About

Judith G. Coffin is a professor and researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, affiliated with the Department of History. Her scholarly work primarily focuses on French history, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. She is the author of the book 'Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir,' published in September 2020 by Cornell University Press, which studies an archive of letters from ordinary readers to Simone de Beauvoir at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her research explores themes such as the emotional and psychological engagement of readers with Beauvoir's work, the social and cultural transformations in postwar France, and the ways in which topics like sexuality, gender, and personal identity are addressed through correspondence and cultural discourse. Coffin has also contributed to the study of psychoanalysis, mass culture, and the history of women's work, and has written multiple editions of 'Western Civilizations.' Her academic background includes supervision by notable scholars such as John M. Merriman and Nancy F. Cott.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Art
• Philosophy
• Law
• Literature
• Art history
• History

Selected publications

• Beauvoir, “French” Feminisms, and “Translation Work:” A Roundtable Conversation

  Journal of Feminist Scholarship · 2024-05-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book and its translation allow us to see Beauvoir anew.

  PublisherDOI

• Sex, Love, and Letters

  2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
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• Introduction

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses the search for personal and collective self-knowledge, the multiplying cultural incitements to discourse about the self and sexuality, and the disconcerting transformation of gender roles, and expectations in postwar France and beyond. It talks about the readers' letters to Simone de Beauvoir, asking advice on marriage, love, and birth control. It also uses the letters to examine the relationships that bind readers to authors and vice versa. The chapter explains how the letters disclose an exceptionally interesting author–reader intimacy, one that was consciously nurtured by Beauvoir and her readers. It explores the psychological processes of projection, recognition and misrecognition that invent an interlocutor and style oneself as a confidant that spin out inner monologues.

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• Notes

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-08-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• 6. Second Takes on The Second Sex

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-08-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sexual Politics and Feminism

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter covers letters to Simone de Beauvoir simmering with grievances about stifling marriages, constrained choices, the grind and boredom of housework, the absence of contraception, serial pregnancies, criminalized abortion, and the affective burdens of family throughout the 1960s. It recounts the French legislature that legalized contraception, women that swelled the ranks of labor unions, and books on the female condition that filled bookstores in 1967. It also mentions the explosion of student radicalism and enormous general as the most distinctive features of France in May 1968. The chapter discusses that feminism transformed and renamed women's liberation, which emerged with immense force in the aftermath of this movement. It highlights the movement of the French press called the <italic>Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes</italic> (MLF) which emerged in 1970.

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• Couple Troubles

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter talks about an Austrian woman who had been reading <italic>Das andere Geschlecht</italic> 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.

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• The Intimate Life of the Nation

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter reconstructs how the public was introduced to <italic>The Second Sex</italic>, Simone de Beauvoir's most famous work, and considers its critical reception. It mentions reviewers and critics who saw themselves as custodians of literary standards and public taste, and held very firm and contrasting views on the broader reading public. It elaborates how the reviewers and critics' views provide new ways to understand Beauvoir's arguments and the expectations that took shape around her. The chapter describes <italic>The Second Sex</italic> as an eight-hundred-page manuscript that challenges philosophical argument, literary criticism, history, and social science, as well as provide a detailed description of sexual and bodily experience. It points out how <italic>The Second Sex</italic> was considered ahead-of-its time with its narrative of the philosophical reconsideration of the female condition or situation.

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• 5. Shame as Political Feeling

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-08-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Second Takes on The Second Sex

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter recounts Simone de Beauvoir's interview with the magazine <italic>France Observateur</italic> regarding the future of women and feminism in France in 1960. It talks about Marie Craipeau, Simone de Beauvoir's interviewer, who plainly considered the future of women dim and expressed how women are disappointingly traditional, slow to “adapt” to a rapidly changing world, and ill-at-ease with modernity. It also explains how women were easily dissuaded from taking on ambitious projects and readily diverted from assuming self-sovereignty or facing their freedom. The chapter describes Beauvoir's vexed relationship with the members of her public, which was a recurring theme of her career as a writer, an engaged intellectual, and a feminist. It emphasizes how the 1960 <italic>France Observateur</italic> interview reiterated Beauvoir's earlier diagnosis in <italic>The Second Sex</italic> of the contradictions of femininity and political repercussions.

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert C. Stacey

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Carol Symes

  1 shared

• Stephen E. Wessley

  1 shared

• Lloyd Kramer

  1 shared

• Sandrine Sanos

  1 shared

• Eileen Boris

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• Michelle Marshman

  1 shared

• Gary Cross

  1 shared