muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) (01/07/91)
From the SF Chronicle, Friday, January 4th: [Typed in without permission.] A Heroine Falls From Grace --------------------------- A role model's 'sins' agitate feminists BY DEIRDRE BAIR The first time I heard the question, it surprised me. The second and third times, I was uneasy, but after that, when it was asked whereever I spoke, no matter who the audience, I was deeply troubled. The curious thing was the way the question crossed boundaries of age, class, education and nationality. Whether the women were young or old, housewives or professional women, it was always the same: How do we go on without an ideal to look up to, now that we know that Simone de Beauvoir made the same mistakes and the same doubtful choices as all the rest of us? Ever since she wrote "The Second Sex" (first published in the United States in English translation in 1953), with its electrifying message that women must insist on equality in every aspect of their lives, de Beauvoir has come close to being an ideal for women. Now, as a result of the resarch for my biography, the first complete study of de Beauvoir, we know that the woman who gave us such explicit instructions about how to live the feminist life did not do so herself, and many women feel betrayed. Individual Reactions -------------------- This feeling of betrayal takes many forms, as I have found in the past few months of public speaking. Some were not surprising; others left me shocked or saddened. I spoke in New York to an affluent group of older women, and at the end of the lecture one stood up hesitantly and said she didn't know how to say it, but still she had to try. She was a survivor of the Holocaust who had first read "The Second Sex" in French in 1949 on the sweltering rust bucket of a boat that brought her from Portugal to New York and her new life. The book so affected her that from then on she patterned her relationships on what de Beauvoir had written they should be. When she learned of her idol's less than altruistic behavior during the war, of how de Beauvoir bragged about her black-market bargains and how handsome she thought the German occupiers of Paris looked in their uniforms, this woman, the only member of her family to survive, was understandably devastated. Later, in Australia, a younger woman cornered me during a break at a scholarly conference and demanded to know how she should live now that she realized de Beauvoir spent much of her life catering to Jean-Paul Sartre's every whim, always putting herself second to the man she called "a genius," denigrating her own achievement. This young woman's interpretation of de Beauvoir's feminist message was the most drastic I encountered, for she had had herself sterilized at the age of 23 to ensure that, like her mentor, she too would be childless. In her late 30s now, she seemed terrified to recall marriage proposals she had rejected because de Beauvoir denounced marriage as a bourgeois institution. Two French women condemned de Beauvoir for very different reasons: the first, for "choosing not to marry when she could have, not to have children when she could have"; the second, for being dishonest, demanding to know "why could she not admit that she made love to women when she so clearly did." A Question of Trust ------------------- Both, obviuosly pained, then asked what I was [??] by now calling the question: "How can we trust anything she wrote and why should we continue to read her books?" I can understand the feeling of betrayal, the pain every one of these women felt when they learned how de Beauvoir, throughout the more than 50 years they were together, put all her needs, goals and desires second to Sartre's every impulse, how she evaded hard truths about herself such as her bisexuality or the sad realities of much of her daily life, continually running errands for Sartre. I could not have spent the better part of a decade studying the life of a woman I did not admire, but as I was writing about the decisions she made, I had to find a way to explain them to myself before I could even consider explaining them to my readers. As I discovered how, time and again, de Beauvoir ignored all the principles of equality that she had expounded so eloquently, I began to feel like a slowly deflating balloon as I had to deal with what I, a firm believer in her feminist views, considerd her many wrong choices. But because of my deep respect for her, this woman who braved the wrath of her family, church and social class to live the independent life she wanted, I was determined to write about all of her choices and decisions with compassion, understanding and as much objectivity as I could muster. Still, I remained as perplexed as the many women who questioned me. Why, I asked myself, did de Beauvoir choose to remain locked in a sexless relationship with Sartre, in which she was often lied to, taken advantage of and humiliated, when she could have had a truly equal relationship with Nelson Algren? Why, when she was bursting to finish writing "The Second Sex," did she tearfully put that work aside and fly across France to Sartre's side because he said he needed her help on a film script, which he then cavalierly decided he wasn't interested in writing after all? Her Choices ----------- But wait, I told myself, they were her choices, and until the very end she thought they were the right ones. In our more than five years of conversations and interviews, she insisted that she had had a happy life, and she did so with such relish that it was impossible not to believe her. Who was I, and who are we women, to question what goes on within the privacy of a lifelong relationship that seems to have satisfied both parts of the couple? Why do women (and I am among them) do this to themselves? Why do we demand an impossible standard of perfection, whatever it may be for each of us, in another woman's life as well as her work? By doing so, we ignore the fact that what constitutes a happy life for one woman may bring misery and discontent to another. We don't impose this standard of perfection upon male writers; we don't discredit their work when we learn how reprehensible or disappointing their lives may have been. No one has suggested, for example, that we reject the existential philosophy of Sartre because of his notorious womanizing or his self-serving behavior during World War II, but they do seem to believe we should reject de Beauvoir's because she went along with it. Objects of Worship ------------------ Nevertheless, the larger question remains, and it is a chilling one: Do we women really need false gods to worship in this, the last decade of the 20th century, when we are still engaged in the strongest and most sustained feminist revolution in the history of the Western world? Are we so insecure that unless we have someone whose life we can hold up as the ideal (whatever that may be), we cannot continue to forge ahead in search of a better life and more satisfying work and relationships? Have we learned so little that we cannot make up our own minds about how to live unless someone tells us how to do it? "Real life is messy," de Beauvoir once told me defiantly. "I wrote a feminist statement, and then I went on to live my life as I wanted." It's too bad she could not have combined the two. But there is no reason why we should not do as she wrote and not as she lived -- why we can't do it for her and prove how well it can be done.