SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR 65 Resistance) forced them. to define their radical stance clearly and drove them into active political participation. In this period, de Beauvoir was a major campaigner for various anti-colonial and progressive causes, participating in demonstrations, signature campaigns and attempts to publicize and condemn the activities of French and^ other imperialisms. She was sickened by the callous and inhuman atrocities committed by the colonialists, and haunted by the complicity that inaction or silence implied. Djamila Bonpacha (1962), a collaborative book with the Algerian lawyer Gisele Halimi, is a searing account of the case of an Algerian woman who was tortured. Earlier too, de Beauvoir had shown herself sensitive to the plight of people in developing countries attempting to break out of their own forms of oppression. This is evident in The Long March (19 57), based on a visit to China, and other writings. In 1968, she and Sartre joined French workers and students in the uprising which rebelled against the stolidity and reification of oppression which characterized social relations in capitalist France. She made several trips to the Soviet Union in these years : admiring the material gains and economic support for equality, but critical of the suppression of intellectual freedom and tendency to centralisation. It is clear that de Beauvoir saw political activity as a means of establishing a creative 'We' and escaping from the sterility of the solitary 'I4. In Force of Circumstance (1963), her third volume of memoirs, she described her feelings on attending a demonstration in Paris during a time of personal despondency and bleakness : "Solitude is a form of death, and as I felt the warmest of human contact flow through me again, I came back to life." Posterity may find that de Beauvoir's work on women was her greatest contribution. The Second Sex (1949) is a tour de force in every conceivable way. This remarkable book. rich in theory and replete with historical detail, derives its strength from describing and criticising the social, economic and psychological mechanisms of women's oppression. Extraordinarily, it was written in relative isolation from other women : in the socio-political absence of a developed women's movement, and in the personal absence of close women friends with whom she could develop her views. Yet it was the first, and remains the only work on the female condition which posits an explanation for women's oppression while seeing women as subjects who have the power to liberate themselves. De Beauvoir developed the concept of woman as the 'other' as do blacks in a white-dominated society or the proletariat in a capitalist society; but the bond that unites women to their oppressors is obvl ^^Iv not comparable to any other. "Women are not born but made", and this making condemns them to lives of "immanence" and basic reproduction rather than "transcendence" through creativity. Despite its analytical force and scholarship, the book is not without its flaws and extremities of judgements. De Beauvoir's analysis was heavily idealist; later she admitted that if she were to rewrite The Second Sex, she would give her notion of women's oppression a stronger material grounding "Otherness is not simply an idealistic relationship..... it is a power relationship, based also on scarcity." In the Img Mar.ch, she elaborated on this