‘To Simone de Beauvoir, who gave us our feminism’: Beauvoir, Marxism and Method in New York City Women’s Liberation, 1967–1970

It is well known that the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) used The Second Sex as a consciousness-raising text. This article, however, attempts to account for another related use that this text had for the WLM: its way of critiquing Marxism while maintaining support for its basic principles. The article begins by placing the WLM in New York City in its historical context of critical indebtedness to Marxist New Left movements and movements for Black Power. It then highlights three interrelated critiques levelled against those movements by the WLM: that they have the wrong object of study; that socialism fails to alter the structure of the family and so fails to liberate women; and that women on the organized Left have only ever been organized as workers, not as women. I suggest that all three of these critiques of Marxism were, at least in part, derived from readings of The Second Sex.