Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Uncommon TV Interview (1975)

In Simone de Beau­voir’s 1945 nov­el The Blood of Oth­ers, the nar­ra­tor, Jean Blo­mart, reviews on his baby­hood good friend Marcel’s reac­tion to the phrase “rev­o­lu­tion”:

It was sense­much less to attempt to change any­factor on this planet or in life; issues had been unhealthy sufficient even when one didn’t med­dle with them. Each­factor that her coronary heart and her thoughts con­demned she rabid­ly defended—my father, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ism. As a result of the fallacious lay not within the insti­tu­tions, however within the depths of our being. We should hud­dle in a cor­ner and make our­selves as small as pos­si­ble. Guess­ter to just accept each­factor than to make an abortive effort, doomed prematurely to fail­ure.

Marcel’s concern­ful deadly­ism rep­re­sents each­factor De Beau­voir con­demned in her writ­ing, most notably her floor­break­ing 1949 research, The Sec­ond Intercourse, usually cred­it­ed because the foun­da­tion­al textual content of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism. De Beau­voir reject­ed the concept ladies’s his­tor­i­cal sub­jec­tion was in any manner pure—“within the depths of our being.” As an alternative, her analy­sis fault­ed the very insti­tu­tions Mar­cel defends: patri­archy, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion.

Within the 1975 inter­view above with French jour­nal­ist Jean-Louis Ser­van-Schreiber—“Why I’m a Feminist”—De Beau­voir picks up the concepts of The Sec­ond Intercourse, which Ser­van-Schreiber calls as impor­tant an “ide­o­log­i­cal ref­er­ence” for fem­i­nists as Marx’s Cap­i­tal is for com­mu­nists. He asks De Beau­voir about certainly one of her most quot­ed strains: “One isn’t born a lady, one turns into one.” Her reply reveals how far prematurely she was of post-mod­ern anti-essen­tial­ism, and the way a lot of a debt lat­er fem­i­nist thinkers owe to her concepts:

Sure, that for­mu­la is the idea of all my the­o­ries…. Its imply­ing could be very sim­ple, that being a lady isn’t a nat­ur­al truth. It’s the results of a cer­tain his­to­ry. There isn’t a bio­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal des­tiny that defines a lady as such…. Child women are man­u­fac­tured to turn out to be ladies.”

With­out deny­ing the very fact of bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, De Beau­voir debunks the notion that intercourse dif­fer­ences are suf­fi­cient to jus­ti­fy gen­der-based hier­ar­chies of sta­tus and social pow­er. Wom­en’s sec­ond-class sta­tus, she argues, outcomes from an extended his­tor­i­cal course of; even when insti­tu­tions not inten­tion­al­ly deprive ladies of pow­er, they nonetheless intend to carry on to the pow­er males have his­tor­i­cal­ly accrued.

Nearly 50 years after this interview—and 75 years since The Sec­ond Intercourse—the debates De Beau­voir helped ini­ti­ate rage on, with no signal of abat­ing any­time quickly. Though Ser­van-Schreiber calls fem­i­nism a “ris­ing pressure” that promis­es “professional­discovered modifications,” one gained­ders whether or not De Beau­voir, who died in 1986, can be dis­mayed by the plight of ladies in a lot of the world right now. However then once more, in contrast to her char­ac­ter Mar­cel, De Beau­voir was a struggle­er, not like­ly to “hud­dle in a cor­ner” and provides in. Ser­van-Schreiber states above that De Beau­voir “has all the time refused, till this yr, to look on TV,” however he’s mis­tak­en. In 1967, she appeared together with her half­ner Jean-Paul Sartre on a French-Cana­di­an professional­gram known as Dossiers.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Simone de Beau­voir Speaks on Amer­i­can TV (in Eng­lish) About Fem­i­nism, Abor­tion & Extra (1976)

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Turned an Intel­lec­tu­al and Fem­i­nist (1960)

Simone de Beauvoir’s Phi­los­o­phy on Discover­ing Imply­ing in Previous Age

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian primarily based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness