Neither Dominant Nor Subordinate: The Women’s Movement and American Culture

To ask about the new feminism and contemporary American culture, I must begin with Le Deuxieme Sexe, which Simone de Beauvoir published in France 31 years ago. Joyless but monumental, that book articulated a concept of woman that American feminists, some 15 years later, were to accept as both accurate and appalling: a reality to recognize and repel. The text, a cultural feat, did not create the women’s movement, a social and political force. The massive changes in the lives of modern Western woman generated both. But after World War II, in the West, de Beauvoir named “woman.” She shaped our collective consciousness of a huge subject. So doing, she helped to incite a cultural force inseparable from feminism. As it grew, it differed from its origins and provoked the attention of an initially negligent larger culture. That development, which few early readers of de Beauvoir might have predicted or desired, is my subject now.

No stranger to dialectical argument, de Beauvoir dismissed some common ways of regarding women: the psychoanalytic, which, at its most pompous, construed the female as a maimed male; the Marxist, which, at its most crass, analyzed women as people whose wrongs would be righted ...