What Anaïs Nin Foresaw About the Future of Feminism
And the powerful advice she offers modern women
A Third Type of Feminist
With the first publication of her first diary in 1966, Anaïs Nin finally achieved widespread fame and recognition as a writer — and as a feminist icon with women across the world.
Her diary’s release coincided with the rising tide of the Women’s Liberation Movement, marked by a generation of women challenging the establishment and demanding change. But Anaïs Nin wasn’t one of these feminists; nor was she like most women of her generation living within the constraints of tradition.
Anaïs Nin was something else entirely. As her friend and biographer Barbara Kraft shares:
“There was something accessible about her and this accessibility is communicated in the voice of the diary. It is not an intimidating or inflammatory voice, as were so many voices of the period. Rather it was a quintessentially feminine voice. While many women of the ’60s and ’70s belligerently cast aside this part of their identity…Anaïs embodied what they had artificially rid themselves of...”
That may be the reason that although her work is less known than her friend and contemporary Henry Miller’s, it has never been forgotten. Her diary, now translated into 15 languages, continues to sell and her writing seems to re-emerge each generation for the next wave of women looking for a godmother, someone whose voice they can recognize their own in.
That’s what Anaïs Nin was to me.
Sitting at Silver Moon Bakery on Sunday mornings in New York City, I read her diary and essays and heard my own voice in them. Anaïs Nin was someone who not only articulated a type of feminism I resonated with, but who embodied it. Here is her description of the “New Woman,” as she calls her:
“The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for her self-development. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity…she is not aggressive, she is serene, she is sure, she is confident, she is able to develop her skills, she is able to ask for space for herself…Man has been uneasy about this self-evolution of woman, but he need not be — because, instead of having a dependent, he will have a partner.”
In many ways, the “New Woman” she is describing is herself. What I want to share here is not just how Anaïs Nin became this woman, but what lessons she offers for the women of today.
Protect and Cultivate Your Inner Life
If there’s one thing that impresses me above all about Anaïs Nin, it’s that she believed in her inner vision for decades, even when no one else did.
She began writing her diary at age 11 as a letter to her father, but it would be another 52 years before she was ready to release it to the world. During that time, the diary evolved from a child’s journal to something more: a sanctuary, a psychoanalytic laboratory, a “house of the spirit” where she shared her identity and then re-worked it over and over. It was her refuge from a world that otherwise would have shattered her.
What makes the publishing of her diary — her most intimate and private work — even more incredible is that her prior works were roundly insulted or ignored by critics. A Guardian article on her legacy shares, “When she hosted a party at the British Book Center for her novel Spy In The House of Love, none of the invited critics came. “America tried to kill me as a writer, with indifference, with insults,” she wrote.”
A striking photo from that time captures Nin’s grit. She’s operating a handpress, patiently and stubbornly self-publishing her books by hand.
When asked later in life what she learned during her years of solitary courage prior to receiving any positive recognition, her answer was this: “The importance of faith, the great importance of orientation and the inner life to withstand outer pressures. Also, the understanding that increased awareness will prevail and cause external changes.”
Celebrate Intimacy and Human Values
In her essay “The New Woman,” Nin shares a beautiful tribute to the writer Colette:
“When [Colette’s] name was suggested for the Académie française, which is considered the highest honor given to writers, there was much discussion because she hadn’t written about war, she hadn’t written about any large event, she had only written about love…somehow the personal world of Colette was not supposed to have been very important. And I think it is extremely important, because we have lost that intimacy and that person-to-person sense, which she developed because she had been more constricted and less active in the world.”
Throughout her life, Nin was criticized for many of the same reasons as Colette. Her diary was filled with descriptions of colors, clothing, sense impressions, feelings, and lovers. That’s part of why it’s so accessible and familiar: like all inner lives, it’s filled with seemingly insignificant details that are packed with personal meaning and feeling.
In her essays on the woman of the future, she even describes women as preservers of human values and intimacy:
“The restrictions of women’s lives, confined to the personal, also created in us qualities men lost to a degree in the competitive world. I think woman retains a more human relationship to human beings and is not corrupted by the impersonality of powerful interests…It is humanism which is lacking in our leaders.”
Find New Ways to Express Feminine Experience
In a Vogue interview from 1971, Anaïs Nin shares: “Women have perceptions that are difficult to describe, at least in intellectual terms. These perceptions come instantly from intuition, and the woman trusts them.”
And yet she spent a lifetime searching for ways to put a woman’s experience and feelings into words. She explored different genres and styles, always focusing her lens on the inner lives of women rather than the outer. Unlike many of the great male action heroes popular at the time, the drama of her female characters was almost always internal:
“I think all my women have tried to live by the impulses of the subconscious. In all my novels, I have only one heroine in direct action, and even she discovers the necessity of the inner journey. I never believed in action, only in achieving life on a poetic level.”
In many cases, her attempts were incredibly original and immediately misunderstood. Speaking about her book “A Spy in the House of Love,” Nin later wrote:
“As in all neurosis, the vision of others is partial…The men moved around Sabina, were highlighted during the encounter, and vanished (as would happen in life). This was completely misunderstood by the critics. They felt personally insulted…not realizing that I had meant to take the reader inside the mind and feelings of Sabina, with the limitations imposed by her own vision, obsessions, and fantasies, so that the reader would know how Sabina felt.”
Apart from her novels, Nin’s perhaps most famous — or infamous — for the erotica she wrote, including “Delta of Venus” and “Little Birds,” and is still considered one of the finest writers of female erotica.
But at the end of the day, her diary was her purest and most intimate expression. It was the only place where she could fully express the development of feminine feeling and identity, because it was where she had worked through her own — over and over.
Conclusion
Anaïs Nin never left behind a map of how to become the new woman, but she did leave a very detailed account of her own journey becoming one. And by most accounts, it was a very successful one:
She succeeded as an artist, against steep criticism and high odds. Her diary made her an overnight success after its initial release in 1966 and led to a steady stream of readers that continues today.
She enjoyed the love and adoration of not one, but two husbands, the second of whom lovingly stayed with her even after finding out about the first. She even maintained a certain, if highly unusual, loyalty to each until her death.
She was a writer, dancer, artist, and tremendously stylish and empathetic woman who was loved by her friends and inner circle.
Maybe most importantly, she was her own creation. She appealed to others because she was the “New Woman:” a sensitive, gentle, confident, creative woman who believed her personal and inner life had value — and would eventually be recognized.
