I go back to my seat.
Until the plane touches down in New York, this is all I think about
A Festive Banquet
Simone de Beauvoir, even more than fifty years after her death, remains a diva in the history of the feminist movement. At her funeral in 1956, thousands of mourners heard an unforgettable phrase: "Women, you owe her everything" — a phrase that says a lot about her charisma and legendary heritage. You may not agree with everything she said, you may not even like her personality, but you cannot turn a blind eye to her work or intellectual legacy.
"One is not born a woman, but becomes one," she stated famously. For centuries girls were taught that their most important roles in life were sexuality, childbearing and motherhood. Armed with the small task of ensuring the continuation of the human race, young women were rarely, if ever, encouraged to pursue their studies and make more of their talents. In the France of the 1940s, motherhood was almost a religious duty, unquestionable and sacrosanct. Simone de Beauvoir knew what she was talking about, being raised by a staunch Catholic mother.
Waging a passionate war against bourgeois norms, she questioned the institutions of marriage and motherhood at great length. She said many women longed to rediscover themselves in their children — a "psychological need" she clearly did not share. She and Sartre were a committed but free couple — independent, self-reliant and sufficient for each other. Bourgeois marital life was full of lies, deceptions and unrealistic pledges of fidelity. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of their parents, they had made a pact: They would tell each other everything. They were both open to the idea of "experiencing contingent love affairs." Besides, she believed that maternity was incompatible with the life she had chosen as a writer and intellectual. She needed time, concentration and freedom to pursue her ideals.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir reiterates Hegel's famous dictum that the birth of children often goes hand in hand with the death of parents. Yet, despite her strong feelings on marriage and motherhood, de Beauvoir's writings bear traces of another truth underneath: that if Sartre had wanted to have children, in her desire to please him she could have become a mother. She adored him. To her the sun of a new society rose from the depths of his eyes. He was the only man she respected more than she desired — the man whose time, work and ideas she had had to share with hundreds of other people, some of whom were women far more beautiful and ambitious than she was. And yet she knew how special she was in his eyes. Since the day their paths intersected in 1929 when they were both students at the Ecole Normale Superieure, he had been many things to her — a comrade, a lover, a father, a son, a brother, a tutor, a best friend and an impossible dream.
One should not be fooled by the terms of endearment she uses in her letters to him: "my little man," or "my dear little being." He was a giant to her — a man she addressed with the formal vous all the time. If he had wanted to start a family, she would have probably gone ahead, even though she clearly thought that motherhood was not meant for the likes of her. Though she was hurt by Sartre's infidelities, she continued to defend the pact they had made. Simone de Beauvoir was a woman of impeccable analyses and unexpected conflicts.
If the broader society was not ready to address motherhood in a critical light, the intellectual circles — by definition progressive and open-minded — were just as unprepared, not to mention disproportionately male. There was a widespread silence in the world of books when it came to issues such as premenstrual syndrome, postpartum depression or menopause. Likewise, hardly anyone wrote about the Bermuda triangle of "ideal wife — diligent housekeeper — selfless mother" whereby so many women's creative talents disappeared into the vortex
In a milieu such as this de Beauvoir faced deeply rooted prejudices and cliches. She wrote and spoke fervently on how women were being "forced to choose" between the brain and the body.
She was equally critical of those women who had willingly internalized gender inequalities, seeing themselves as inferior to their male counterparts. "Even the lowliest of men sees himself a demi-God when faced with a woman," she remarked. Her mind was corrosive, her pen was sharp and her personality was highly contentious. Once she said she found it quite normal that many people among the middle class hated her. "If it were any other way, I would begin to doubt myself."
It wasn't only Western feminists who questioned the romanticized sacredness of motherhood. In the East, too, there were heated debates. The Japanese feminist movement opened up the term bosei—the natural motherly instinct — for discussion. They put forth the claim that maternal roles were more cultural than natural and biological.
Female writers in Japan brought new blood to these debates, questioning gender stereotypes through their fiction. In 1983 Yuko Tsushima published Child of Fortune, which features a remarkable female protagonist — a headstrong, nonconformist divorcee — torn between the realities of her heart and the ideal of womanhood taught by society. Although she doesn't necessarily consider herself a feminist writer, Tsushima has critically explored themes of gender and sexuality in her works. Perhaps she is spiritually connected with another Japanese author of the past century, Toshiko Tamura — one of the country's earliest, most outspoken female writers — whose royalties, after her sudden death in 1945, were used to establish a literary prize for women writers. In a story titled "A Woman Writer," Tamura describes a scene where an angry husband, himself a writer, reprimands his wife, who is struggling to write a passage. The husband believes women are not good writers. They are indecisive and insecure, wasting a hundred pages to write only ten. His words reiterate the belief that men write for more serious and sublime reasons, and are therefore earnest writers, whereas for women writing is merely a hobby.
There is a similarly influential woman writer in Turkish literature whose unique voice continues to echo today, long after her passing. In the antagonistic environment of the 1970s, when the country was divided between leftists and rightists, Sevgi Soysal questioned, in clever, flowing prose, patriarchal precedents on all sides.
She was the writer of women dangling on the threshold — between sanity and insanity, society and the individual, setting the table and walking away, endless self-sacrifice and impromptu selfishness. . She created female characters who straddled the divide between living for others and following their hearts. One of her unforgettable fictional characters is Tante Rosa:
Tante Rosa left a letter behind. She left three children, one of them still on the bottle, a recipe for roasted goose and apple pie, and instructions on how to clean the table cloth for the maid whom she had also taught the art of arranging shelves. She left a little garden with marigolds, a house with a wooden staircase, high ceilings, and a grandfather clock; a husband who went to church every Sunday morning, and crawled into her bed every Sunday afternoon; neighbors who had big, bright hats, snot-nosed children, their own husbands and roasted goose. . She left her left breast behind, the breast that covered her heart. And walked away.
Soysal's female characters are, for all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the "ideal women" of Turkish society. Hers are women who make mistakes, stumble on their path and hurt their knees, and yet, each time, somehow manage to pull themselves together.
In another novel, she writes about a woman named Oya, who is deeply fragmented in her desires and obligations.