Adventures of feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographies, women's liberation, and self-fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoret ical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often thr ough her autobiographies - especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Pr ime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins - that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly ab sorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashio ning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated tha t a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their id entity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies w hich suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere sloga n, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascin ating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-r eading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examinati on of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and fina lly by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.