Word: beauvoire
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...CAME TO STAY (404 pp.)-Simone de Beauvoir-World...
...fiction bestsellers put together. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female sold very well for an $8 book, but even at some 200,000 copies, it was not the runaway that the trade had expected. It was only one of many books on women (Frenchwoman Simone de Beauvoir's disgruntled The Second Sex was another), but all the industry and argument that went into them seemed to leave the confrontation of the sexes pretty much as before...
Like many foreigners and not a few Americans, Tourist de Beauvoir hated racialism and loved orange juice, big breakfasts, drugstores, jazz (Chicago and New Orleans style), as well as movies, museums, old cowboy songs and. at the right time, a hamburger. Toward the end of her trip she began to learn that Americans were individuals and as hard to generalize about as Frenchmen. But she faithfully kept on generalizing. Relations between the sexes were difficult in the U.S., she feared. "Men shut themselves up in their clubs, women take refuge in theirs." Sexual frustration seemed typical, with the women frigid...
...Strings & Morality. Author de Beauvoir gathered her evidence at swank hotels and dreary slums, saw and did whatever she could. In a New Orleans nightclub she saw a beautiful brunette do a striptease, and when the girl was down to her G-string, "the atmosphere was so charged with morality that one might have been in church." She also smoked marijuana in a New York hotel apartment with a group of initiates. One dark woman had an abandoned look and tears in her eyes, and kept saying she was "madly happy." Mlle. de Beauvoir smoked three cigarettes...
When Author de Beauvoir left the U.S. she was still critical, but so captivated with New York that her "heart was torn." She felt "miserable to be leaving this country, which had so often irritated me." The full measure of her reaction is perhaps carried in her last page, where she describes her arrival in the Paris she loves. "How old the customs men were, how crumpled their uniforms! They did not seem proud to be French citizens; there was a hangdog look about them . . . The people are poorly dressed; the women have colorless, frizzy hair, the men grey faces...