The subtitle of Beauvoir and Belle is “A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex,” but this is less a critique in the everyday sense of an opposing view than in Kant’s sense of delimiting the boundaries of a phenomenon and the conditions of its possibility. In this excellent and accessible text, Kathryn Sophia Belle indeed critiques views of The Second Sex as an origin ex nihilo, a limitless intellectual source for (white) feminism. But this does not mean she sees it as an object entirely separate from the history of Black feminist opposition to slavery in the nineteenth century and to structural discrimination and colonialism in the twentieth. In fact, she points out, Beauvoir’s text was comparatively well received by leading radical Black women who recognized its potential, who defended it in the Communist and Black internationalist press, and who engaged in theoretically nuanced critiques of its philosophical and historical assumptions long before the advent of “second wave” feminism. Yet the theoretical conversation between their perspectives was never acknowledged by Beauvoir and has been largely unremarked by white feminists, including philosophers. Thus The Second Sex—and its limits—enable Belle to introduce readers to “resources in Black feminist thought that exceed the limits of white feminism in general and of The Second Sex in particular” (4).

Belle argues that Beauvoir’s achievement, while considerable, was marred by her acceptance of neo-Kantian frameworks for describing social hierarchy. These frameworks broke up an otherwise indivisible experience of embattled human transcendence along lines of “race,” “sex,” “class,” “religion,” and “nationality”; attempted to analyze each in isolation from the others; and used them as “contrasting and competing” theoretical lenses taking certain elements of a complex social world and human experience as representative while ignoring others. In accepting the conceptual separability of sexual oppression and prioritizing it over the negative effects of other hierarchies, Beauvoir inadvertently reinforced the very frameworks she was trying to abolish. Because they had had long recognized that oppression, as a unity, had many forms affecting differently situated women, radical Black women within American civic movements and the Communist party did not fragment human experience in this way. Had Beauvoir been able or willing to draw on their theoretical writings, Belle believes The Second Sex would have been conceptually stronger and might have preemptively challenged the racist assumptions that many white American women brought to “second wave” feminist movements.

Part One, “Black Feminist Frameworks,” explores a “select genealogy” of Black internationalist feminism (the phrase comes from Cheryl Higashida’s (Reference Higashida2011) excellent book on the subject, to which I was introduced by Beauvoir and Belle). These opening chapters situate The Second Sex with respect to the writings of early twentieth century Francophone women intellectuals such as the Nardal sisters, as well as Black American and Caribbean women writers from the early nineteenth through the late twentieth century. All focused on women’s challenges as workers, political agents, and artists without excluding attention to sexual and maternal life, using newly invented frameworks such as “the race question and the woman problem” or the “triple oppression” thesis (60). Beauvoir’s exact contemporaries, Claudia Jones and Lorraine Hansberry, anticipated many arguments in The Second Sex, appreciated its complexity, and took issue with the individualism of its existentialist methodology.

Part Two, “White Feminist Frameworks,” addresses the history, presuppositions, and consequences of two analogies deployed by Beauvoir: between “women and Blacks” on the one hand and between “slavery and womanhood” on the other. Such analogies obscured the nature of the multi-pronged oppression facing women, if not the reality of Black and non-European women tout court. A third chapter in this section, “Abolition and Suffrage,” provides a detailed account of the ways in which race and sex were pitted against one another to the exclusion of Black women by American movements of the nineteenth century. As Belle explains, Beauvoir relied on the version of this history found in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Problem, and probably borrowed from Alva Myrdal’s analogy between racial oppression and the oppression of other groups such as (white) women in her appendix to that text. Belle does not necessarily oppose analogies plain and simple—drawing on Lorenzo Simpson, she acknowledges they can enable thought to move from one sphere of application to another—but there are ample historical and logical reasons why these analogies do not fit Beauvoir’s philosophical goals.

White American feminists’ tendency to theorize “sex” in isolation from the social whole (of the United States as well as the formerly colonial world under post-WWII US hegemony) is exemplified by two historic women’s political gatherings. One is the Seneca Falls conference of 1848, whose Declaration of Sentiments prioritized votes for white women over those of Black men (and therefore Black women)—foreshadowing an increasingly racist turn in the suffrage movement after the Fourteenth Amendment. Notably, some white American activists, such as the Grimké sisters, did not fall into this trap and some Black men, such as Frederick Douglass, did not see their interests as divorced from those of Black and white women. The other is the 1979 feminist conference commemorating The Second Sex at which Audre Lorde presented “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Confronting Jessica Benjamin’s retrospective complaint that this speech introduced “identity politics” to a formerly unified movement, Belle explains that Lorde’s attention to differences beyond gender did not essentialize class or race, nor reject philosophical technique as male. Rather, Lorde rejected the artificially separated social spheres allocated to those conceptual objects by white theorists and the university within which Black women’s personal experience was fragmented and erased.

In part three, “Frameworks Beyond the Black/White Binary,” Belle asks where Beauvoir’s ideal of reciprocity might have led philosophically if she had understood the “coloniality of gender”—in other words, the fact that practices and ideas related to sex were either “broken out” of the whole of social life differently in different cultures prior to European colonization or were not considered distinct dimensions of human existence at all. Brief as were Beauvoir’s comments on the situation of colonized and Black American women in The Second Sex, she says still less about Asian and indigenous women—the “other Others”—whose contributions to the internationalist feminist movements described by Belle should not be underestimated. Here Belle engages with Sally Markowitz, Alia Al-Saji, Kyoo Lee, and Mariana Ortega. Finally, she takes up the concept of “coalition” in a renewed critique of the way various parts of the contemporary academy have come to understand intersectionality—i.e., as an infinite addition of “atomic, homogeneous, separable categories”—not only competing for importance but serving competitive aims among scholars—rather than as a term for the oppressive reality of the “capitalist world system” with its many facets.

By using Beauvoir’s text as an occasion to explain the theoretical work and disputes among Black women thinkers before and after The Second Sex, Belle does the indispensable work of individualizing each of them and defending them against the homogeneity threatened by racial as well as sexual aspects of oppression. Belle’s own account of intersectionality and coalition acknowledges that Black feminists themselves disagree about the meaning of such concepts. She notes that the lives of white women, whose struggles cannot be reduced (as Beauvoir sometimes suggests) to their experiences of humiliation or reciprocity in love relationships with white men, are also intersectional. Although she is rightfully critical of white feminists who either failed to investigate or defensively excused Beauvoir’s awkward analogies and condescension toward Black American or Arab women who did not prioritize gender as she did, Belle gives credit to scholars such as Margaret Simons, Vicki Bell, and Penelope Deutscher, who recognized Beauvoir’s debt to Richard Wright and the lacunae in her approach from a global perspective.

The guiding thread of Beauvoir and Belle is The Second Sex and its reception, not the internationalist Black and communist movements whose programmatic twists and turns over the course of the twentieth century alienated many Black male thinkers (such as Wright) in both the United States and France. Still, I was left wondering if and how these conflicts reduced the historical impact of the Black feminist tradition explored so productively by Belle. As Belle points out, Beauvoir’s analogies are also anachronistic in focusing on American rather than French racism. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s (Reference Joseph-Gabriel2020) Reimagining Liberation is one resource for readers who want to learn more about the Francophone women thinkers from whom Beauvoir could and perhaps should also have learned. Belle’s exquisitely written critique is a condition of possibility for a more expansive, counterfactual Second Sex and the conversations founded upon it. Feminist philosophers like myself who learned a largely white canon in our youth should be grateful to Belle for giving us not only an introduction to her Black genealogy of the ideas we found useful in our own lives, but also for giving us tools to effectively transmit that genealogy to the next generation of students.