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This chapter mentions Alfred C. Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the most prominent research on sexuality that François Mauriac associated with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It analyses Kinsey and his team of American scientists' investigation of sexual acts, practices, inclinations, and tastes they had discovered among their fellow citizens. It also talks about critics who were deeply invested in the role of literature, and the responsibility of the writer who warned that The Second Sex and the Kinsey report debased the public. The chapter likens The Second Sex and the Kinsey report to the “erotic jungle” of American popular culture and fashion magazines, and to a world of commerce, sensationalism, and prurience. It explores the scholarly study of sexuality and the public's fixation on the subject that situates The Second Sex in the larger history of contemporary culture.

This chapter talks about an Austrian woman who had been reading Das andere Geschlecht or “The Other Sex,” and sent Simone de Beauvoir her reflections on the sections concerning marriage. It describes the Austrian reader as passionate, appreciative, not a philosopher, and casts Beauvoir's argument in terms very much her own. It also references other letters to Beauvoir concerning marriage that loomed over the lives of the letter writers as much as the Algerian War loomed over the Republic. The chapter recounts how marriage was an almost inescapable lifelong drama with many ramifications as broad social and cultural changes in the 1950s and 1960s helped create a wave of unhappiness about marriage. THe chapter mentions unmarried people who were implicated in marriage's galling legal and economic dependencies.

This chapter recounts Simone de Beauvoir's interview with the magazine France Observateur regarding the future of women and feminism in France in 1960. It talks about Marie Craipeau, Simone de Beauvoir's interviewer, who plainly considered the future of women dim and expressed how women are disappointingly traditional, slow to “adapt” to a rapidly changing world, and ill-at-ease with modernity. It also explains how women were easily dissuaded from taking on ambitious projects and readily diverted from assuming self-sovereignty or facing their freedom. The chapter describes Beauvoir's vexed relationship with the members of her public, which was a recurring theme of her career as a writer, an engaged intellectual, and a feminist. It emphasizes how the 1960 France Observateur interview reiterated Beauvoir's earlier diagnosis in The Second Sex of the contradictions of femininity and political repercussions.

This chapter explains how Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs were thoroughly intertwined with the Algerian War and with some of the most dramatic years of the French Republic. It looks at Beauvoir's writing from 1954 to 1962, which brought a tidal wave of correspondence and show how her relationship with her readers deepened and became more difficult. The chapter highlights readers who shared Beauvoir's political feelings on the French state's war against Algerian nationalism, the revelations of torture in that war, and historical memories of Nazi imperialism and brutality during World War II. It mentions Djamila Boupacha, the young Algerian militant that was arrested, tortured, and raped by the French military in 1960, who sent a letter to Beauvoir. The chapter also covers letters that came from soldiers who were either conscience-stricken or fiercely unapologetic about the war, and from social workers and schoolteachers who felt implicated in the French state's actions.

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 elaborates how Simone de Beauvoir burst into the world of literary stardom in the 1950s. It begins with Mandarins from 1954, Beauvoir's novel about postwar French intellectuals' political, literary, and ethical debates, and their love lives, which won many readers and gained a blizzard of publicity. It also cites the novels, plays, and philosophical essays on justice, ethics, and morality that Beauvoir has written as an accomplished writer. The chapter talks about Beauvoir's publication of her reflections on her travels through the United States, America Day by Day, which was dedicated to Richard and Ellen Wright. It describes the outcome of Beauvoir's hard work as an epic of postwar existentialism and its attendant anguish, a readable and serious fare that fueled the mid-twentieth-century expansion of book publishing.

When this book's author discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired the author to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of the book, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s — from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. The book traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir's acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of Beauvoir's generation — Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Albert Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre — bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life. The book lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as the book shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production.

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

This article concerns female labor, guild organization, and eighteenth-century political economy. The first half of the article analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Parisian clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations, and the social and economic forces that reshaped them. The second half focuses on pre-revolutionary petitions from the guilds, which illustrate dramatically the different ways in which guildsmen and women interpreted the rules of gender in the corporate order. The guildswomen's distinctive perspective reflected their history, experience, and changing currents of economic thought.