A beacon, a symbol, the author of feminism's most important theoretical text, a great lover, a militant at 76—Simone de Beauvoir seems beyond criticism, creator of one of the most examined lives ever lived. She has had what she wanted, Sartre and writing, writing and Sartre; "I have never met anyone," she says in her memoirs, "in the whole course of my life, who was so well equipped for happiness as I was, or who labored so stubbornly to achieve it." Why then have I always felt so ambivalent, so uneasy, reading her autobiography? Why is this latest installment, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, so disturbing?…
If I've learned anything in feminism's last decade, it's that nobody's emotional life is—or should be—"politically correct." If somebody tells me that she or he is satisfied, it seems worse than churlish to disagree. In the case of Simone de Beauvoir—who more than anyone else made me feel the sheer, transforming power of feminist thought—it seems breathtakingly rude, like spitting at your grandmother. While parts of The Second Sex are dated today, 35 years after it was published amid a barrage of hostile reviews, and while feminists have taken issue with everything from the book's existentialist framework to its use of anthropology, nothing even approaches it in scope; de Beauvoir ranges from biology to psychology to literature to history, describing a vast pattern of sexual asymmetry….
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