Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract Conclusion, “Simone de Beauvoir: ‘I think The Second Sex will seem like an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless . . . a book which will have made its contribution’ ” takes up interviews with Beauvoir about The Second Sex and how her relationship to the text evolved over time (between 1974 and 1979). In a 1976 interview with John Gerassi (“Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex Twenty-Five Years Later”), she acknowledges the limits of the text and says that if a project like that were to be done again it should be a collaborative effort with different women speaking from their own lived experiences and situations. Unfortunately, she goes on to undermine this important insight when she also asserts that Black women in America should be listening to white women instead of supporting Black men: “It is the same in America, where black women refused to listen to the women’s liberation movement proselytizers because they were white. Such black women remained supportive of their black husbands despite the exploitation, simply because the person trying to make them aware of the exploitation were white.”1 Thus, in one of the few instances in which Beauvoir takes up Black women in the United States, she assumes we are ignorant of our own oppression and should be enlightened by white women liberators to raise our consciousness about our situation. The conclusion revisits Audre Lorde, specifically her “Open Letter to Mary Daly” and its implications for Beauvoir and The Second Sex. The conclusion also revisits identity politics and intersectionality as coalitional practices, comes back to Maria Lugones on decolonial feminisms and coalition, and closes with (or rather opens up to) Mariana Ortega’s call for coalitional politics and a praxis of intersectional philosophy.