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Howard M. Parshley’s Translation
of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The
Second Sex:’ Contrition, Sabotage
or Suicide?
JUNE 24, 2010
For most of the last 25 years, Howard M. Parshley, translator of the first
English edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953), has been cast
as a saboteur of second-wave feminism. In a 1983 article, Margaret A. Simons
characterized Parshley as a barely bilingual hack, ungrounded in philosophy,
and bored by women’s history as evidenced by his many mistranslations of
existentialist terminology and the fact that he cut the many stories of strong
women present in the original. According to Simons, Parshley, a Smith
College zoologist, got the gig only because Beauvoir’s American publisher,
Knopf, mistakenly thought her book was about the act of sex, and Parshley
had written a book on human reproduction in the early 1930s.
From The Science of Human Reproduction (1933) by Howard W. Parshley. Eugenics Publishing
Company.
Parshley had his defenders, including Richard Gillman, a one-time neighbor,
who in a 1988 article in the New York Times noted that Parshley, rather than
hostile to Beauvoir, had encouraged Knopf to publish The Second Sex in
English after reading it, in the original French, in 1949. In a note to Knopf,
Parshley described the book as, “a profound and unique analysis of woman’s
nature and position, eminently reasonable and witty.”
In an ironic turn, Parshley’s reputation has recently been restored, at least
partially, through the publication of a new English translation of The Second
Sex that was prodded into existence by Simons and other critics. The latest
edition is complete and supposedly more sensitive to the original’s
existentialist armature. However, at least one reviewer has admitted that the
language of the new edition is literal to the detriment of felicity and
coherence.
Whether Howard Parshley was the right man for the job (or whether any
man was the right man for the job) will probably forever remain the subject
of debate. But to the question of whether Parshley was a saboteur, the answer
is clear. He was. Just not of feminism. The ideology Parshley undermined and
sent careening into the gorge by translating The Second Sex was not
Beauvoir’s, but his own.
Howard W. Parshley (1884-1953) came of age as a scientist and educator in
the decade following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics. It was a heady
time for biologists, and many embraced and promoted the notion that human
behavior was, on balance, biologically based. Parshley was far from alone in
his belief that societies could be beneficially managed through the broad
dissemination of biological information leading to (mostly) voluntary
reproductive control.
Parshley expressed a strong, if naïve, faith in science as the new foundation
for ethics. From his first book, Science and Good Behavior (1928), through his
college survey textbook, Biology (1940), Parshley unselfconsciously promoted
the Progressive Era conceit that science could supply better answers to
questions of morality than religion, philosophy … or even anarchic
democracy. In 1928 he wrote, “There is no good reason to suppose that a new
and still undreamed-of principle of regulation will appear to continue the
series in which religion, taboo, morality, philosophy, ethics, et cetera, have so
far appeared – and not altogether to advantage. Science, at least as far as we
are concerned, completes and terminates the list” (1928, 215).
Along with many of his contemporaries, Parshley thought it was logical and
perhaps necessary for societies to cede to the scientifically enlightened the
task of determining public policy and managing human potential based on
their capacity for rational and unemotional analysis.
Parshley represents the early stirrings of a movement Daniel Kevles has
labeled “reform eugenics.” In contrast to “mainline eugenics,” which by the
20s had become a vent for noxious nativist and racist beliefs, reform eugenics
embraced liberal cultural ideas, allowing life scientists to promote
progressive political and social beliefs while retaining the authority to
categorize, rank and judge individuals and their behaviors.
Parshley and his peers, including sociologist Frank Hankins, popular science
authors Frederick Osborn and Amram Scheinfeld, and geneticists Hermann
J. Muller and Bentley Glass, understood early the dangers of association with
conservative cultural forces, and were careful to distance themselves from
the xenophobes who had came to dominate eugenics. But this group never
lost faith in the idea that cultural relationships and the social hierarchy was
more or less a natural development, and that social rank was a fair
approximation of genetic health.
If only everyone understood their place, and were educated relative to their
genetically determined abilities, civilization could get about the businesses of
continuing its advance. Parshley wrote, “Education, whether within or
without the home, must impart knowledge specifically useful to the
individual according to his peculiar nature, if it is to accomplish results
ethically valuable” (1928, 263). In part, Parshley was pitching more “class-
appropriate” education and a science-based ethics. He suggested “juvenile
delinquency” was the result of being bored by lessons in “geometry and
Caesar,” and that the solution was not old fashioned moralizing, but
vocational education. “Given at fifteen a knowledge of automobile repairing
and venereal disease, our case would have become a harmless and happy
human being, likely enough, whether he ever went to church or not” (1928,
264).
But as this last line hints, at the end of the day, it all came back to
reproduction and its management. The overriding fear among eugenicists,
both mainline and reform, was “differential reproduction,” or the idea that
the “less fit” were outbreeding the “most civilized.” Though Parshley was
certainly not opposed to state-sponsored eugenic sterilization – praising the
California law that led to the 19,000 coerced vasectomies and tubal ligations,
and noting that such policies were more effective than “Christianity and
Prohibition” in controlling births (1933, 274-275) – he remained optimistic
that, properly educated, less fit people would control their own reproduction,
knowing the health of “the race” was at stake. He wrote, “With all classes
controlling the exuberant fecundity of nature we should see the end of that
differential and dysgenic (racially injurious) population growth – that rapid
increase in the relative numbers of the defective and subnormal – which so
alarms all who recognize the inheritability of human traits … Certainly with
better education in these respects, individual habit and interest will come
gradually to eliminate the need for enforcement, except in pathological cases
(1928, 109).”
It is fair to say that among life scientists, at least male life scientists, of the
1920s and 30s, Parshley’s ideas were fairly typical and relatively non-
controversial. Critically, it was during this time that the establishment set
itself to the task of “scientizing” ideas that had their birth in first-wave
feminism and the social movements of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. By the 1930s, biologists had purged their ranks of birth
control “amateurs” like Margaret Sanger and built protections against
“emotional” movements like anti-vivisection. As Molly Ladd-Taylor writes,
eugenicists like Paul Popenoe “particularly detested birth control’s feminist
aspect” (Ladd-Taylor, 305).
In playing along, Parshley set the trap he would later spring on himself.
Parshley’s 1933 book, The Science of Human Reproduction,” was the author’s
attempt to apply a scientific ethics to human sexual relations. Among his
curious conclusions was the suggestion that the “natural” age for people to
marry was 16 or 17 for girls, and 17 or 18 for boys. Somehow, with laws
sufficiently “liberalized” to allow for and encourage such marriages, “our
biological ideal would soon become an accomplished fact” (1933, 247).
The trap, however, lay in the necessity of those proposing eugenic utility to
establish categories of humans, each possessing their own “peculiar natures.”
Such categorizations, when pitched to the educated, were non-controversial,
at least when they related to class, as all educated people could credit
themselves with possessing those “progressed” eugenic characteristics that
made them educable. Reform eugenicists were also able to extend charity to
the lower classes and darker races by suggesting that the “extreme
heterogeneity” of the human species meant that, though it was possible to
judge a class or race generally, it was impossible to judge an individual
specifically. According to reformers, gross phenotypic characteristics, like skin
color, did not necessarily dictate genetic worth. This idea was forcefully
outlined in Frank H. Hankins’ 1926 book, The Racial Basis of Civilization, a
book Parshley read and critiqued prior to its publication.
As stated before, the idea of a sliding scale of eugenic fitness was relatively
non-controversial, and a common “liberal” point of view. But as I wrote in an
earlier essay, within this neat little ideology sat a ticking bomb. It was
triggered by a simple question: “what about women?”
Unlike individual males within races or classes, whose differences in genetic
natures and genetic worth were visible only to the scientist, preventing all
but the scientist from passing judgment, differences between the sexes were
“obvious,” which required reform eugenicists to lay their cards on the table.
What, according to Parshley, was a woman’s “peculiar nature?”
Well, first, women were naturally “more emotional” than men due to their
“sensitive and continuously varying internal organization” (31-32). They were
also less “variable” than men, neither reaching his lows or highs. According to
Parshley, “From vagrancy to asceticism, all sorts of deviations are found more
commonly among men” (1933, 33-34). Noting that a woman’s “creativeness
may be normally found in the creation of new life” (33-34), Parshley did
recognize that the demands of reproduction placed limits on a woman’s claim
to power and authority, admitting the existence of “a certain disadvantage,
especially marked in civilized humanity.” But he made sure to add that, “the
function [of gestation, birth and primary child care] is an integral part of
[female] mammalian biology, and its performance under favorable conditions
is attended with the deep satisfaction that attends obedience to profound
natural impulses. Difficulties, discomforts, and dangers which are very real
do not alter the truth of this assertion, a truth to which a great many women
will be found to testify” (149-150).
Yet, it was this same Parshley who would come to translate “The Feminist
Bible,” rendering elegantly Beauvoir’s prose, including the statement, “the
body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world.
But that body is not enough to define her as a woman.”
In her book, When Sex Became Gender, Shira Tarrant writes, “After World War
II, feminist thought and expression were constrained by McCarthyism in
America, by postwar reconstruction in France and Britain, by French
pronatalist impulses, and by a domestic ideology that attempted to revive
earlier arguments for separate spheres in all three countries” (2).
Scholars are beginning to recognize that the “domestic ideology” Tarrant
speaks of had a name, eugenics, which in its “reform” variant, more strongly
than once imagined, influenced expectations and “naturalized” relations in
post-war America. Popenoe, according to Ladd-Taylor, thought, “the main
causes of marital troubles – sex, mothers-in-law, children, and money – could
all be traced to ignorance about sexual difference and other
misunderstandings of biology” (Ladd-Taylor, 316). Later in the same article
Ladd-Taylor states, “It is ironic indeed that Popenoe’s eugenics-inspired
efforts to enhance personal happiness in marriage contributed to an
individualist politics and therapeutic culture that led to the undermining of
the gender and family norms he saw as the basis of a eugenically sound
society” (322).
The same irony holds for Howard W. Parshley. However, while Popenoe
responded to the rise of second-wave feminism with “apocalyptic rants about
the decline of civilization” (Ladd-Taylor, 320), Parshley responded by
devoting the last 4 years of his life to sensitively translating a text that
challenged and ultimately undermined his own life’s work.
The task literally killed him. Of Parshley’s final act, flawed though it may be,
it seems uncharitable in the extreme to say anything but, “tres bien.”
REFERENCES
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex . Translated and edited by H. M.
Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hankins, Frank H. 1926. The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic
Doctrine. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 2001. “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in
the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe.” Gender & History 13:22.
Parshley, Howard W. 1940. Biology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
–. 1933. The Science of Human Reproduction. New York: Eugenics Publishing
Company.
–. 1928. Science and Good Behavior. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Tarrant, Shira. 2006. When Sex Became Gender. New York: Routledge.
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