Couple Troubles

Abstract

This chapter talks about an Austrian woman who had been reading Das andere Geschlecht or “The Other Sex,” and sent Simone de Beauvoir her reflections on the sections concerning marriage. It describes the Austrian reader as passionate, appreciative, not a philosopher, and casts Beauvoir's argument in terms very much her own. It also references other letters to Beauvoir concerning marriage that loomed over the lives of the letter writers as much as the Algerian War loomed over the Republic. The chapter recounts how marriage was an almost inescapable lifelong drama with many ramifications as broad social and cultural changes in the 1950s and 1960s helped create a wave of unhappiness about marriage. THe chapter mentions unmarried people who were implicated in marriage's galling legal and economic dependencies.