Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir, 1949–1963
The Second Sex (1949) is a big book, but it was a small part of Simone de Beauvoir's intellectual production. Beauvoir wrote essays and fiction; she kept notebooks and diaries that she revised (significantly) for volumes of memoirs; she sent thousands of letters to her friends, lovers, and fell...
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| Published in | The American historical review Vol. 115; no. 4; pp. 1061 - 1088 |
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| Main Author | |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Oxford
The University of Chicago Press
01.10.2010
University of Chicago Press Oxford University Press |
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The Second Sex (1949) is a big book, but it was a small part of Simone de Beauvoir's intellectual production. Beauvoir wrote essays and fiction; she kept notebooks and diaries that she revised (significantly) for volumes of memoirs; she sent thousands of letters to her friends, lovers, and fellow intellectuals. She wrote tirelessly--creating, presenting, and reworking her self. It was a high-profile act, and, her critics notwithstanding, an enormously popular one. Moreover, she received thousands of letters from her readers, now gathered in a rich but virtually unexplored collection at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. The letters to Beauvoir offer rare close-up views of women and men in the 1950s struggling to write about a range of difficult subjects: work, the travails of a writer, marriages gone bad, unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children, frustrated or confusing desires and feelings, including homosexuality, childhood experiences, and so on. Here, Coffin examines the outpouring of confessional correspondence to Beauvoir in response to her publication of The Second Sex in 1949. |
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| Bibliography: | href:115-4-1061.pdf Judith G. Coffin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades (Princeton, N.J., 1996) and articles on gender, labor, consumerism, advertising, sexuality, and social science, most recently “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir: Engagements, Contexts, Reconsiderations, Special Issue, French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 18–37; and “Between Opinion and Desire: Elle Magazine's Survey Research in 1950s France,” in Kerstin Brückweh, ed., The Voice of the Citizen Consumer: A History of Market Research, Consumer Movements, and the Political Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She co-authored with Robert Stacey three editions of W. W. Norton's Western Civilizations (New York, 2002, 2005, and 2008). The present essay is part of a project on “Simone de Beauvoir and Mid-Century Sex.” She is also writing “The Interior Fortresses of France,” about letters to the journalist and radio personality Menie Grégoire in the 1960s. The time to write this article came from a fellowship in 2008–2009 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and I owe many thanks to Judy Vichniac and my fellow fellows there. Support for research came from the Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a UT Faculty Research Award. Thanks to colleagues at Trinity College in Hartford, Yale University, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and the University of Florida for inviting me to speak and asking excellent questions; to Mauricette Berne and Anne Mary at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris for smoothing the way in the archive; to Rachel Ollivier for her help with tricky translations; and to Dr. Cecile Goldet, who worked with the Movement for Family Planning in the 1950s, for her expertise. Alexis Harasemovitch Truax and Katie Anania came through at key moments with impressive competence and calm. I am especially grateful to Sheryl Kroen, Leora Auslander, Vicki Caron, Nancy Cott, Susan Faludi, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Garver, Helen Horowitz, Lisa Leff, Dan Sherman, and the anonymous readers for the AHR for their very constructive suggestions. Warmest thanks to my friends in France for their hospitality, which makes every research visit a pleasure, and to Willy Forbath for his unfailingly generous editing and everything else. ark:/67375/HXZ-2BMX1N7G-T istex:DF28C139F90C628C36763296D37508386E1A40C0 ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0002-8762 1937-5239 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/ahr.115.4.1061 |