Attribution of shared ideas was decided on gender without evidence

Evidence

In most cases its fi rst premise is that only men have ideas: women do not. Th is has traditionally been the framework that contains (and constrains) the history of human thought. In Beauvoir’s case, it meant that she could attract some acceptance as a freak original female thinker, but only so long as her direct formative infl uence on male philosophers was not imprinted in public consciousness. For example, when commentators emphasized that Beauvoir and Sartre expounded the same novel set of philosophical ideas in their writing, the general cultural myth quickly turned people’s perception of Beauvoir upside down. Culturally, it was both inconceivable and inadmissible that it had been the woman rather than man who had been the creative source of some of their shared ideas. No argument and no evidence was necessary to eff ect this fundamental change in the public and historical perception of Beauvoir. And none was given. Instead, as in so many instances, the issue of which of the couple’s ideas was due to the man and which to the woman was decided on the basis of gender. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 306

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that evidence played no role in a historiographical dispute — that gender did all the work with ‘none given’ — is a pointed methodological observation about how intellectual history gets written.
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘When the Woman Has the Better Ideas’ — how shared-idea attribution defaults to the man even in cases where documentary evidence suggests the reverse, with Beauvoir-Sartre as case study.
• XREF: connects to: Male-authored justifications of female subordination reflect self-interest, not truth — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 59; Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53; Nineteenth-century anthropologists’ gender bias rendered women’s moss uses invisible — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 430

Broader Connections

• Male-authored justifications of female subordination reflect self-interest, not truth #contradicts (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 59
• Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered #corroborates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53