‘We have the same enemies’: Simone de Beauvoir and the silent feminism of C. Wright Mills

ABSTRACT

During the last two decades, there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the writings of the radical twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, and one of the central issues in this wave of scholarship has been the Mills’ relationship to feminism and the place of sex and gender in his social theory. Contemporary scholars assert that Mills was largely ignorant about feminism or even hostile to it and that his social theory basically ignores issues of sex and gender. As this essay shows, the existing consensus is fundamentally mistaken. Mills’ social theory of sex and gender and his emerging critique of patriarchy were heavily influenced by the ‘silent feminists,’ Shira Tarrant's name for the leading women social scientists and philosophers of the 1930s and 40s. Though an analysis of Mills’ Character and Social Structure and White Collar, I show that Mills’ anti-essentialist conception of gender was inspired by the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead, sociologist Viola Klein, and psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Likewise, through an analysis of Mills’ review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, I show that not only is his critique of Beauvoir rooted in his readings of the silent feminists but also that Beauvoir’s influence on Mills’ thought can be traced through his most popular works, The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• C. Wright Mills
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Margaret Mead
• feminist theory
• social theory
• gender theory
• new Left

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributors

Patrick Anderson earned his PhD in Philosophy at Texas A&M University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University. His primary research interests include Social-Political Philosophy, Africana Philosophy, and interdisciplinary work between the humanities and social sciences. His work has also appeared in The Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

Notes

1 While Horowitz’s editorship of Mills’ work has been criticized (Summers 2007) and Parshley’s transition of The Second Sex is notoriously flawed (Thurman 2011), I have relied on those text here, the first because it is publicly available and the latter because it is the text that Mills worked form. While I argue that Mills understood the text he had, I leave open the question of whether or not the poor translation of The Second Sex was an impediment to Mills’ overall understanding of Beauvoir.

2 Irving Louis Horowitz (1985, 48) claims that Mills thought Character and Social Structure was ‘crap,’ and while one might think this a reason for dismissing the book, there are two reasons to resist this temptation. First, Summers (2007) work has called into question the integrity of Horowitz’s scholarship on Mills, and given that Horowitz provides no citation for his quoting of Mills on this issue, it cannot easily be independently verified. Second, even if we grant that Mills did think Character and Social Structure was ‘crap,’ that does not mean it cannot provide insight to his other works, especially White Collar, which he was composing at the same time as he was writing Character and Social Structure with Gerth. And given that many of the ideas in Character and Social Structure reemerge in The Sociological Imagination (Mills even cites Character and Social Structure in this book), there is reason to think that Mills was more concerned with the cumbersome presentation of the ideas in Character and Social Structure than with its arguments or basic claims.

3 Mills was not uncritical of the silent feminists, including Horney. He criticized her other works for their failure to full escape Freud’s biologism and for their failure to develop an adequate structural account of the origin of neuroses (Tilman 1984, 53, 207n.77).

4 In this discussion, I do not mean to suggest that either Mead or Mills completely disregard biology; I only mean to show that Mills took one very important insight from Mead’s work, namely, that human difference is better explained by cultural differences than innate biological characteristics. Of course, Mead has been the subject of a series of long and contentious disagreements in the nature-nurture debate (Shankman 2009), which I have no intent or desire to settle here.

5 For other relevant discussions of women in Character and Social Structure, see 22, 34, 309; for a discussion of the kinship order, 245–250; and a discussion of kinship symbol sphere, 281–283.

6 The irony here is palpable. Geary dismisses Character and Social Structure but would not do the same with The Feminine Mystique, even though both books make similarly arguments about psychoanalysis and functionalism, the dominant social scientific paradigms of the period. For Geary to maintain his position on Character and Social Structure, he would also have to claim that The Feminine Mystique was not a breakthrough book of feminist theory that challenged the prevailing patriarchal assumptions of American social science but rather a mere collection of commonplace observations. In other words, it would put Geary at odds with feminists, the very sin he (wrongly) accuses Mills of committing.

7 Mills received some census data in the mail after the publication of the book, but he was still unsure that he could derive any meaningful interpretations from it. ‘White collar up to 1950: Census reports and correspondence, 1950–1952,’ BOX 4B 347, C. Wright Mills Papers, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin (henceforth referred to as UT).

8 ‘Women, 19–4-1948,’ undated, BOX 4B 345, UT.

9 ‘Sexual Exploitation in White Collar Environments,’ page 1, undated, BOX 4B 345, UT.

10 ‘Women, 1944-1948,’ BOX 4B 345, UT.

11 ‘Sexual Exploitation in White Collar Environments,’ page 7, BOX 4B 345, UT.

12 Mills’ description of these white-collar women also resonates with de Beauvoir’s (1953, 679–715) analysis of the ‘independent woman,’ who acts in bad faith because she acts as if she is autonomous when the world still denies her that.

13 Tilman (2004), the only scholar to provide any analysis of Mills’ review of The Second Sex, offers only a mere three-page summary of the review, rather than situating it within Mills’ corpus and the history of feminism.

14 ‘[Assorted articles, clippings and typescript drafts]: 1948–1955,’ BOX 4B 375, UT.

Additional information

Funding

This project was partly supported by the Texas A&M University Women’s and Gender Studies Research Grant 2016 ($200.00).