Word: girlhood
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...wife, she has lived for years in the public's gaze and should be well accustomed to the limelight. But in fact she shrinks from it. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's struggle to maintain her own separate and private identity has been lifelong. It marked her girlhood. It has marked her marriage. It is the key to her past-and to her future...
...what bothers her most about those years is the memory of someone else winning the school drama medal. The teacher's explanation-that the winner of her choice needed encouragement more than Anne-still rings false. The grown woman seethes with rage and searches for understanding of her girlhood slight...
MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, by Simone de Beauvoir. France's existentialist termagant. Jean Paul Sartre's first lady of the Left Bank cafés, is at least as candid as she is philosophically stubborn. Her memoirs of girlhood owe most of their charm to the surprising fact that her origins were Catholic, her upbringing puritan. She describes all this with considerable grace, ends with a conversion to Sartre's atheism which seems from her own testimony to be just another straitjacket, but one she can wear with arrogance...
...amused incomprehension is likely to enfold U.S. readers trying to visualize the social climate in which Simone de Beauvoir rebelled against parental authority. As she depicts the French society of her girlhood, it was almost Oriental in its concern with losing face and in its rigid taboos. As a female emancipation proclamation, the Memoirs will also seem curiously dated to Americans, for Feminist de Beauvoir belongs uncompromisingly to the either-or camp on the marriage v. career question, and apparently consigns most of her sex to the vegetable bin of history. Nonetheless these graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal...
...sensuosity and innocence which characterizes their work. Both were passionately fond of the beautiful, even of the pretty, and achieved a voluptuousness and bursting fullness which epitomizes the joy a poet finds in all nature. Both were especially involved with the rhythm of the female form. Maillol wrote, "Girlhood with its fresh bloom, its flowerlike innocence, its confidence in life, is for me the world's greatest wonder...