correspond to Western liberalism’s negative concept of freedom as the absence of constraints. Nor does her gender egalitarian concept of society resemble Western liberalism’s model of society with its dichotomous organization of labor and care. It is argued that Western feminism, as it was conceived by Beauvoir, can be elaborated substantially, as well as strategically, into an inclusive feminism for a globalizing, yet culturally plural world.

La vraie liberté c’est celle qui se réalise par un projet positif (Simone De Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour)

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Notes

1.
See Karen Vintges, ‘Beauvoir’s Philosophy As the Hidden Paradigm of Contemporary Feminism,’ in Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman (London/New York: Routledge, 1998).
2.
I borrow this term from political philosopher James Tully. See especially Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,’ in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Leila Ahmed, in her Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), argues that feminism was imported in Egypt by British colonialists like the by now famous Lord Croner, who in their own country outspokenly resisted the vote for women.
3.
Badinter, in her book Fausse route (2003), defended the banning by law in France of the headscarf for Muslim schoolgirls, referring in interviews to Beauvoir’s stances to underline her overall argument.
4.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 112.
5.
Karen Green, ‘Sartre and de Beauvoir on Freedom and Oppression.’ Feminist Interpretations of Sartre, ed. Julien Murphy (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999).
6.
Ibid., 196, fn. 7.
7.
Meryl Altman, ‘Beauvoir, Hegel, War,’ Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22, 3 (July, 2007): 66–91. Nancy Bauer, Simone De Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Columbia University, 2001). Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997); Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990; New York: Routledge, 1991). Michèle Le Doeuff, L’Etude et le rouet (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1989; published in English as Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ tr. Linda Schenck (London:Athlone Press, 1996; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
8.
Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex & Existence, 212.
9.
Gothlin, ‘Beauvoir and Sartre on appeal, desire and ambiguity,’ in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 133; 137.
10.
Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 13.
11.
Ibid., 13.
12.
Ibid., 84.
13.
Ibid., 8.
14.
Ibid., 25. My italics.
15.
Ibid., 24.
16.
Ibid., 26; 32.
17.
Ibid., 26.
18.
Ibid., 158.
19.
Compare: ‘Phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,’ Les Temps modernes 1 (1945): 363–67 and ‘Merleau-Ponty et pseudo-sartrisme,’ Les Temps modernes 10 (1955): 2072–122.
20.
Simone de Beauvoir, Must we Burn De Sade? (London: Nevill), 33.
21.
See Karen Vintges, Philosophy As Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1996), ch. 4.
22.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 25.
23.
Ibid., 159.
24.
Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amerique au jour le jour (Paris: Editions Paul Marihein, 1948), 319.
25.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 737.
26.
The phrase that both sexes, man and woman, should recognise the other as both subject and object, is articulated by Bauer as Beauvoir’s original appropriation of Hegel’s formula that we should recognise each other as subjects, original because she indicates instead that men and women should accept their subjective ánd objective, i.e. bodily dimension in a reciprocal manner. See Bauer, Simone De Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism.
27.
My translation. The English translator, Parshley, translated the French ‘conversion’ as ‘transformation.’
28.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 172.
29.
Compare the treatment in Bauer, Simone De Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism.
30.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 740.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘It’s About Time Woman Put a New Face on Love,’ Flair 1 3 (1950): 76–7; the italics are mine.
33.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Preface’ in Lagroua Weil-Hallé La grand peur d’aimer [1960], in C. Francis & F. Gontier, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 397–400, 399 (my translation).
34.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘What Love Is and Isn’t,’ McCall’s (August, 1965), 53–55.
35.
See Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 30.
36.
Ibid., 32.
37.
Ibid., 37.
38.
cf. Vintges, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Thinker for the Twenty-first Century,’ 70; 184. For an interesting discussion of the absoluteness of ontological freedom in Beauvoir’s work see Gail Linsenbard, ‘Beauvoir, Ontology, and Women’s Human Rights’ Hypatia 14 4 (1999): 145–162.
39.
Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 38. My translation. The French reads ‘noir’ other than the English translation ‘negro.’
40.
Beauvoir implies that we should ‘change laws, institutions, customs, public opinion and the whole social context, for men and women to become truly equal’ (The Second Sex, 734).
41.
For the left Hegelian thinker Marx as well freedom is not an attribute of persons but of social arrangements.
42.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 734.
43.
Simone de Beauvoir, La condition feminine [1961], in C. Francis & F.Gontier, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 401–409.
44.
For an extensive comparison of both their works see Bart van Leeuwen and Karen Vintges, ‘L’existentialisme français d’un point de vue multiculturel: une politique de la différence dans les philosophies de Simone de Beauvoir et de Jean-Paul Sartre’, in Simone de Beauvoir cent ans après sa naissance: contributions interdisciplinaires de cinq continents, ed. Thomas Stauder (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008).
45.
Anti Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 57
46.
Ibid., 146. My translation. The French reads ‘les Noirs’ other than the English translation ‘Negroes.’
47.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 14. The last sentence has been omitted from the original English translation.
48.
Both were threatened by bomb attacks, among other things, as were many others who spoke out against French colonialism.
49.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Pour Djamila Boupacha’ Le Monde 2 (1960): 6. Simone de Beauvoir,‘Preface,’ In Djamila Boupacha, Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
50.
Julien Murphy, ‘Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Postcolonial Ethics,’ in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, 289. For a discussion on Beauvoir’s stances on the Algerian war see as well Sonia Kruks, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of privilege,’ Hypatia 20 1 (2005): 178–205.
51.
Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstances, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 386.
52.
Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 406: ‘fournissant ainsi une caution à ceux qui souhaitant concilier cette guerre et ses méthodes avec l’humanisme bourgeois.’ In the English text ‘caution’ is translated in its opposite namely ‘warning’ instead of licence, or permit. See, Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstances, 396.
53.
Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstances, 607–8.
54.
See Margaret Simons, ‘Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism,’ in Philosophers on Race, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
55.
Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 89–90. My translation. The French reads ‘leaders noir’ other than the English translation ‘Negro leaders.’
56.
Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 89–90.
57.
Beauvoir, The Long March, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1958), 497.
58.
Ibid., 496.
59.
William McBride, ‘Sartre at the twilight of liberal democracy as we have known it,’ Sartre Studies International, 11 1&2 (2005): 311–18, fn. 13.
60.
Beauvoir concluded her book on China by stating that China must become richer and more liberal (Beauvoir, The Long March, 501). McBride convincingly argues that Sartre questioned the abstract nature of rights in bourgeois democracies, attacking them as ‘false democracies,’ not because he wanted to get rid of democracy but on behalf of the democratic ideal as such: ‘if there are “false democracies,” there must also be true ones, at least in principle.’ (William McBride, ‘Sartre at the twilight,’ 312–313) McBride concludes that Sartre’s own vision was a democratic, socialist and libertartian one, an open vision which he therefore never attempted to describe in detail.
61.
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Speech,’ in Foucault and the Iranian revolution, edited by J. Afary & K. Anderson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 246–247, 247; the italics are mine.
62.
See Vintges, ‘Endorsing Practices of Freedom. Feminism in a Global Perspective,’ in Feminism and The Final Foucault, edited by D. Taylor and K. Vintges (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 275–299.
63.
See Vintges, Karen and Ireen Dubel, Women, Feminism and Fundamentalism (Amsterdam: SWP Publishers, 2007).
64.
Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
65.
Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, 253.

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Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Karen Vintges

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Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
Eileen O’Neill
Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
Marcy P. Lascano

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Vintges, K. (2019). Surpassing Liberal Feminism: Beauvoir’s Legacy in Global Perspective. In: O’Neill, E., Lascano, M.P. (eds) Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_11
Published: 27 June 2019
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