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This chapter reconstructs how the public was introduced to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's most famous work, and considers its critical reception. It mentions reviewers and critics who saw themselves as custodians of literary standards and public taste, and held very firm and contrasting views on the broader reading public. It elaborates how the reviewers and critics' views provide new ways to understand Beauvoir's arguments and the expectations that took shape around her. The chapter describes The Second Sex as an eight-hundred-page manuscript that challenges philosophical argument, literary criticism, history, and social science, as well as provide a detailed description of sexual and bodily experience. It points out how The Second Sex was considered ahead-of-its time with its narrative of the philosophical reconsideration of the female condition or situation.

This chapter focuses on Djamila Boupacha, which was a book about political intervention from a public intellectual that reported on Djamila Boupacha's trial and gathered testimony on other cases of torture. It cites sections of Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance from 1963 that dealt with the Algerian War and excavates several layers of memory, feeling, and experience. The chapter explains how The Force of Circumstance addressed both Beauvoir's intimate public and her fellow intellectuals. It refers to Beauvoir's memoir, The Prime of Life, which had come out in the fall of 1960, right after the Boupacha scandal, and emphasizes how Beauvoir wrote The Force of Circumstance in deliberate philosophical detail, expressing her antiwar politics and political feelings.

“It is hard to think of an idea more immediate,” says Amartya Sen, than that of “the living standard. . . . It figures a good deal in everyday thought. It is, in fact, one of the few economic concepts that is not commonly greeted with the uncommon skepticism reserved for the other concepts of economics.”Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1. At the turn of our century, however, this was certainly not the case. A “standard of living” was neither “immediate” nor “everyday.” The term itself rarely appeared before the 1920s. Even then, observed one economist surveying her contemporaries' vocabulary and assumptions, “all the meaning, and the exact meaning, that is bound up in it” was far from clear. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10; and Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997), which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999). It could variously signify a technical measure of purchasing power, an aspiration, or an entitlement—although whether to a minimum subsistence or a more expansive notion of comfort would be bitterly disputed. For many European intellectuals of the 1920s, the term, almost solely used as “American standard,” captured in one phrase the threat or the promise of the increased economic clout of the United States, Fordism as an economic strategy, and a new politics of material abundance. On both sides of the Atlantic, all of these meanings were hotly contested by economists, reform sociologists, political leaders, and the labor movement. In short, some historical scrutiny seems in order. What did the concept mean and when? What light would a genealogy of the “standard of living” shed on the prehistory of “mass consumption” or the transition to new consumer regimes of the twentieth century?

The Society for French Historical Studies met in Lexington, Kentucky, in March 1997 for its annual look at the state of scholarship in French history. As has been the case in recent years, labor was a marginal category in a conference increasingly devoted to cultural history. However, some of the more interesting work occurred at the intersection between histories of class and the new perspectives provided by scholarship on gender and the construction of identity. Participants in a panel on "Gender, Work, and Politics in the Longue Dur?e: The Shifting Boundaries of Women's Work" confronted why women's work was valued and remunerated at a rate less than the work of men. Traditional explanations attribute the discrepancy to the ways in which women have participated in production: Female workers lacked formal training or skills, and their work patterns were unstable or trun cated because of family obligations. Social scientists have improved upon such simplistic explanations with complex, well-researched monographs and more imaginative syntheses in the last two decades. Joan Scott, how ever, has challenged social historians to examine problems of causality more closely, suggesting the concept of gender as an analytical tool with which to assess long-term changes that are still understood largely as eco nomic phenomena. The three panelists responded to Scott's call by addressing how women challenged the constructed gender boundaries of women's work in France. Carol Coats examined the cultural assumptions shaping women's work and women's family roles during the sixteenth century. Comparing notarial records from the middle of the century to a set of records from 1610, she showed that widows saw the boundaries of their authority and autonomy increasingly constricted?a pattern supported by other local studies of widowhood during the period. Widows were increasingly denied access to traditional economic activities as well, such as hiring male appren tices. Clare Crowston assessed women's guild systems in Paris during the eighteenth century, examining how gender assumptions contributed to the ways in which they were created and regulated. Economic competition

"It is doubtful if the history of the entire world can furnish an instance in which any single house . . . has had a growth so stupendous within an equal amount of time," declared a pamphlet published in 1880 by the Singer sewing machine company.' Singer could boast an empire, and it did, making its international success the centerpiece of the company's unprecedented advertising campaign. In France, as in other European countries, the company printed pamphlets to be distributed at world's fairs, given out in department stores, and carried by traveling salesmen or dry-goods merchants into the countryside. Imitating the style of popular broadsheets and almanacs, brochures like Les Merveilles de l'industrie exulted in the "miracles" of technology and tried to conjure them up for their readers.2 Advertisements plas

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