Chapter 9: Simone de Beauvoir at Rice, by Melissa Kean

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From the course by Rice University

America Through Foreign Eyes

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Rice University

America Through Foreign Eyes

104 ratings

The United States has always been a source of fascination — both attraction and repulsion — for the people of France, Mexico, China, and African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan. "America Through Foreign Eyes" is a rich, interdisciplinary, international course that features Rice University faculty from a variety of disciplines and area studies. Focused on perceptions of America abroad, the course is a cross between World Cultures and American Studies. The course features four modules, each covering the perceptions and interactions of particular regions with America, Americans and Americanization.

From the lesson

America Through French Eyes

The United States has always been a source of fascination for the people of France. French observers and travelers are rarely indifferent to American culture and people. This module, “America Through French Eyes,” examines historical and contemporary perceptions of America, Americans, and Americanization through the lens of French writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals, and public opinion. Taught by Dr. Julie Fette, a professor of French Studies, this module will cover the four themes of the course: Democracy and Modernity; Globalization and Capitalism; Racism and Immigration; and Intellectual and Cultural Life.

Chapter 1: France and America: Friend and Foe6:04

Chapter 2: America: Land of Democracy12:19

Chapter 3: America = Modernity10:47

Chapter 4: American Capitalism: Mass Production, Mass Consumption, and Inequality11:29

Chapter 5: Globalization and the Cultural Exception9:43

Chapter 6: Racism and Xenophobia in the United States and France13:02

Chapter 7: Religion and Secularism10:09

Chapter 8: Franco-American Cultural Exchange: Art, Artists, and Art Patrons11:48

Chapter 9: Intellectual Life: The American University9:20

Chapter 9: Simone de Beauvoir at Rice, by Melissa Kean7:24

Chapter 10: America as Hyperreality8:05

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Anne S. Chao
Lecturer
Rice University
Dr. Julie Fette
Associate Professor
Rice University
Dr. Jeffrey Fleisher
Associate Professor
Rice University
Dr. Moramay López-Alonso
Associate Professor
Rice University

As the official University Historian of Rice University,

I'm pleased to share with you a snapshot

of the Rice University that Simone de Beauvoir encountered, and to provide you

with my analysis of this slice of America through this Frenchwoman's eyes.

When Simone de Beauvoir rode a bus through the Texas countryside into

Houston in April 1947,

she was keenly aware that she was crossing from the American West into the South.

Recounting what she saw out of the window, she describes the harsh landscape

of large-scale, plantation-based cotton tenancy.

What she could not have known was that this way of life

was in its very last days.

About to be swept away completely by the economic, demographic, and

social changes that followed World War II.

Similarly, when she reached Houston and visited the campus of the Rice Institute,

guided by long time Rice professor French Marcel Moreau she was stepping

into an institution that was in the first flush of almost explosive change.

Rice University was founded as a tiny, largely scientific technical

institute in 1912 and had had only a single president,

Edgar Lovett, from its founding until the fall of 1946.

Although it had grown modestly over the years,

it remained essentially a well-regarded regional college.

But in 1946, the school's Board of Trustees hired Lovett's replacement,

William Howsen, and charged him with transforming what had been, until then,

a small but ambitious undergraduate institute into a full-fledged university.

William Howsen had been on the job only for

about a semester and a half when de Beauvoir visited.

Although not everyone could see it yet,

the winds were already blowing in a new direction.

Most obvious and

dramatic was the nearly immediate physical transformation of the campus.

Rice in 1947 had only a handful of buildings,

all completed by the middle of the 1920s.

But while she was here,

de Beauvoir would have seen the early stages of a building boom.

Three new buildings were under construction,

although still just raw holes in the ground.

A research library, a classroom building, and a president's house.

Three weeks before her visit, a fourth.

A new engineering lab was announced and many more were to follow.

Deep changes to the intellectual life of the campus were also coming.

Behind the scenes the faculty, many only recently returned from military service,

we're planning the first significant changes to the curriculum in

the school's history.

They added courses and even entirely new departments in the Humanities and

Social Sciences.

And began moving away from purely technical instruction

in order to add intellectual depth to offerings in the basic sciences.

A new emphasis on research and graduate study was also brewing.

Houston's population had shot up during the war as workers moved

from agricultural jobs in the countryside into war related factory jobs.

When the war was over those people stayed, enjoying a much better quality of life in

the city, and holding on to well paid jobs as the factories began to shift

production to consumer goods, washing machines instead of tanks.

The Rice faculty had from the very beginning been

deeply engaged with their community.

But not in the same way that de Beauvoir had in mind.

As engineers and scientists,

they envisioned their interaction with the wider community in a very practical way.

So working with industrial companies, Rice engineers provided much of the expertise

needed for this switch to an economy and a society based on consumer production.

During World War II, Rice had been converted in large part

into a training school for Naval engineering officers.

So while many of the faculty members and

most of the regular male students had disappeared for the duration of the war,

the campus was flooded with naval ROTC cadets preparing for active duty.

Their training was in deadly earnest and a sense of military discipline and

order pervaded life while the war lasted.

The other side of that, though, was a sort of

determination to enjoy life to the very fullest in the face of possible death.

That attitude carried over very strongly after the conflict ended.

With 74 Rice students and alumni out of a tiny student body killed in action,

the shadow of death still hovered.

The students reacted to the long trauma by running as fast as they could to normalcy.

What they wanted now was simply fun.

Mindless, harmless, normal fun.

As far from fear and death as they could get.

It was, for awhile at least, party time.

The year that was nearing its end when de Beauvoir visited had been a whirl of

dances, barbecues, parties, outings to the beach.

The Rice football team had become a national powerhouse and

had played Tennessee that winter in the Orange Bowl.

Every football Saturday, the stadium was packed to the rafters and

game day rituals like pep rallies and bonfires drew huge crowds.

The literary societies, a group of non-Greek letter sororities that played

a leading role in campus social life, sprang back into action with full force

with plays, white glove tees, and new pledges.

It all sounds so innocent from our perspective today, but

things weren't really quite that simple.

De Beauvoir quotes here guide, Professor Moreau, who slyly

notes both the hard drinking ways and the hypocrisy of the Rice campus community.

Moreau did not lead de Beauvoir astray on this.

The place was soaked in alcohol.

Drinking on campus was officially banned, and sanctions were severe if caught.

But numerous photographs of off campus parties and dances show punch bowls and

bottles of all kinds.

Faculty members who were there as chaperones were sometimes seen

with a bottle of their own sticking out of a suit pocket.

And the social world had a point beyond itself.

As they went from dance to party foremost on everyone's mind was marriage.

Both the women and

the men yearned to leave the tragedies of the war behind them.

The deepest expression of this was their eagerness to return to the world that they

had known before.

To pair off and start families just as their parents and grandparents had done.

The students' scrapbooks from the spring semester of de Beauvoir's visit feature

page after page of newspaper clippings announcing engagements and bridal showers.

And finally, Simone De Beauvoir could not help but

notice the unavoidable issue of race.

Southern race relations had hampered Rice from it's very beginning, mostly by making

it difficult to retain faculty members who were not from the region, and who could

not help but be appalled of the treatment of blacks in the city of Houston.

Kept in menial occupations, forced out of participation and

civic life, confined in substandard neighborhoods and

schools, the black population of Houston in 1947 was thoroughly segregated.

At Rice too, segregation was total.

There were no black students admitted until 1965.

By charter, the institution was for whites only.

The only blacks on campus were in the kitchens and

laundry rooms, out mowing grass in the sun, or cleaning equipment.

Sadly, it would be many more years before this would change.

But once again Professor Moreau was right.

Ever since the war, he told de Beauvoir,

blacks have demonstrated a sense of racial solidarity and a will to revolt.

It would take another two decades before black students would be admitted to Rice,

but this too was coming.

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