What Is A Woman?: And Other Essays (review)

Moi, Toril. What Is A Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

The Second Sex, Toril Moi asserts, is “the deepest and most original work of feminist thought to have been produced in [the twentieth] century, . . . [but] has yet to be properly inherited by contemporary feminist theorists ” (vii). These bold opening claims set the tone for all of the essays that together constitute What Is A Woman? And Other Essays, Moi’s most recent contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theory. Many readers are, no doubt, already familiar with Moi’s earlier books, Sexual / Textual Politics (1985) and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994). Not surprisingly, What Is A Woman continues many of the preoccupations of these earlier works. Moi herself goes to some lengths to situate her new book in relation to the previous two. While her 1994 book-length study of Simone de Beauvoir attempted to understand the social and historical conditions that allowed Beauvoir to become the intellectual woman she was, the essays on Beauvoir in the new volume attempt to situate Beauvoir in relation to contemporary feminist thought. Similarly, while Sexual / Textual Politics was groundbreaking in its introduction of poststructuralist and French feminist thought into the realm of Anglo-American feminist theory, What Is A Woman consciously distances itself from postructuralism in order, as Moi puts it, “to see what happens when one goes elsewhere” (xii). Thus, while both the subject matter and feminist perspective of this new book will be familiar to Moi’s readers, What Is A Woman reflects a sense of having grappled with difficult questions, a characteristic that is missing from Moi’s previous works. This quality of thought, which can only be the product of hard-earned experience, makes What Is A Woman more satisfying and, in my opinion, more useful for feminist theory than either Sexual/Textual Politics or Simone de Beauvoir.