I’d like to recommend a new website by Rebecca Chalker, a U.S. feminist and international activist on women’s rights and reproductive health issues whom I have been happy to meet with Simone de Beauvoirs’sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir. French feminists always speak higly of her accomplishments for women’s rights, health and bodies issues.  

     The website, www.clitoraltruth.com, provides information about a new online seminar that Professor Chalker is conducting, a feminist critique of the cultural history of sexuality, and about her latest book on women’s bodies.   

        Rebecca Chalker is Adjunct Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City and Visiting Lecturer in Women’s Studies at Florida State University in Tallahassee.  She has also spoken at the Beauvoir Society conferences at Trent University in Canada, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. 

      She has spoken at the World Congress of Sexology in Washington, D.C. (1983), Heidelberg (1987), Yokohama, Hong Kong, Paris, and Havana.  Rebecca presented five workshops at the 4^th United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing (1995).  Since 1978, she has given numerous presentations on women’s health and rights at the American Public Health Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Interstitial Cystitis Association, and as spoken frequently to women’s groups on college campuses, and in private lectures and public forums.  Her articles have appeared in Ms. magazine, The Village Voice, Cahiers de Sexologie Clinique (22:132, 1997), and in other peer-reviewed medical journals.

     It is always very inspiring to speak with her and Rebecca Chalker’s visits to France are always great occasions for French feminists to share with her on women’s issues in the context of globalisation. I hope you will enjoy as much as I do her new website.    

Iit was quite a surprise for Simone de Beauvoir when, once, on my return from working as an activist in the Feminist Womens’ Health Center of Los Angeles in 1975, very much at lead in women’s health programs and studies, I informed her that I would be meeting Henry Miller. Simone de Beauvoir was intrigued and asked me to report on her the details of this encounter.

Henry Miller was at the time 84 years old and had retired at a lovely house in Pacific Palisades. He had the reputation of being surrounded by half-naked women and I was wondering how the meeting would go.

It was in fact a young beautiful woman, lightly dressed, who welcomed me and opened the front door. Behind her, helping himself with a walking frame, a puny little man. Even though he had a watery eye, his way of looking at me was very vivacious, and he invited me to join him in…his bedroom.

I was so shocked that he added: “-Don’t worry! I am a very, very old man now! You don’t risk anything!” And he burst into laugh. As a matter of fact, he did not inspire any cause of concern. He looked like such a cheerful person. But when he offered me as a place to sit to choose either his bed or his wheelchair, I choose the latter.

As I was seated on his wheelchair trying to take notes Henry Miller declared:-You are still afraid of me?- Not at all! -I don’t believe you!”Immediately he mentioned Simone de Beauvoir: “Please let her know that I am not so awful. She must consider me as a macho”. I smiled at him. “ You know, the Americans, because of their so-called sexual revolution, they find me a little outdated, passé as you say in French. This country will never lose its Puritanism. Feminists should consider me as their ally. Men only destroy what women have built. In the near future, women will liberate us. Please never do what men have done to the planet and to the people.”

A few months later I brought a short typewritten letter I had received from him to Simone de Beauvoir. Reading it, she was dumbfounded. Miller was asking me, as to other people he knew, to write a letter to the Nobel Committee supporting his candidature at the Nobel Prize in literature.

The content was: Pacific Palisades, august 13, 1978:” Dear friend, my name, In my attempt to obtain the Nobel Prize for Literature this coming year I hope to enlist your support. All I ask is for you to write a few succinct lines to:  Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, address. Please note that the Committee urgently requests that the name of the proposed candidate not be publicized. Sincerely Henry Miller”.  

Simone screamed:

 -         I can’t believe this!

-         Yes Simone, it’s true, I replied, and why should we not do it for you?”

We had been hoping since 1975 when they had mentioned from Stockholm that she was going to get it, that she would be the next laureate.

-It is ridiculous; I don’t want you to do such a thing in my favour.

-But Simone, with all the well-know women we know from around the world, there could be quite some support for you.

-No, I don’t want to.”

Henry Miller never got the Nobel Prize, neither Simone. At her passing, I was sorry I had respected her decision. My suggestion had some sense in this context. We should all have written to the Nobel Committee.    

If you wish to read more about it, please look at the report I wrote on the French version of my website. I will write about it in English next week.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Martial Dauriac, one of Jeanne de Beauvoir’s children and to his wife Danièle Dauriac, who so kindly welcomed me in their property at Meyrignac, near Uzerche and Limoges, last week-end. I gave two lectures on the lives and commitments of Simone de Beauvoir and of her sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir.

Simone and Hélène used to spend all their summer vacations there as children, as Beauvoir recalls in Memoirs of a dutyful daughter.

Thank you also for the women’s rights committee of the region to have sponsored the event.

In front of a very large crowd of men and women who had come from all around the towns and counties, it was a pleasure to testify on their bodies of work and on their struggles for human and women rights all their lives.

It was very emtional to discover that Simone de Beauvoir’s goddaughter, a lady from the region, was in the audience. She told us that ” Françoise de Beauvoir, their mother, was nicer and sweeter than Simone’s description in her Memoirs”.

Pascale Bastin Charles-Lavauzelle, a woman historian  also specialist on gardening, nature, and writers, gave us an amazing tour of the parc of Meyrignac which countains so many unique flowers and plants that were planted by the Beauvoir ancestors at the end of the XIXth century. She quoted many writers and made this moment exceptional to us all.

Next week, I shall be in Newcastle, UK, for the international conference of the Simone de Beauvoir society where I shall testify on my conversations with Simone on the writers Marguerite Yourcenar, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Michel Foucault, and Henry Miller.

Thursday december 7, 2007, I shall give a talk on Simone de Beauvoir’s modernity in the XXIrst Century. I shall speak in the beautiful city of Lyon, at the café   ”Regards de  femmes”(www.regardsdefemmes.com).

A 7:45pm we shall meet at the restaurant “La Maison de Lucy”, 61 rue Garibaldi, Lyon 6ème (métro Masséna, parking Garibaldi street or parking de l’Europe 50m away). 

En 2008, the hundreth anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir’birth will be celebrated around the world. I shall testify on my friendhsip with her and how her life, her writings and her activism is still a unique source of inspiration for us nowadays in our view to promote gender and women’s rights. 

It has been very sad to learn about the sudden passing of a great French feminist, Maryse Guerlais on October 27, 2007. Since 1980 Maryse Guerlais wanted to create a Space which would permit women’s groups to have a place to meet in the western part of France. Her project has been since then a great success and the Espace Simone de Beauvoir (The Simone de Beauvoir Center) is a reference all over the country.

This place, which just celebrated it 15^th birthday, is located 25 quai de Versailles in the city of Nantes, a very dynamic region by the Atlantic shore. 32 women’s groups have joined the Espace which has a cafeteria, a library, and meeting rooms. It offers counselling to women in many areas. It is also a place which carefully watches the defense and development of women’s rights in France. There are many evenings where women writers, painters, singers and others are invited. Our deepest gratitude to Mary’s impressive contribution to women’s issues in France.

While I was recently a Visitor’s Director at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, USA, I spent a day with the dynamic group of women academics of the gender studies and political science departments of Rutgers University.

As a friend of Simone de Beauvoir and a writer on women’s issues, I am very sensitive to books published on feminist theory and activism and I am always eager to find writings which can provide both a global view and energy to all women in their feminist activities.

This is why I would like to highly recommend you to read Globalization & Feminist Activism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), written by Mary Hawkesworth, professor of women’s and gender studies and political science in New Brunswick, which I found one of the most inspiring book in our understanding of past and present women’s issues.

Professor Mary Hawkesworth had declared at the publication of her book: “The literature never mentions women or feminism. If women are mentioned, they are relegated to the domestic sidelines.There’s a long history in political science and sociology: What men do matters. It’s a screening out; the analytical lens obliterates women. It’s a form of myopia.”

In her book, Hawkesworth explores globalization from a feminist perspective and relates transnational feminist efforts to overcome social, economic, and political inequalities from the 15th century. She also gives very valuable perspectives for the XXIth century and therefore for the present and the future of women’s issues in the context of globalization.

If I may add here a suggestion, it seems to me that this book could be used for students in women and gender and political studies as a basis for discussion and for writing papers.

Enjoy reading it !

I have the pleasure to inform you that I will be speaking at the Swedish Cultural Center in Paris on January 8, 2008, at 7:30 pm on Simone de Beauvoir, for the opening of the celebration of the events in honor of the hundreth anniversary of her birth.

It will be an occasion to exchange views with the Swedish writer Asa Moberg on her book on Florence Nightingale. The evening will be called “two women, two centuries”, and the question will be: why does Simone de Beauvoir does not mention Florence Nightingale in “The Second Sex”?

You are welcome to join us! 

I would like to share you I review on my book The Beauvoir Sisters, that I found recently on the web:

Don’t read Claudine Monteil’s The Beauvoir Sisters: An Intimate Look at How Simone and Helene Influenced Each Other and the World for insights into Simone’s relationships with women. Read it, instead, for the tales of Helene’s founding of battered women’s shelters, both sisters’ connections with Carol Downer and the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, the harassment Simone received for writing The Second Sex, the circle of younger feminist friends from the Women’s Liberation Movement that surrounded them both during the latter parts of their lives – and to recall the incredible courage it took to stand up for abortion rights in those halcyon days of the early 70s. And for a cautionary tale about how easily we could lose many of these essential feminist advances. Claudine Monteil was one of the WLM “girls.” She started writing this memoir the morning after Helene died.

This is my first post! I will write the next one very soon!