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. However, de Beauvoir proposed that women’s oppression was more far-reaching than what reforms could mend and that the moral and political stakes of sexism and patriarchy were more pressing than previously conceived. Her analysis influenced modern second-wave feminists, most notably its radical wing who, following de Beauvoir, called for a complete reorganization of the social and symbolic orders. These feminists began to apprehend patriarchy’s influence in locations beyond law, rights, and the family and sought to interpret and grapple with these newfound politicized sites which de Beauvoir helped uncover. Today, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites The Second Sex as one of the hundred most important works of the 20th century.
Despite the work’s influence however, Belle finds that The Second Sex does not do justice by all women as it fails to capture the sexist oppression of Black women and other women of color under racist and colonial systems. In her classic work, de Beauvoir does treat issues like biology, mothering, and psychology as factors behind women’s plight, but she does not treat racism nor the colonial experience as essential to women’s condition. According to Belle, this flouts the lived experience of most of the world’s women and proves what de Beauvoir maintains as a general account of women’s plight is a more limited thesis most responsive to the history and lives of white women in western nations. Belle contends that other black feminists have advanced related criticisms of The Second Sex but that this literature has fallen on deafened ears. Belle argues that the quest for a more general philosophical account of women’s oppression thus calls for more engagements with black and decolonial feminists who have theorized the workings of multiple systems of oppression—racism, capitalism, and colonialism—in the lives of women. Beauvoir and Belle seeks to show how de Beauvoir and black feminists conceive women’s oppression disparately and to criticize how de Beauvoir’s conception marginalizes Black women and other women of color in feminist thought.
Belle’s book is divided into three parts, eight chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. In the ‘Introduction’, Belle recounts the efforts of feminist philosophers to promote the work of de Beauvoir in philosophy. She argues that the sheer struggle behind such efforts have left some feminist philosophers apathetic to criticisms about de Beauvoir’s exclusions of Black women and other women of color. De Beauvoir scholars commonly defend her omissions by claiming that feminist concerns with difference is a presentist issue postdating de Beauvoir. But to the contrary, Belle shows how such themes recurred in the thought and writings of Black women intellectuals who were contemporaries of de Beauvoir in the United States and the French colony Martinique. Belle promises to show how these thinkers developed more inclusive conceptions of women’s oppression, accounting for the situation of women under multiple systems of domination.
Part 1 is dedicated to conceptual differences between de Beauvoir and black feminists. Chapter 1 stresses these differences, presenting a history of black feminist thought spanning from the 18th to late 20th centuries. This history cites concepts that black feminist thinkers have developed and used to conceive how women are affected under racism and other oppressive systems. Belle chronicles and explains concepts like ‘super exploitation’, ‘double jeopardy’, ‘interlocking systems of oppression’, and ‘intersectionality’ (60). She builds a solid case for their merits, but she does not delve deep enough into their differences. On one hand, these concepts all posit that systems of domination can interact in compounding ways and ways that combine to engender hybrid systems (e.g., misogynoir, heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, etc.). But at the same time, they disagree on how these systems interact and what their relations are. For example, are these systems co-articulated? Is sexism a symptom of capitalism like the jeopardy approach maintains? These approaches are patently black feminist, and they do differ from de Beauvoir’s as Belle contends. But they also retain differences which do not come across when these concepts are presented in an evolutionary sense. Perhaps, Chapter 1 could have delved deeper and informed the unwitting reader of these subtle nuances were its treatment limited to the concepts intersectionality and interlocking oppressions. These concepts are singled out since they are the ones drawn on most heavily in Belle’s later analysis.
Chapters 2-4 show how Black women intellectuals have engaged The Second Sex over time. This is both a neglected topic in feminist philosophy and one that careens back to underscore Belle’s contentions about de Beauvoir and de Beauvoir scholarship. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the Pan African communist activist Claudia Jones. It recounts her successful efforts to prevent a negative review of The Second Sex from appearing in the Marxist paper Masses & Mainstream as well as her subsequent efforts to get a more positive one published in the Worker in 1954. In this chapter, Belle expertly contrasts The Second Sex with Jones’ most famous essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Women” (1949). This essay is a strategic import on Belle’s part for two reasons. First, it is published in the same year as The Second Sex and paints a disparate picture of women’s plight. Second, it shows that contemporaries of de Beauvoir did indeed consider race, capitalism, and empire as more serious affronts to women than she did, undermining a core claim of her defenders.
Chapter 3 discusses writer Lorraine Hansberry’s important review essay ‘Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary’ (1957). Hansberry believed that the situation of women was ill-conceived which led her to praise the release of The Second Sex, labelling it ‘perhaps the most important work of this century’ (114). Nevertheless, Hansberry questions de Beauvoir’s ability to account for the development of capitalism and its relationship to women’s oppression. She criticizes de Beauvoir’s reliance on existentialism and recommends for both a better characterization of Marxist historical materialism and that it be applied in lieu of existentialism in several areas of the text. Hansberry’s chapter lends concrete support behind Belle’s assertion that the issue of multiple systems of oppression has been a key theme in black feminist thinking on The Second Sex.
Chapter 4 discusses Audre Lorde’s ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ first delivered September 1979 at the conference ‘The Second Sex—Thirty Years Later’. In the essay, Lorde criticizes the second-wave feminist movement that de Beauvoir helped shape. She argues that Black, lesbian, and Third World women are excluded from its concept of liberation. There is a strong sense of synergy between Lorde’s thesis here and the analysis Belle develops throughout the next three chapters. While Lorde challenges feminist exclusions, Belle’s analysis shows how these exclusions flow logically from de Beauvoir’s conception of woman’s oppression which Belle criticizes in Part 2.
Part 2 is where Belle begins to critically analyze de Beauvoir directly. Like many feminists of her day, de Beauvoir conceived patriarchy as a nameless problem. These feminists witnessed public opinion turning against abuses like racial segregation and pondered why similar outrages failed to materialize against sexist abuse. To stress this contradiction, de Beauvoir and countless feminists appealed to noted forms of oppression to underscore the similar oppressive workings of sexism. However, Belle believes that this tactic laid the ground for exclusions of Black women and women of color in feminist thought.
Chapters 5-7 critically delves into these appeals. Chapter 5 focuses on de Beauvoir’s appeals to the wrong of racism to underscore the wrong of sexist oppression. De Beauvoir contends that there ‘are deep analogies between the situations of women and blacks’ which make these appeals appropriate (170). For example, she argues that both classes are imprisoned underneath imposed stereotypes. She writes that white men ‘praise … the carefree, childlike, merry soul of the resigned black’ and simultaneously impose the stereotype of the ‘frivolous, infantile, irresponsible’ woman (170). For Belle, however, these are stereotypes historically imposed on white women. Traditionally, Black women were deemed wayward, laboring, and promiscuous. By only considering stereotypes commonly imposed on white women, this shows how de Beauvoir assumes the normativity of white women when she construes women’s plight. Belle argues that such conceptions lay the groundwork for the exclusion of Black women and women of color in feminism. Belle’s case is compelling and cleverly developed here. She supports it with copious examples from The Second Sex.
Chapter 6 turns to de Beauvoir’s appeals to the wrong of slavery to reveal the wrong of sexist oppression. De Beauvoir argues that women are enslaved by men and their reproductive functions as both subordinate women to the will of an external other. Importantly, however, de Beauvoir believes women’s slavery is more absolute and thus more grave, because unlike chattel slaves, women typically do not apprehend their enslavement. Belle worries that this conception diverts attention away from the oppression of enslaved Black women and ranks the harm of sexist oppression above racial oppression. This thinking can lead feminist analysis to focus on sexism to the exclusion of racial and colonial abuses pertinent to Black women and other women of color. This chapter shows while rhetorically understandable, analytically, de Beauvoir’s appeals have lost much of their profitability.
Chapter 7 focuses on de Beauvoir’s analysis of the tensions between the abolitionist and suffrage movements in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. De Beauvoir maintains that women’s suffragists were blindsided when, following their support of emancipation, they were excluded from the 15th amendment which gave formerly enslaved men the right to vote, thus revealing society’s comfort with sexist abuse. Belle’s chapter recounts Black women’s political leadership in this era as well as their efforts to forge coalitions between the two poles of the suffrage movement. She argues that de Beauvoir excluded this history from her account, showing a lack of concern with Black women and other women of color. This chapter’s thesis may read more reiterative than constructive as it supplies more evidence for Belle’s claims without developing them in any new direction.
Chapter 8 fares similarly. Here, Belle analyzes passages in The Second Sex where de Beauvoir maintains that the evolution of freedom in the West has enabled white western women to develop feminist consciousness while women in the Global South suffer under despotism, superstition, and backwardness. There is a general sense that de Beauvoir believes such suffering is culturally determined. For Belle, this arouses worries about cultural imperialism as westernizing appears to be de Beauvoir’s remedy for this situation. Belle performs a sweeping overview of feminist responses to de Beauvoir’s orientalism. She shows how Latin American, African, Asian and other feminists of color have contested The Second Sex’s mythmaking about women in the Global South, challenging their construction in the text as unfree subjects. This chapter reinforces Belle’s main claims and treats the reader to unsung authors in feminist philosophy, but its underlying thesis can read reiterative as stated before.
This leads to Belle’s Conclusion, where she acknowledges the legacy and continued significance of The Second Sex. However, she urges that its exclusions must be reckoned with and that feminists must commit themselves to fighting the exclusions of Black women and other women of color in feminist movements and thinking. She argues that this can be facilitated by appreciating identity politics and embracing intersectional philosophy. Belle believes the former is a resource for coalition building as it rationalizes why single movements can contain multiple priorities. She believes the latter will sensitize feminist actors to systems of oppression beyond sexism. But in doing so, there is a slight concern that Belle is treating these black feminist concepts as if they intrinsically reinforce one another by virtue of emanating from the same tradition. This is debatable as Crenshaw’s landmark 1991 conception of intersectionality offers a critique of identity politics, claiming that the concept ‘frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences’. Belle ought to defend why they are compatible or at least, why Crenshaw is mistaken.
Overall, Belle and Beauvoir represents an important addition to the small but growing area of black feminist philosophy. Those familiar with intersectionality or black feminism are likely to be familiar with Belle’s sort of analysis and the spirit of her main claims. Her commendable efforts to recover and promote Black women’s manifold but neglected responses to The Second Sex are bound to dazzle.
That said, amidst growing criticisms of intersectionality, it would have been enlightening for Belle to inform readers how her analysis averts the putative limitations of this approach (if it does). While Belle rightfully challenges de Beauvoir’s appeals in her efforts to condemn sexism, like other women of their day, Belle’s account does reveal Black women intellectuals like Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, and Lorraine Hansberry making these sorts of appeals to underscore women’s plight. For example, during The Great Depression, streets like Simpson Avenue in the Bronx became hubs where Black women domestic workers gathered to sell their services to middle class families for pithy wages. In a famous essay, Baker and Cooke dub this exploitative trade ‘The Bronx Slave Market’ (1935), thus drawing a parallel between Black women’s exploited labor during and post enslavement. Does Belle find their analogy to be a more conscientious example feminist thinkers can model? If so, a chapter devoted to these black feminist analogies could have been profitable in some of the more reiterative areas.
Belle and Beauvoir proves to be a much needed contribution on a neglected topic. Importantly, it comes at a time when theorists are calling for both greater conceptual clarity on how systems like capitalism and racism interact as well a return to the thought of Black women Marxists and communists.