A woman’s education
Miu Miu Literary Club 2025
By Nell Whittaker
Off a busy road in Milan’s central district lies the stately Circolo Filologico Milanese, founded in 1872 by journalist Eugenio Torelli Viollier to promote culture and, particularly, the study of foreign languages and societies. Under the direction of Miuccia Prada, this month, the Circolo hosted the second annual Miu Miu Literary Club, “A Woman’s Education”, curated by Olga Campofreda. Its colonnaded chamber hosted a two-day conference built around the work of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Fumiko Enchi (1905-1986); here, we would embark on an investigation into the still-foreign grammar of female experience in the last century.
Two panels convened to discuss two books, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables and Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years. Both novellas were written in the 1950s – though de Beauvoir’s was only published in 2020 – and both concern female self-determination within the close confines of the domestic and its politics. Both, too, are about the love and violence that women can mete out to one another; and both are incisive and graceful evocations of the worlds of mid-century Paris and Japan. The first panel, titled “The Power of Girlhood”, focused on Simone de Beauvoir and featured a conversation between Indian novelist Geetanjali Shree, Italian writer Veronica Raimo and French-American writer and translator Lauren Elkin (who also translated The Inseparables). During the conversation, Shree was asked by moderator Lou Stoppard how she came across de Beauvoir’s work for the first time. “It was not a cataclysmic moment,” she responded, “But it was a catalyst … at a moment when what had been inarticulate was being articulated.”
The novella is similarly attuned to a moment in adolescence when previously formless attachments begin to take shape as experience. It follows the intense friendship between girls Sylvie and Andrée – modelled on de Beauvoir and her childhood friend Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died in early adulthood; and also examines the prohibition on freedom of expression that families lay on their female subjects, in this instance the punishing domestic regime of errands, tasks and responsibilities that Andrée’s mother subjects her to. Yet it also marks an examination of the couple form, framed through the intensity of female adolescence, that amounts to a philosophical enquiry into being itself; as Shree noted during the panel, you need to be in a dyad for anything to become meaningful, and individual subjecthood requires someone to hear what you are saying. In this way, relationships draw us into narrative form itself. An extract from the novella, read by actor Millie Brady, closes on this line, just after Sylvie has met Andrée: “I suddenly had the impression that nothing had ever happened to me at all.” The encounter with the other – particularly within the charged atmosphere of adolescent love and solidarity – opens onto realms of experience inaccessible to the self alone.
Day two opened with “About Love, Sex and Desire”, a discussion centred around Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years (1957), by a panel comprised of Nicola Dinan, Irish writer Naoise Dolan, and American poet and novelist Sarah Manguso, moderated by Kai Isaiah Jamal. The novel opens with Tomo, the thirty-year-old wife of a high-ranking official, tasked by her husband to find him a concubine: “a young – as far as possible inexperienced – girl”. Suga, a thirteen-year-old, is procured, and the novella follows the household over the next fifty years as it expands through additional concubines, marriages, and children, describing an extraordinarily complex stew of politics, feeling and thought that forms between the women of the house. It’s often a harrowing read, particularly in the descriptions of the grooming of the child-concubines, but the story isn’t simply one about violence; rather, in Sarah Manguso’s words, it also describes the extreme adroitness manifested by women “skilled at maximising their own autonomy and that of their daughters” within a system that marginalises and trivialises them.
Though written in the previous century, both novellas remain startlingly contemporary in their concerns: the ways in which women are complicit in the oppression of each other, how the urge to love and be loved distorts us in beautiful and horrifying ways, and how dazzling and surprising it is to become, instead of to be born, a person. We were missing some of the expansiveness that a broader selection of panellists might have provided – the panels were nearly entirely European – which meant that some understanding of how feminism interacts with culture, and particularly Japanese culture, was lost. Nicola Dinan, who is Chinese-Malaysian-British, said early in the conversation that her grandmother had been a concubine; a collision of subject and history I wish we had been able to follow.
For feminism, as Raimo observed, is not “a compact ideology” but something expansive, shifting, and frequently ambivalent. And education – especially an education in womanhood – is no more straightforward: diffuse, fragmentary, often shaped as much by peers as by predecessors. Yesterday, the UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman was to be defined by “biological sex” alone. Photos from outside the court picture members of trans-exclusionary groups holding a sign that says, “I know what a woman is.” A bold claim! A woman is born, not made, insist these 21st-century feminists; de Beauvoir would be spinning in her grave. “All oppression creates a state of war,” she wrote in The Second Sex – some women are choosing to war with one another.
“How do we teach young girls concepts like self-determination?” Miuccia Prada asked. Perhaps the answer is found through discourse and discussion, like that on display across these two days, which prove – fruitfully – that the very terms by which we argue or agree are contested and contestable. What is self-determination? Where do you end and I begin? An education is a life-long undertaking – we’re still learning what womanhood might be, and how we might explain it to one another. ◉