1. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 23.
2. In intellectual history, the concept of ‘gender’, as a tool is not unequivocal. It has allowed us to reflect on the historical construction of masculine and feminine gender roles and to recover women intellectuals as the ‘Second Sex’ from anonymity and occultation in the intellectual field, with the conviction that relationships between men and women intellectuals will form the basis of a future study of intellectuals. Nicole Racine in L’Histoire des intellectuels aujourd’hui ed. by Michel Leymarie and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), 2003, pp. 341–363 (p. 362).
3. Susan P. Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830–60 (Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press), 1987, p. 7 quoted in
4. Elaine Showalter, ‘Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium’, Women: A Cultural Review, 11 (2000), 131–138 (p. 132).
5. Racine and Trebitsch wonder why this may be so: ‘L’activité intellectuelle de Beauvoir, trop souvent réduite à sa théorisation du féminisme, ne mériterait-elle pas d’être étudiée en elle-même, tout comme ses engagements politiques spécifiques?’ ‘Doesn’t Beauvoir’s intellectual activity, too often reduced to her theorisation of feminism, deserve to be studied in its own right, just as her specific political commitments?’ Nicole Racine and Michel Trebitsch (eds), Intellectuelles: du genre en histoire des intellectuelles (Brussels: Complexe, 2004), p. 25.