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Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Feminist Review. www.jstor.org ® 116 Feminist Review While the autobiographical sections of Call me Woman are vivid and alive with Ellen Kuzwayo's emo- tional and moral strength, the parts of the book which attempt an analysis of the condition of African women in South Africa, and a description of the broad effects of apartheid, are very sketchy. They detract from the book's main themes. There is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that the experiences of the educated African classes are the experiences of all the African people, and there is a jarringly naive faith in the work of the Urban Foundation, a group of influential financiers who since 1976 have worked to co-opt middle- class Africans to accept minor changes in the status quo. Ellen Kuzwayo tells her own history, but it cannot be, and is not, Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin Mary Evans Tavistock London an{l New York 1985 ISBN0422 795100£4.95Pbk This is a stimulating, sometimes passionate and witty book. It is also bleak and contradictory. Mary Evans examines each area of Simone de Beauvoir's work; her values, her politics, her ideas and her fiction. She is particularly illuminating on how the existential- ist code of freedom, freewheeling as it did above material and historical conditions, fell apart, or caused its protagonists to fall apart, when it became a rationale for new forms of sexual relationship. Simone de Beauvoir chose to live like a 'childless, rather singular, employed man'. She accepted and epitomized the values of the public (as opposed to the domestic) sphere and thus, being male identified, she accepted that: 'A cardinal existen- tialist sin would be to say that "Love means asking the other to limit his the history of every-woman in South Africa. Although she has often been at the centre of events, although she has great warmth, and sympathy, and strength, her experiences are only one aspect of the experiences of black women in South Africa. While the book is at its most unsatisfac- tory when it abandons the certain voice of personal insight for well- worn observations about women under apartheid, its clear commit- ment to the struggle for liberation is deeply moving. All the more so because Ellen Kuzwayo has told us some of what that courage and commitment cost. Elaine Unterhalter Elaine Unterhalter is a member of the Anti-apartheid Movement's Women's Committee. or her behaviour".' However, since this refusal of any constraint which might threaten the liberty of others in close sexual or personal rela- tionships was easier to justify than to carry out, de Beauvoir turned to fiction where she wrote as a woman of the stressful ambiguities ofliving up to such a rationalist, idealist code. Does this separation between the male- and female-identified de Beauvoir sound confusing? If so, then I have illustrated how doubts about some of Mary Evans's premis- es crystallized when I contemplated the conclusions that she implies (rather than those she actually summarizes). Which is not to doubt the whole of her book. There has been little assessment or discussion of de Beauvoir's work and Mary Evans contributes an appraisal in the light of today's fragmented feminisms which is necessarily inconclusive. She shows that The Second Sex dichotomizes too rigidly between the sexes, ignores evidence which would have undermined its thesis and

Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin Mary Evans · Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Feminist Review. ® 116 Feminist

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Page 1: Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin Mary Evans · Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Feminist Review. ® 116 Feminist

Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access toFeminist Review.

www.jstor.org®

116 Feminist Review

While the autobiographical sections of Call me Woman are vivid and alive with Ellen Kuzwayo's emo­tional and moral strength, the parts of the book which attempt an analysis of the condition of African women in South Africa, and a description of the broad effects of apartheid, are very sketchy. They detract from the book's main themes. There is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that the experiences of the educated African classes are the experiences of all the African people, and there is a jarringly naive faith in the work of the Urban Foundation, a group of influential financiers who since 1976 have worked to co-opt middle­class Africans to accept minor changes in the status quo.

Ellen Kuzwayo tells her own history, but it cannot be, and is not,

Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin Mary Evans Tavistock London an{l New York 1985 ISBN0422 795100£4.95Pbk

This is a stimulating, sometimes passionate and witty book. It is also bleak and contradictory. Mary Evans examines each area of Simone de Beauvoir's work; her values, her politics, her ideas and her fiction. She is particularly illuminating on how the existential­ist code of freedom, freewheeling as it did above material and historical conditions, fell apart, or caused its protagonists to fall apart, when it became a rationale for new forms of sexual relationship.

Simone de Beauvoir chose to live like a 'childless, rather singular, employed man'. She accepted and epitomized the values of the public (as opposed to the domestic) sphere and thus, being male identified, she accepted that: 'A cardinal existen­tialist sin would be to say that "Love means asking the other to limit his

the history of every-woman in South Africa. Although she has often been at the centre of events, although she has great warmth, and sympathy, and strength, her experiences are only one aspect of the experiences of black women in South Africa. While the book is at its most unsatisfac­tory when it abandons the certain voice of personal insight for well­worn observations about women under apartheid, its clear commit­ment to the struggle for liberation is deeply moving. All the more so because Ellen Kuzwayo has told us some of what that courage and commitment cost. Elaine Unterhalter

Elaine Unterhalter is a member of the Anti-apartheid Movement's Women's Committee.

or her behaviour".' However, since this refusal of any constraint which might threaten the liberty of others in close sexual or personal rela­tionships was easier to justify than to carry out, de Beauvoir turned to fiction where she wrote as a woman of the stressful ambiguities ofliving up to such a rationalist, idealist code. Does this separation between the male- and female-identified de Beauvoir sound confusing? If so, then I have illustrated how doubts about some of Mary Evans's premis­es crystallized when I contemplated the conclusions that she implies (rather than those she actually summarizes).

Which is not to doubt the whole of her book. There has been little assessment or discussion of de Beauvoir's work and Mary Evans contributes an appraisal in the light of today's fragmented feminisms which is necessarily inconclusive.

She shows that The Second Sex dichotomizes too rigidly between the sexes, ignores evidence which would have undermined its thesis and

Page 2: Simone de Beauvoir, a Feminist Mandarin Mary Evans · Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Feminist Review. ® 116 Feminist

tends to biological determinism; she discusses ideas structured into the autobiographies and converging in the novels which are partisan to existing inequalities, including the attitude of moral privileges granted to the male hero and, to some extent, to the politics of intellectual intervention. But there is more discussion needed on many issues.

Existentialism never asserted that the capacity to choose was an 'innate' human characteristic. This capacity had to be developed, learned, struggled for, cultivated, and thus one became 'human'. And it is wrong to equate self-reliance with independence or with auton­omy, as if each defined the same value - atomized, defensive, com­petitive and negative.

Nor would I call an orgasm an 'anaesthetic', exactly. And you can-

Reviews 117

not deconstruct adult heterosexual love until it sinks out of sight like the Titanic to lie a silent, antique concept letting the ghostly echoes of desire sail in through the mist, only to meet parental love or sisterly love waving on the shore, healthy, romantic, intact. Marsha Rowe

Marsha Rowe was co-founder of Spare Rib and edited the Spare Rib Reader. She has a five-year-old daughter. Apart from a novel-in­progress, she works as a freelance writer, proofreader, editor.

Erratum: Janet Holland, author of the review pp. 107-110 , is current­ly working in the Sociological Re­search Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London, on girls and occupational choice.