By turns surprising and revelatory, this sixth volume in the Beauvoir Series presents newly discovered writings and lectures while providing new translations and contexts for Simone de Beauvoir's more familiar writings. Spanning Beauvoir's career from the 1940s through 1986, the pieces explain the paradoxes in her political and feminist stances, including her famous 1972 announcement of a "conversion to feminism" after decades of activism on behalf of women.
documents and contextualizes Beauvoir's thinking, writing, public statements, and activities in the services of causes like French divorce law reform and the rights of women in the Iranian Revolution. In addition, the volume provides new insights into Beauvoir's complex thinking and illuminates her historic role in linking the movements for sexual freedom, sexual equality, homosexual rights, and women's rights in France.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword to the Beauvoir Series / Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Margaret A. Simons
1. French Women Writers
Introduction by Elizabeth Fallaize
Problems for Women's Literature
Women of Letters
2. Femininity: The Trap
Introduction by Nancy Bauer
Femininity: The Trap
3. A Review of The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Introduction by Shannon M. Mussett
A Review of The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss
4. Short Feminist Texts from the Fifties and Sixties
Introduction by Karen Vintges
It's About Time Women Put a New Face on Love
Preface to Family Planning
Preface to The Great Fear of Loving
The Condition of Women
Preface to The Sexually Responsive Woman
What Love Is-and Isn't
Love and Politics
5. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome
Introduction by Elizabeth Fallaize
Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome
6. The Situation of Women Today
Introduction by Debra B. Bergoffen
The Situation of Women Today
7. Women and Creativity
Introduction by Ursula Tidd
Women and Creativity
8. Foreword to History: A Novel
Introduction by Margaret A. Simons
Foreword to History: A Novel
9. The MLF and the Bobigny Affair
Introduction by Sylvie Chaperon
The Rebellious Woman-An Interview by Alice Schwartzer
Response to Some Women and a Man
Abortion and the Poor
Beauvoir's Deposition at the Bobigny Trial
Preface to Abortion: A Law on Trial. The Bobigny Affair
10. Short Feminists Text from the Seventies and Eighties
Introduction by Françoise Picq
Everyday Sexism
League of Women's Rights Manifesto
Preface to Divorce in France
Introduction to Women Insist
Preface to Through Women's Eyes
When All the Women of the World . . .
My Point of View: An Outrageous Affair
Preface to Stories from the French Women's Liberation Movement
The Urgency of an Anti-Sexist Law
Press Conference of the International Committee for Women's Rights
Foreword to Deception Chronicles: From the Women's Liberation Movement to a Commercial Trademark
Women, Ads, and Hate
11. Preface to Mihloud
Introduction by Lillian S. Robinson and Julien Murphy
Preface to Mihloud
Contributors
Index
About the author
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was a French existentialist philosopher who employed a literary-philosophical method in her works, including
Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and
The Second Sex (1949).
Margaret A. Simons is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the author of
Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism.
Marybeth Timmermann is a contributing translator and editor of Beauvoir's
Philosophical Writings and
"The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings.
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, adopted daughter and literary executor of Simone de Beauvoir, is the editor of
Lettres à Sartre and many other works by Beauvoir.
