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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEAUVOIR AND BELLE: A BLACK FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE SECOND SEX  
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Naomi Simmons-Thorne
August 29, 2024
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ Reviewer Simmons-Thorne this book aims to show "how de Beauvoir and
black feminists conceive women’s oppression disparately and to
criticize how de Beauvoir’s conception marginalizes Black women and
other women of color in feminist thought." _

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_Beauvoir and Belle
A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex_
Kathryn Sophia Belle
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197660201

Professional philosophy has not been kind to Black women. This fact is
partly reflected by the perturbingly small number of Black women who
have _ever_ earned PhDs in the discipline (somewhere near 50 in the
U.S.). It is also reflected by the small (but growing) number of
philosophical works authored by Black women or focused on our
philosophical contributions. Far from contesting it, such anecdotes
merely support the assertion of Marx and Engels in _The German
Ideology_ that ‘the class which is the ruling material force of
society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’. The
exclusion of Black women in philosophy thus also says something about
the overall power structure of our society. It shows the continued
reach of race, class, and gender segregation within the superstructure
and the influence of these forces on the field of philosophy.

Such discriminatory legacies serve as a backdrop to _Beauvoir and
Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of the Second Sex_. Kathryn Sophia
Belle takes up black feminist thinkers and their efforts to
conceptualize how multiple systems of domination – especially
sexism, racism, and capitalism –interact and converge to marginalize
Black women and other minorities. Alongside black feminist thought on
the oppression of women, Belle takes up philosopher Simone de
Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex _(1949) which famously shaped modern
feminist conceptions of these issues. Once discounted as a mere
novelist and interpreter of Sartre, feminist philosophers, with great
effort, have helped promote de Beauvoir and her works to their
rightful place in the history of philosophy. Considered her magnum
opus, _The Second Sex _is famous for its existentialist account of the
nature of sexism and oppression, the historical and contemporary
plight of women, and the virtues and limits of past efforts to
interpret patriarchy in psychoanalysis and Marxist historical
materialism. _The Second Sex_ is considered a groundbreaking work for
influencing a generation of feminist thinking and giving the issue of
sexism its most extensive philosophical treatment upon its release.

Before de Beauvoir, philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart
Mill, and Friedrich Engels helped form and shape the aims of the
women’s liberation movement in the 19th century. De Beauvoir’s
monograph arrived in 1949 when many felt that feminism was stalling
after women attained suffrage in liberal democracies and believed that
the movement therefore was ultimately fated to end as an important but
limited reformist development. However, de Beauvoir proposed that
women’s oppression was more far-reaching than what reforms could
mend and that the moral and political stakes of sexism and patriarchy
were more pressing than previously conceived. Her analysis influenced
modern second-wave feminists, most notably its radical wing who,
following de Beauvoir, called for a complete reorganization of the
social and symbolic orders. These feminists began to apprehend
patriarchy’s influence in locations beyond law, rights, and the
family and sought to interpret and grapple with these newfound
politicized sites which de Beauvoir helped uncover. Today, the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites_ The Second Sex _as one of
the hundred most important works of the 20th century.

Despite the work’s influence however, Belle finds that _The Second
Sex_ does not do justice by all women as it fails to capture the
sexist oppression of Black women and other women of color under racist
and colonial systems. In her classic work, de Beauvoir does treat
issues like biology, mothering, and psychology as factors behind
women’s plight, but she does not treat racism nor the colonial
experience as essential to women’s condition. According to Belle,
this flouts the lived experience of most of the world’s women and
proves what de Beauvoir maintains as a general account of women’s
plight is a more limited thesis most responsive to the history and
lives of white women in western nations. Belle contends that other
black feminists have advanced related criticisms of _The Second Sex
_but that this literature has fallen on deafened ears. Belle argues
that the quest for a more general philosophical account of women’s
oppression thus calls for more engagements with black and decolonial
feminists who have theorized the workings of multiple systems of
oppression—racism, capitalism, and colonialism—in the lives of
women. _Beauvoir and Belle _seeks to show how de Beauvoir and black
feminists conceive women’s oppression disparately and to criticize
how de Beauvoir’s conception marginalizes Black women and other
women of color in feminist thought.

Belle’s book is divided into three parts, eight chapters, an
introduction, and a conclusion. In the ‘Introduction’, Belle
recounts the efforts of feminist philosophers to promote the work of
de Beauvoir in philosophy. She argues that the sheer struggle behind
such efforts have left some feminist philosophers apathetic to
criticisms about de Beauvoir’s exclusions of Black women and other
women of color. De Beauvoir scholars commonly defend her omissions by
claiming that feminist concerns with difference is a presentist issue
postdating de Beauvoir. But to the contrary, Belle shows how such
themes recurred in the thought and writings of Black women
intellectuals who were contemporaries of de Beauvoir in the United
States and the French colony Martinique. Belle promises to show how
these thinkers developed more inclusive conceptions of women’s
oppression, accounting for the situation of women under multiple
systems of domination.

Part 1 is dedicated to conceptual differences between de Beauvoir and
black feminists. Chapter 1 stresses these differences, presenting a
history of black feminist thought spanning from the 18th to late 20th
centuries. This history cites concepts that black feminist thinkers
have developed and used to conceive how women are affected under
racism and other oppressive systems. Belle chronicles and explains
concepts like ‘super exploitation’, ‘double jeopardy’,
‘interlocking systems of oppression’, and ‘intersectionality’
(60). She builds a solid case for their merits, but she does not delve
deep enough into their differences. On one hand, these concepts all
posit that systems of domination can interact in compounding ways and
ways that combine to engender hybrid systems (e.g., misogynoir,
heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, etc.). But at the same time, they
disagree on _how_ these systems interact and what their relations are.
For example, are these systems co-articulated? Is sexism a symptom of
capitalism like the jeopardy approach maintains? These approaches are
patently black feminist, and they do differ from de Beauvoir’s as
Belle contends. But they also retain differences which do not come
across when these concepts are presented in an evolutionary sense.
Perhaps, Chapter 1 could have delved deeper and informed the unwitting
reader of these subtle nuances were its treatment limited to the
concepts intersectionality and interlocking oppressions. These
concepts are singled out since they are the ones drawn on most heavily
in Belle’s later analysis.

Chapters 2-4 show how Black women intellectuals have engaged _The
Second Sex _over time. This is both a neglected topic in feminist
philosophy and one that careens back to underscore Belle’s
contentions about de Beauvoir and de Beauvoir scholarship. Chapter 2
is dedicated to the Pan African communist activist Claudia Jones. It
recounts her successful efforts to prevent a negative review of _The
Second Sex _from appearing in the Marxist paper _Masses & Mainstream
_as well as her subsequent efforts to get a more positive one
published in the _Worker _in 1954. In this chapter, Belle expertly
contrasts _The Second Sex _with Jones’ most famous essay “An End
to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Women” (1949). This
essay is a strategic import on Belle’s part for two reasons. First,
it is published in the same year as _The Second Sex _and paints a
disparate picture of women’s plight. Second, it shows that
contemporaries of de Beauvoir did indeed consider race, capitalism,
and empire as more serious affronts to women than she did, undermining
a core claim of her defenders.

Chapter 3 discusses writer Lorraine Hansberry’s important review
essay ‘Simone de Beauvoir and _The Second Sex_: An American
Commentary’ (1957). Hansberry believed that the situation of women
was ill-conceived which led her to praise the release of _The Second
Sex_, labelling it ‘perhaps the most important work of this
century’ (114). Nevertheless, Hansberry questions de Beauvoir’s
ability to account for the development of capitalism and its
relationship to women’s oppression. She criticizes de Beauvoir’s
reliance on existentialism and recommends for both a better
characterization of Marxist historical materialism and that it be
applied in lieu of existentialism in several areas of the text.
Hansberry’s chapter lends concrete support behind Belle’s
assertion that the issue of multiple systems of oppression has been a
key theme in black feminist thinking on _The Second Sex_.

Chapter 4 discusses Audre Lorde’s ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master’s House’ first delivered September 1979 at
the conference ‘_The Second Sex_—Thirty Years Later’. In the
essay, Lorde criticizes the second-wave feminist movement that de
Beauvoir helped shape. She argues that Black, lesbian, and Third World
women are excluded from its concept of liberation. There is a strong
sense of synergy between Lorde’s thesis here and the analysis Belle
develops throughout the next three chapters. While Lorde challenges
feminist exclusions, Belle’s analysis shows how these exclusions
flow logically from de Beauvoir’s conception of woman’s oppression
which Belle criticizes in Part 2.

Part 2 is where Belle begins to critically analyze de Beauvoir
directly. Like many feminists of her day, de Beauvoir conceived
patriarchy as a nameless problem. These feminists witnessed public
opinion turning against abuses like racial segregation and pondered
why similar outrages failed to materialize against sexist abuse. To
stress this contradiction, de Beauvoir and countless feminists
appealed to noted forms of oppression to underscore the similar
oppressive workings of sexism. However, Belle believes that this
tactic laid the ground for exclusions of Black women and women of
color in feminist thought.

Chapters 5-7 critically delves into these appeals. Chapter 5 focuses
on de Beauvoir’s appeals to the wrong of racism to underscore the
wrong of sexist oppression. De Beauvoir contends that there ‘are
deep analogies between the situations of women and blacks’ which
make these appeals appropriate (170). For example, she argues that
both classes are imprisoned underneath imposed stereotypes. She writes
that white men ‘praise … the carefree, childlike, merry soul of
the resigned black’ and simultaneously impose the stereotype of the
‘frivolous, infantile, irresponsible’ woman (170). For Belle,
however, these are stereotypes historically imposed on white women.
Traditionally, Black women were deemed wayward, laboring, and
promiscuous. By only considering stereotypes commonly imposed on white
women, this shows how de Beauvoir assumes the normativity of white
women when she construes women’s plight. Belle argues that such
conceptions lay the groundwork for the exclusion of Black women and
women of color in feminism. Belle’s case is compelling and cleverly
developed here. She supports it with copious examples from _The Second
Sex_.

Chapter 6 turns to de Beauvoir’s appeals to the wrong of slavery to
reveal the wrong of sexist oppression. De Beauvoir argues that women
are enslaved by men and their reproductive functions as both
subordinate women to the will of an external other. Importantly,
however, de Beauvoir believes women’s slavery is more absolute and
thus more grave, because unlike chattel slaves, women typically do not
apprehend their enslavement. Belle worries that this conception
diverts attention away from the oppression of enslaved Black women and
ranks the harm of sexist oppression above racial oppression. This
thinking can lead feminist analysis to focus on sexism to the
exclusion of racial and colonial abuses pertinent to Black women and
other women of color. This chapter shows while rhetorically
understandable, analytically, de Beauvoir’s appeals have lost much
of their profitability.

Chapter 7 focuses on de Beauvoir’s analysis of the tensions between
the abolitionist and suffrage movements in the United States during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. De Beauvoir maintains that
women’s suffragists were blindsided when, following their support of
emancipation, they were excluded from the 15th amendment which gave
formerly enslaved men the right to vote, thus revealing society’s
comfort with sexist abuse. Belle’s chapter recounts Black women’s
political leadership in this era as well as their efforts to forge
coalitions between the two poles of the suffrage movement. She argues
that de Beauvoir excluded this history from her account, showing a
lack of concern with Black women and other women of color. This
chapter’s thesis may read more reiterative than constructive as it
supplies more evidence for Belle’s claims without developing them in
any new direction.

Chapter 8 fares similarly. Here, Belle analyzes passages in _The
Second Sex _where de Beauvoir maintains that the evolution of freedom
in the West has enabled white western women to develop feminist
consciousness while women in the Global South suffer under despotism,
superstition, and backwardness. There is a general sense that de
Beauvoir believes such suffering is culturally determined. For Belle,
this arouses worries about cultural imperialism as westernizing
appears to be de Beauvoir’s remedy for this situation. Belle
performs a sweeping overview of feminist responses to de Beauvoir’s
orientalism. She shows how Latin American, African, Asian and other
feminists of color have contested _The Second Sex_’s mythmaking
about women in the Global South, challenging their construction in the
text as unfree subjects. This chapter reinforces Belle’s main claims
and treats the reader to unsung authors in feminist philosophy, but
its underlying thesis can read reiterative as stated before.

This leads to Belle’s Conclusion, where she acknowledges the legacy
and continued significance of _The Second Sex_. However, she urges
that its exclusions must be reckoned with and that feminists must
commit themselves to fighting the exclusions of Black women and other
women of color in feminist movements and thinking. She argues that
this can be facilitated by appreciating identity politics and
embracing intersectional philosophy. Belle believes the former is a
resource for coalition building as it rationalizes why single
movements can contain multiple priorities. She believes the latter
will sensitize feminist actors to systems of oppression beyond sexism.
But in doing so, there is a slight concern that Belle is treating
these black feminist concepts as if they intrinsically reinforce one
another by virtue of emanating from the same tradition. This is
debatable as Crenshaw’s landmark 1991 conception of
intersectionality offers a critique of identity politics, claiming
that the concept ‘frequently conflates or ignores intragroup
differences’. Belle ought to defend why they are compatible or at
least, why Crenshaw is mistaken.

Overall, _Belle and Beauvoir _represents an important addition to the
small but growing area of black feminist philosophy. Those familiar
with intersectionality or black feminism are likely to be familiar
with Belle’s sort of analysis and the spirit of her main claims. Her
commendable efforts to recover and promote Black women’s manifold
but neglected responses to _The Second Sex _are bound to dazzle.

That said, amidst growing criticisms of intersectionality, it would
have been enlightening for Belle to inform readers how her analysis
averts the putative limitations of this approach (if it does). While
Belle rightfully challenges de Beauvoir’s appeals in her efforts to
condemn sexism, like other women of their day, Belle’s account does
reveal Black women intellectuals like Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, and
Lorraine Hansberry making these sorts of appeals to underscore
women’s plight. For example, during The Great Depression, streets
like Simpson Avenue in the Bronx became hubs where Black women
domestic workers gathered to sell their services to middle class
families for pithy wages.  In a famous essay, Baker and Cooke dub
this exploitative trade ‘The Bronx Slave Market’ (1935), thus
drawing a parallel between Black women’s exploited labor during and
post enslavement. Does Belle find their analogy to be a more
conscientious example feminist thinkers can model? If so, a chapter
devoted to these black feminist analogies could have been profitable
in some of the more reiterative areas.

_Belle and Beauvoir_ proves to be a much needed contribution on a
neglected topic. Importantly, it comes at a time when theorists are
calling for both greater conceptual clarity on how systems like
capitalism and racism interact as well a return to the thought of
Black women Marxists and communists.

Naomi Simmons-Thorne is a second-year PhD student at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a Doctoral Merit Fellow of the
Graduate College and the recipient of the Cheryl A. Wall Prize. Naomi
studies Africana and continental philosophy, education, and black
feminist studies. She has forthcoming work in _Hypatia_.

* Philosophy
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* Black feminism
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* Simone de Beauvoir
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* The Second Sex
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