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“... icons but a very personal pantheon, composed (Diana and one or two others apart) of femmes de lettres in Showalter’s mould rather than of grassroots political activists, as we used to call those who preferred getting things done to talking about them. Figures familiar from other popular histories of feminism appear – Margaret Fuller, Charlotte ...”

“... watching a horror movie – involved but powerless, transfixed by uncontrollable events. As Simone deBeauvoir once quaintly put it, ‘when I go into a cinema, my praxis is paralysed.’ Many films resemble dreams or nightmares: many directors are Luna-park sorcerers, turning the spectator into a spellbound ...”

“... Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. But two of them had a crack at the earlier work of Simone deBeauvoir. Mary McCarthy pointed out waspishly that the great Parisienne was no more than an appendage to Sartre. Elizabeth Hardwick took a higher tone, at least as sarcastically described by Lowell, who wrote in ...”

“... be no other book so loved by one sex and ignored by the other. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone deBeauvoir writes: ‘There was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ... I identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual ... She wrote; in ...”

“... bondage in the recreational sense and, aside from a few pages at the end about Julia Kristeva and Simone deBeauvoir, was mostly indifferent to questions of sexuality. It is sexual politics that has generated Butler’s present celebrity, however, which no doubt helps explain the republication of the Hegel book ...”

“... book pushes the years of French theory back to the aftermath of the Second World War (Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty) and in doing so weaves a personal biography into its intellectual history. Jameson’s first book was on Sartre; he regarded himself as a ‘more-than-former-Sartrean’ and was inclined to overrate Being and ...”

“... periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although Simone Weil pushed bravely past her sinus headaches, working in the fields and organising worker protests, and writing her ...”

“... Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and Blanchot. With Lewis Carroll, it was love at first sight, but the infatuation was short-lived: humour was not Duras’s strong point. She laughed a lot, it is ...”

“... more alike than they were, for they were united by a common enemy: existentialism. Sartre and Beauvoir and their adherents dominated the immediate postwar period in France. The new writers and theorists would have to slay the existentialist dragon. They accused the existentialists of embracing a naive view of language and equally naive ideas about freedom ...”

“... libertarian liberals but by some feminist thinkers, might be to take individualism more seriously. Simone deBeauvoir and Shulamith Firestone both argued that if women are prevented by their traditional domestic roles and intimate ties from enjoying equal rights and citizenship, then these ties should be severed. Birth ...”

“... existentialists who seem to be their intellectual predecessors. They are not the daughters of Simone deBeauvoir, shaping their lives through determined acts of will. Instead, they grapple with an unstable sense of self, their certainty easily swayed by whoever is nearby. They want to escape the dysfunction and ...”

“... with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone deBeauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a ...”

“... a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up to the needs of a younger protégée it is de rigueur nowadays for the latter to rage in print at the cruelty of her faithless idol. Mommie Dearest (1978), Christina Crawford’s high-kitsch account of her wretched childhood with her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, is the archetype here – the first and ...”

“... the daughter, or even granddaughter generation. She inevitably regards McCarthy’s tours de force in exposing the bad faith of the radicals of the Thirties and Forties with some ambivalence: ‘By withholding pity, by honouring the weight and worth of convention in American life, McCarthy uncovers a deeper truth about the way in which American ...”

“... be ranked? As a profession? As domestic science? As art and mystery? A ‘torture of Sisyphus’ (Simone deBeauvoir)? A sanitarian crusade? A divinely ordained form of drudgery? An unpaid, male-imposed scam? A therapy that expands the chest while allowing the stressed mind to freewheel? Or was it, and is it, just the ...”