The Married Woman

Abstract

As de Beauvoir herself never opted for marriage it has, on occasion, been suggested that she was less than qualified to write about it.¹ But de Beauvoir and Sartre did seriously, if briefly, consider marriage in 1929,² and her reasons for rejecting Sartre’s proposal of marriage in the early 1930s were never less than plausible.³ Besides, she had witnessed her parents’ marriage at close quarters, she had observed the behaviour of her married relations at Merignac, and whatever remaining illusions she had about the role of women evaporated when she went to the United States in 1947. As she put it to Deirdre Bair,

because I had never felt discrimination among men in my life, I refused to believe that discrimination existed for other women. That view began to change, to crumble, when I was in New York and I saw how intelligent women were embarrassed or ignored when they tried to contribute to a conversation men were having. Really, American women had a very low status then. Men wanted them for sex and babies and to clean house and that’s very much what they wanted for themselves, too.⁴