Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius . By Alison E. Jasper. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012. x + 178 pp. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius . By Alison E. Jasper . Waco, Tex. : Baylor University Press , 2012. x + 178 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn Because of Beauvoir , Alison Jasper aims to bridge Christian and feminist imaginaries. The feminist side is represented mainly by Simone de Beauvoir (an inspirer of Second-Wave feminism, who disdained Christianity) and Julia Kristeva (a theorist transplanted from Bulgaria to France who found some intellectual resources in Christian theology). Kristeva's notion of "female genius," Jasper claims, usefully illuminates the lives and writings of four Christian women whom she takes as case studies. These, although living in constrained circumstances and facing hostility from church authorities, found outlets for their creativity that were rewarding for themselves and beneficial to those whose lives they touched.A first chapter summarizes Beauvoir's exploration of the question, "What is woman?" in her ground-breaking book, The Second Sex (French original, 1949). Beauvoir, an existentialist, believed that women of her era were still struggling to achieve human personhood; "female genius" lay beyond that struggle. Yet, as a lasting contribution, she carefully identified the strategies that had led to women's inequality. Dismissive of Christianity as a barrier to women's achievement of full personhood, Beauvoir's book prompted many later feminists to view Christianity as an obstacle to self-realization. Yet Christianity had a prophetic message to be recaptured, assisted in the 1970s and 1980s by the impressive development of feminist Biblical criticism.Julia Kristeva, writing several decades after Beauvoir, differs from Beauvoir in several respects, including the philosophical position with which she is associated. Kristeva appropriated from Christianity images of Mary, maternity, birth, and female embodiment to "think with," showing that Christian theology did offer powerful resources for women. Even if (as Kristeva presumably thinks) Christianity is illusion, it is rich in significance for feminist thinking. Unlike Beauvoir, for Kristeva female bodiliness is not something to be transcended but embraced. Moreover, Kristeva was not burdened with Beauvoir's view that women, struggling to achieve even a basic humanity, had not been able to develop creativity. Nor did the Romantic-era exaltation of male genius cramp her thinking about women. Jaspers appeals primarily to Kristeva's trilogy Female Genius (French originals, 1999-2002), that considers Hannah Arendt, Melanie Kline, and Colette as figures who were not known first and foremost for their feminism, but who as women broke barriers and made possible new horizons for others. Female genius, out of its "undaunted curiosity and rebellious resistance," brought about "significant transformations," for example, in the very definition of what "being female" meant (65). For Kristeva, "acknowledgment of a subject position is itself female genius" (52). …