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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“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
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