Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Uncommon TV Interview (1975)

In Simone de Beau­voir’s 1945 nov­el The Blood of Oth­ers, the nar­ra­tor, Jean Blo­mart, reviews on his kid­hood pal Marcel’s reac­tion to the phrase “rev­o­lu­tion”:

It used to be sense­much less to take a look at to modify any­factor on this planet or in lifestyles; issues have been unhealthy sufficient despite the fact that one didn’t med­dle with them. Each­factor that her center and her thoughts con­demned she rabid­ly defended—my father, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ism. Since the flawed lay now not within the insti­tu­tions, however within the depths of our being. We should hud­dle in a cor­ner and make our­selves as small as pos­si­ble. Wager­ter to just accept each­factor than to make an abortive effort, doomed prematurely to fail­ure.

Marcel’s concern­ful deadly­ism rep­re­sents each­factor De Beau­voir con­demned in her writ­ing, maximum particularly her floor­damage­ing 1949 learn about, The Sec­ond Intercourse, ceaselessly cred­it­ed because the foun­da­tion­al textual content of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism. De Beau­voir reject­ed the concept that girls’s his­tor­i­cal sub­jec­tion used to be whatsoever herbal—“within the depths of our being.” As a substitute, her analy­sis fault­ed the very insti­tu­tions Mar­cel defends: patri­archy, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion.

Within the 1975 inter­view above with French jour­nal­ist Jean-Louis Ser­van-Schreiber—“Why I’m a Feminist”—De Beau­voir alternatives up the information of The Sec­ond Intercourse, which Ser­van-Schreiber calls as impor­tant an “ide­o­log­i­cal ref­er­ence” for fem­i­nists as Marx’s Cap­i­tal is for com­mu­nists. He asks De Beau­voir about certainly one of her maximum quot­ed traces: “One isn’t born a lady, one turns into one.” Her answer displays how a long way prematurely she used to be of post-mod­ern anti-essen­tial­ism, and what kind of of a debt lat­er fem­i­nist thinkers owe to her concepts:

Sure, that for­mu­l. a. is the foundation of all my the­o­ries…. Its imply­ing may be very sim­ple, that being a lady isn’t a nat­ur­al reality. It’s the results of a cer­tain his­to­ry. There is not any bio­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal des­tiny that defines a lady as such…. Child ladies are guy­u­fac­tured to change into girls.”

With­out deny­ing the truth of bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, De Beau­voir debunks the perception that intercourse dif­fer­ences are suf­fi­cient to jus­ti­fy gen­der-based hier­ar­chies of sta­tus and social pow­er. Wom­en’s sec­ond-class sta­tus, she argues, effects from an extended his­tor­i­cal procedure; despite the fact that insti­tu­tions not inten­tion­al­ly deprive girls of pow­er, they nonetheless intend to carry directly to the pow­er males have his­tor­i­cal­ly accumulated.

Virtually 50 years after this interview—and 75 years since The Sec­ond Intercourse—the debates De Beau­voir helped ini­ti­ate rage on, with out a signal of abat­ing any­time quickly. Even if Ser­van-Schreiber calls fem­i­nism a “ris­ing drive” that promis­es “professional­discovered adjustments,” one received­ders whether or not De Beau­voir, who died in 1986, can be dis­mayed by means of the plight of girls in a lot of the arena these days. However alternatively, not like her char­ac­ter Mar­cel, De Beau­voir used to be a combat­er, now not like­ly to “hud­dle in a cor­ner” and provides in. Ser­van-Schreiber states above that De Beau­voir “has at all times refused, till this yr, to seem on TV,” however he’s mis­tak­en. In 1967, she gave the impression together with her section­ner Jean-Paul Sartre on a French-Cana­di­an professional­gram known as Dossiers.

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