Susan Pickard says that major academic publishers rejected her new book on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir because it was “too controversial”. Even when one well-known university press finally agreed to publish, the contract was abandoned after 26 reviewers refused to review the finished manuscript. Now, Pickard is publishing her book on Substack and already amassing thousands of readers.
A professor of sociology at the University of Liverpool, Pickard views de Beauvoir as the quintessential figure of second wave feminism and the thinker who best “personified the Free Woman”. Although the French philosopher has not been banished from the curriculum like many other formerly admired thinkers, her ideas have been distorted to align with gender identity theory.
As Pickard sees it, this shift in interpretation is motivated by ideology, rather than genuine engagement with de Beauvoir’s work. Pickard’s experience of trying to publish a book on the subject seems to support this conclusion.
As an expert on one of the most influential feminist philosophers of the twentieth century, and having previously authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and several books, one would think that Pickard would have had little difficulty in landing an academic publisher for her latest work. Yet, when she submitted the proposal for Beauvoirian Feminism to the major names in the industry, they all refused the project, considering it “too controversial”.
“They don’t want to be associated with anything like this”, Pickard explained, adding that no such problem had ever cropped up for any of her previous books. Eventually, she decided to amend her proposal slightly, making it appear less controversial. This strategy worked and a large university press tentatively offered her a contract. “I essentially tricked them into it”, Pickard admits, “but when they saw the final manuscript, it was still too much for them”.
The publisher had already warned Pickard that because the book “will be controversial, we need good reviews”. Still, no one seems to have thought that it would be impossible to gather a handful of positive reviews. According to Pickard, the publisher had “already begun work on the Amazon page and picture; they had already prepared marketing for the book”. Then came the reviews.
Or rather, the reviews did not come. Every single academic who had agreed to review the book, 26 in total, pulled out after reading the manuscript. This came as a shock, both to Pickard and the publisher, who quickly reconsidered the offer to publish the book. “They told me no one would review the book and then ‘recommended’ that I find a different publisher”, Pickard said.
To be clear, academic reviewers are not required to write a positive review of a book. As Pickard explained: “I have reviewed manuscripts where I wrote back that I did not think it was good enough to be published, and the publisher still went ahead”. But apparently, all of the academics who read Beauvoirian Feminism suddenly had more pressing matters to attend to. According to Pickard, “only one responded with a report, saying that I had to change my views and be more positive about Butler”.
That would be Judith Butler: professor at Berkeley, famous scholar of gender studies and the winner of the journal Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest. In many ways, Butler is the gender studies equivalent of a rockstar, and her writing has been so influential that, according to Pickard, even when it comes to de Beauvoir “the Butlerian reading has become orthodoxy”.
This is in no small part what motivated Pickard to write her new book, describing it as her “attempt to push back”. She insists that the book “wasn’t a screed. It was a serious feminist intervention – and it was treated as if it were radioactive”. At its core, Beauvoirian Feminism was a re-engagement “with what made Beauvoir radical in the first place: her insistence on ambiguity, on history, and above all on the sexed body as situation.”
This is not the place to take a deep dive into the different interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir’s writings, but a few lines from Pickard’s Substack are helpful in elucidating the core disagreement between her and Butler:
In Butler’s post-structuralist account, gender is performance, and repeated performances produce the illusion of sex — a shadow cast backwards. […] For Beauvoir, biology is not destiny — but it’s not nothing. Periods, pregnancy, menopause, ageing: the body shapes how gender is lived. She never severs sex from its material ground.
The issue is closely related to recent public debates about gender, sex, and that most perplexing question: What is a woman? While it is (or should be) perfectly commonplace for academics to disagree about interpretations of key texts, the proximity of this particular debate to one of the most explosive culture wars of our times explains why Pickard’s book became unpublishable.
Pickard recounts how many of her students arrive in the classroom with fixed ideas about sex and gender that are clearly influenced by Butler, whether they realise it or not. As writes in a recent Substack:
When I teach that, for Beauvoir, a woman’s body is not a blank slate, not just a surface for self-expression, a student will raise her hand and say: “Whatever the biological cause, using ‘sex’ as a category is increasingly a rationalisation of prejudice.” Another will insist: “Sexual division is just an idea used by cis-women to erase the already marginalised existence of trans women.”
Although she tries to be neutral about the ideas that she teaches, Pickard says that there is always “the fear of a complaint” if she pushes students too hard to question certain orthodoxies. Lectures and seminars meant for thoughtful evaluation of different ideas are turning into echo chambers for a particular viewpoint.
Disillusioned with a field of sociology that “is totally closed to any other option than gender identity theory”, Pickard has decided to self-publish her book online. She says that even though her profile has only been active for a few weeks, her posts are already getting thousands of reads, adding that this is “more than I would get on several journal articles combined”.
The book is now called Simone & Me: A Feminist Resurrection and will be published in sections on Substack as “part memoir, part philosophical excavation”. While it is easy to lament the fact that an experienced academic has to resort to an online blog to publish her work on one of the most pressing issues in modern society, Pickard takes a much more positive view of the development.
“I am reaching so many more people than I ever did [in academia]” she said. “Sometimes I even think that my book getting cancelled is the best thing that could have happened to me”. Even so, when classrooms turn into echo chambers and publishers refuse to publish dissenting views, one begins to wonder what purpose academia has anymore.
Of course, most fields are not as ideologically corrupted as gender studies, but Susan Pickard’s case clearly demonstrates that something has gone seriously wrong in higher education. The opening up of debate on the issue of sex and gender prompted by the Cass Review, the Sullivan Review, and the April 2025 Supreme Court Ruling seems not to have reached many corners of academia. If anything, it has led to a hardening of attitudes. “I feel as if there is both a sense of denial and a sense of doubling down, at least in the communities in which I research and work”, says Pickard. The implementation of HEFSA is a vital step, but on its own it will be of little effect if the culture of many disciplines remains so pig-headedly intransigent.
Luckily, for those of us interested in reading different perspectives on interesting topics, Pickard’s book on de Beauvoir is being gradually released online in relatively short and very readable posts. As Pickard told CAF: “Thank the gods for Substack – or ten years of work would have been in the draw, unpublishable and unspeakable”.