Alba de Céspedes’s Marriage Plot Polemic

In The Second Sex, her 1949 feminist polemic, Simone de Beauvoir declared romantic love, as we’d known it for centuries, a sham. Neither women nor men thrive in the conventional arrangements of coupledom and marriage, but it is the woman in love, de Beauvoir asserts, who “creates a hell for herself”: Society, and its patriarchal degradations, obstruct the possibility of her equal happiness. To love a man under these circumstances is a congenital torment, an internal organ mangled from its first growth. Love’s flame, as it were, burns brightest in hell.