by NAOMI SIMMONS-THORNE
Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex by Kathryn Sophia Belle (Oxford University Press, New York, 2024. 376 pp.
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.
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