"In 1940, arriving at the café Flore first thing to take her position at one of the tables closest to the stove, in chilly wartime...standing at the bar for her breakfast...She with her cigarette...her wooden-soled shoes that she wore until the end of 1945, and her turban...all white and pink in her turban and vest...her turban–the red one–or with her hair piled high, and the bright textiles and necklace AND earrings..." These taken from several pages of the article made me start realizing that I never think about Simone de Beauvoir as having physical form. My 1962 Gallimard copy of Le deuxième sexe has the slightly stiff cream paper used for covers, with the title in red. No picture. All these years, she has remained for me an energetic but deeply disciplined woman whose works obviate the need for image.
But when Caws remarks, "I love contemplating the various portraits and pictures in such books" as some of the ones she reviews, I realized that I too like a face. Simone de Beauvoir was a stern blur to me that did not in any way meet the description of a turbaned woman posing for a picture in 1951 with Yvette Roudy and Kate Millett "all pink and white in her turban and vest"–what turban?
So I went looking for a picture.
The first image I found presented a beautiful older woman, smiling at a speaker, and indeed turbaned. I found others, including the Irving Penn photograph that must be why I imagine her stern, but knowing this smiling woman now I only see her as elegant, reserved, not stern.
I was thinking about her when I found myself overhearing a conversation between a young single woman and an only slightly older married woman, mocking some friend who had spent thirty minutes deciding what underwear to put on for a date. Their feminist credentials were exhibited as they made reference to this one and that one as to why it was ridiculous for this woman to spend so much time on garments that would only be taken off, without notice of their lace, hue, style.
Simone de Beauvoir is also criticized. Caws mentions how often in France she is condemned as 'a phallic woman, complicit with the dominant forms of masculine power'. Others criticize her dismissal of any maternal feeling in herself or other women. She was not particularly nice to some of Sartre's youn
g women. Her comments about them in letters can be vicious. She was loyal to Sartre despite the pain caused by their sexual freedom. She wasn't this. She wasn't enough of that. As if an existentialist would betray herself for someone else's vision of what she should be.Her life was complicated, certainly. And I can not argue that the young woman who was so worried about her panties was necessarily being true to herself. I do, however, wonder that any one continues to have expectations of the manner in which a woman chooses to be a woman. This is why, as a young woman, I refuse the term feminist.
I am enormously grateful to the group of women who raised me alongside my mother. They showed me different lives, lifestyles, regrets, choices that seemed to me deeply personal and not intrinsic to their female gender. I remember being told around the age of fourteen that "you never need a man", this around the same time that I was working for Feminists for Free Expression in the office space donated by Penthouse, and then when I was nineteen, telling my mother that I was not "as French as I thought I was" when my own relationship disintegrated because as philosophy students we believed we should freely engage with whomever we desired. Their feminism permit me to shed it, to make choices without concern whether I am an adequate representative of the 'free woman'.
Some of my mother's friends are in their fifties now, and pride themselves on the self-care that allows them to look in the mirror and admire what they see, to email their resumes confident of the knowledge, credentials, and bank accounts they have earned. In my teenage years, I knew a woman in her fifties who had five lovers, living around the world. They would fly in to see her, and I would suddenly be told that she would not need my help that week as 'he' or 'him' was due to arrive. These women are successful and stunning. Maybe they worry about which lipstick to put on but it hardly seems like it is negatively affecting their lives.
I wear a fancy dress and heels–once a year. Occasionally, I do more than sweep my hair up to be hidden behind me by bobby pins. I like arguing and am as aggressive as any one else, which has occasionally gotten me into trouble as I raise the ante when they do. If some woman wants to wear fancy panties, who are we to think about it once, let alone discuss it in horror? If there is anything I learn from the life of Simone de Beauvoir, it is not to concern myself with labels applied by others or myself. If I learn more about who I am then I can count on the fact that I will change what I think, how I dress, when I speak. I only hope that I can do it with the grace and resiliency of this woman whose politics, philosophy and lifestyle are not necessarily what I would choose for myself. I close with a piece of the quote from A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones that Caws chose to conclude her own review: "she never believed that one size fits all, only that men should not make woman the 'Other' in a relationship or in society." Thanks to Simone de Beauvoir, my mother, her friends, and many feminists I do not know and have never heard of, I am not the Other. I don't need to be a feminist. I can look how, and for what, I want. I'm just living my life.
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