Book Review: SARAH DITUM - Beyond the Second Sex
Becoming Beauvoir:
A Life
By Kate
Kirkpatrick
It’s probably the most
quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all
philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate
Kirkpatrick’s incisive and compelling biography of Simone de Beauvoir, this
appears as ‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one’. Most English readers
will recognise the 1953 translation by H M Parshley better: ‘One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman.’ Either way, it’s become a talisman in the
nature–nurture debate, a badge of blank slate-ism, the only line of Beauvoir’s
work most people ever refer to and one of the most woefully abused sentences
ever to have been written.
Nowadays, ‘One is not
born…’ is regularly recruited to support the extraordinary (but ascendant)
position that whether one is considered a man or a woman should be determined
by personal fiat, regardless of one’s sex. This misapplication goes back to
Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble, in which the author at least
had the decency to acknowledge that in using Beauvoir to argue that ‘gender is
not tied to sex’, she was arriving at a conclusion that Beauvoir ‘herself did
not entertain’. Subsequent appropriators have been even less careful, their
ignorance of the rest of Beauvoir’s output reassuring them that she meant what
they hope she meant.
Where Beauvoir would
fall in the vexed contemporary debate among feminists over gender identity is a
hypothetical question, and although Kirkpatrick briefly addresses the afterlife
of Beauvoir’s ideas, she sensibly leaves that particular wasps’ nest alone.
There is, however, a strong suggestion that Beauvoir would not have been on
board with the current vogue for deleting the word ‘woman’ in favour of desexed
formulations such as ‘menstruator’ or ‘pregnant person’. The suggestion comes
from the fact that when 20th-century American feminists tried this, Beauvoir
declared them to be full of crap (or, as she actually put it, ‘bad faith’)... Women like Dorothy
Parker thought the inequality between the sexes could be resolved by defining
women as ‘human’instead of ‘woman’. But the problem with the ‘we’re all human’ point of view,
Beauvoir said, is that women are not men. The equality they share at this level
is abstract – and the possibilities open to men and women are different... https://literaryreview.co.uk/beyond-the-second-sex
