Criticism
Deirdre Bair describes criticism of The Second Sex in her "Introduction to the Vintage Edition" in 1989. She says that "one of the most sustained criticisms" has been that the author is "guilty of unconscious misogyny": that Beauvoir separated herself from women while writing about them. Bair says the French writer Francis Jeanson and the British poet Stevie Smith had similar critiques: in Smith's words, "She has written an enormous book about women and it is soon clear that she does not like them, nor does she like being a woman." Bair also quotes (as "oft-repeated criticism") British scholar C. B. Radford who thought Beauvoir was "guilty of painting women in her own colors" because The Second Sex is:
primarily a middle-class document, so distorted by autobiographical influences that the individual problems of the writer herself may assume an exaggerated importance in her discussion of feminity.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)