Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
(; French: [simɔn də bovwaʁ] (listen);
9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French
writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher,
political activist, feminist and social theorist.
Though she did not consider herself a philosopher,
she had a significant influence on both feminist
existentialism and feminist theory.De Beauvoir
wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiography
and monographs on philosophy, politics and
social issues.
She was known for her 1949 treatise The Second
Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression
and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism;
and for her novels, including She Came to
Stay and The Mandarins.
She was also known for her lifelong relationship
with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
== Early years ==
=== Family ===
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9
January 1908.
Her parents were Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir,
a legal secretary who once aspired to be an
actor, and Françoise de Beauvoir (née Brasseur),
a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic.
Simone's sister, Hélène, was born two years
later.
The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois
status after losing much of their fortune
shortly after World War I, and Françoise
insisted that the two daughters be sent to
a prestigious convent school.
De Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as
a child, at one point intending to become
a nun.
She lost her faith in her early teens and
remained an atheist for the rest of her life.
=== Education ===
De Beauvoir was intellectually precocious,
fuelled by her father's encouragement; he
reportedly would boast, "Simone thinks like
a man!"
Because of her family's straitened circumstances,
de Beauvoir could no longer rely on her dowry,
and like other middle-class girls of her age,
her marriage opportunities were put at risk.
De Beauvoir took this opportunity to do what
she always wanted to do while also taking
steps to earn a living for herself.After passing
baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy
in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut
Catholique de Paris and literature/languages
at the Institut Sainte-Marie.
She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne
and after completing her degree in 1928, she
wrote her diplôme d'études supérieures
(roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Leibniz
for Léon Brunschvicg (the topic was "Le concept
chez Leibniz" ["The Concept in Leibniz"]).
De Beauvoir was only the ninth woman to have
received a degree from the Sorbonne at the
time, due to the fact that French women had
only recently been allowed to join higher
education.De Beauvoir first worked with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, when
all three completed their practice teaching
requirements at the same secondary school.
Although not officially enrolled, she sat
in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure
in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy,
a highly competitive postgraduate examination
which serves as a national ranking of students.
It was while studying for the agrégation
that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul
Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave
her the lasting nickname "Castor", or beaver).
The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded
Sartre first place instead of de Beauvoir,
who placed second and, at age 21, was the
youngest person ever to pass the exam.Writing
of her youth in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
she said:
"...my father's individualism and pagan ethical
standards were in complete contrast to the
rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's
teaching.
This disequilibrium, which made my life a
kind of endless disputation, is the main reason
why I became an intellectual."
== Middle years ==
From 1929 to 1943, de Beauvoir taught at the
lycée level until she could support herself
solely on the earnings of her writings.
She taught at the Lycée Montgrand (Marseille),
the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc (Rouen), the Lycée
Molière (Paris) (1936–39).During October
1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir became
a couple and, after they were confronted by
her father, Sartre asked her to marry him.
One day while they were sitting on a bench
outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a
two-year lease".
Near the end of her life, de Beauvoir said,
"Marriage was impossible.
I had no dowry."
So they entered a lifelong relationship.[1]Sartre
and de Beauvoir always read each other's work.
Debate continues about the extent to which
they influenced each other in their existentialist
works, such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness
and de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and "Phenomenology
and Intent".
However, recent studies of de Beauvoir's work
focus on influences other than Sartre, including
Hegel and Leibniz.
The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre
Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired
a whole generation of French thinkers, including
Beauvoir and Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit.
== Personal life ==
Beginning in 1929, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre were partners for fifty-one years until
his death in 1980.
De Beauvoir chose never to marry or set up
a joint household and she never had children.
This gave her the time to advance her education
and engage in political causes, to write and
teach, and to have lovers.Perhaps her most
famous lover was American author Nelson Algren
whom she met in Chicago in 1947, and to whom
she wrote across the Atlantic as "my beloved
husband."
Algren won the National Book Award for The
Man with the Golden Arm in 1950, and in 1954,
de Beauvoir won France's most prestigious
literary prize for The Mandarins in which
Algren is the character Lewis Brogan.
Algren vociferously objected to their intimacy
becoming public.
Years after they separated, she was buried
wearing his gift of a silver ring.
However, she lived with Claude Lanzmann from
1952 to 1959.De Beauvoir was bisexual and
her relationships with young women were controversial.
Former student Bianca Lamblin (originally
Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book Mémoires
d'une jeune fille dérangée (English: Memoirs
of a Disturbed Young Lady), that, while she
was a student at Lycée Molière, she had
been sexually exploited by her teacher de
Beauvoir, who was in her 30s at the time.
In 1943, de Beauvoir was suspended from her
teaching job, due to an accusation that she
had seduced her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie
Sorokine in 1939.
Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against
de Beauvoir for debauching a minor and as
a result she had her license to teach in France
permanently revoked.In 1977, de Beauvoir,
Sartre, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida and much of the era's intelligentsia
signed a petition seeking to abrogate the
age of consent in France.
== Notable works ==
=== She Came to Stay ===
De Beauvoir published her first novel She
Came to Stay in 1943.
It is a fictionalised chronicle of her and
Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz
and Wanda Kosakiewicz.
Olga was one of her students in the Rouen
secondary school where de Beauvoir taught
during the early 1930s.
She grew fond of Olga.
Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she rejected
him, so he began a relationship with her sister
Wanda.
Upon his death, Sartre was still supporting
Wanda.
He also supported Olga for years, until she
met and married Jacques-Laurent Bost, a lover
of de Beauvoir.
In the novel, set just before the outbreak
of World War II, de Beauvoir creates one character
from the complex relationships of Olga and
Wanda.
The fictionalised versions of Beauvoir and
Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young
woman.
The novel also delves into de Beauvoir and
Sartre's complex relationship and how it was
affected by the ménage à trois.
She Came to Stay was followed by many others,
including The Blood of Others, which explores
the nature of individual responsibility, telling
a love story between two young French students
participating in the Resistance in World War
II.
=== Existentialist ethics ===
In 1944 de Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical
essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of
an existentialist ethics.
She continued her exploration of existentialism
through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity
(1947); it is perhaps the most accessible
entry into French existentialism.
In the essay, de Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies
that many, Sartre included, have found in
major existentialist works such as Being and
Nothingness.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir confronts
the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom
vs. the constraints of circumstance.
=== Les Temps modernes ===
At the end of World War II, de Beauvoir and
Sartre edited Les Temps modernes, a political
journal which Sartre founded along with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and others.
De Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote
her own work and explore her ideas on a small
scale before fashioning essays and books.
De Beauvoir remained an editor until her death.
=== Sexuality, existentialist feminism and
The Second Sex ===
The Second Sex, first published in French
as Le Deuxième Sexe, turns the existentialist
mantra that existence precedes essence into
a feminist one: “One is not born but becomes
a woman.”
With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated
what has come to be known as the sex-gender
distinction, that is, the distinction between
biological sex and the social and historical
construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes.
The fundamental source of women's oppression,
Beauvoir notes, is its historical and social
construction as the quintessential Other.De
Beauvoir defines women as the “second sex”
because women are defined in relation to men.
Aristotle referred that women are “female
by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.”
De Beauvoir also points out that St. Thomas
referred to the woman as the “imperfect
man", the "incidental” being.
De Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable
of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate
themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence'
to which they were previously resigned and
reaching 'transcendence', a position in which
one takes responsibility for oneself and the
world, where one chooses one's freedom.
Chapters of The Second Sex were originally
published in Les Temps modernes, in June 1949.
The second volume came a few months after
the first in France.
It was very quickly published in America due
to the quick translation by Howard Parshley,
as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher
Alfred A. Knopf.
Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity
with the French language, and a minimal understanding
of philosophy (he was a professor of biology
at Smith College), much of de Beauvoir's book
was mistranslated or inappropriately cut,
distorting her intended message.
For years, Knopf prevented the introduction
of a more accurate retranslation of de Beauvoir's
work, declining all proposals despite the
efforts of existentialist scholars.
Only in 2009 was there a second translation,
to mark the 60th anniversary of the original
publication.
Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
produced the first integral translation in
2010, reinstating a third of the original
work.In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality"
of The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argued that
men had made women the "Other" in society
by application of a false aura of "mystery"
around them.
She argued that men used this as an excuse
not to understand women or their problems
and not to help them, and that this stereotyping
was always done in societies by the group
higher in the hierarchy to the group lower
in the hierarchy.
She wrote that a similar kind of oppression
by hierarchy also happened in other categories
of identity, such as race, class and religion,
but she claimed that it was nowhere more true
than with gender in which men stereotyped
women and used it as an excuse to organize
society into a patriarchy.
Women who do not follow the domestic norm
are looked down upon in society.
Beauvoir is explaining that woman referred
as “the other.”
She states, “What is a woman?’...The fact
that I ask it is in itself significant.
A man would never get the notion of writing
a book on the peculiar situation of the human
male.
But if I wish to define myself, I must first
of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth
must be based all further discussion.
A man never begins by presenting himself as
an individual of a certain sex; it goes without
saying that he is a man.
[…] It would be out of the question to reply:
‘And you think the contrary because you
are a man,’ for it is understood that the
fact of being a man is no peculiarity.”
(34–35) As for man there is no need to define
what is to be a man, there is no reason because
they identified themselves as the superior
part.
Man represents both “the positive and the
neutral,” which doesn’t need to be explained
or defined, and it is self-explanatory.
“Thus humanity is male and man defines woman
not in relation to herself but as relative
to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous
being.”
(35) Men are the default setting and women
are considered a recessive gender.
“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she
is the Other.”
(35) It is like an asymmetrical comparison,
but masculine and feminine aren’t asymmetrical.
“Are there woman, really?
Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine
still has its adherents who will whisper in
your ear: ‘Even in Russia women are still
women’; and other erudite persons—sometimes
the very same—say with a sigh, ‘Woman
is losing her way, woman is lost.’”
(34) De Beauvoir refers, to the “eternal
feminine,” it can be what define some kind
of spiritual being that connect all women
to each other.De Beauvoir argued that women
have historically been considered deviant,
abnormal.
She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered
men to be the ideal toward which women should
aspire.
De Beauvoir said that this attitude limited
women's success by maintaining the perception
that they were a deviation from the normal,
and were always outsiders attempting to emulate
"normality".
She believed that for feminism to move forward,
this assumption must be set aside.
Despite her contributions to the feminist
movement, especially the French women's liberation
movement, and her beliefs in women's economic
independence and equal education, de Beauvoir
was initially reluctant to call herself a
feminist.
However, after observing the resurgence of
the feminist movement in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, de Beauvoir stated she no longer
believed a socialist revolution to be enough
to bring about women's liberation.
She publicly declared herself a feminist in
1972 in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur.
In 2018 the manuscript pages of “Le Deuxième
Sexe,” were published.
At the time her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le
Bon de Beauvoir, a philosophy professor, described
to the New York Times, de Beauvoir's artistic
writing process.
Beauvoir wrote every page of her books longhand
first and only after hired typists.
=== The Mandarins ===
Published in 1954, The Mandarins is set after
the end of World War II and won her France's
highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
The book follows the personal lives of philosophers
and friends among Sartre's and de Beauvoir's
intimate circle, including her relationship
with American writer Nelson Algren, to whom
the book was dedicated.
Algren was outraged by the frank way de Beauvoir
described their sexual experiences in both
The Mandarins and her autobiographies.
Algren vented his outrage when reviewing American
translations of de Beauvoir's work.
Much material bearing on this episode in de
Beauvoir's life, including her love letters
to Algren, entered the public domain only
after her death.
== Later years ==
De Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about
time spent in the United States and China
and published essays and fiction rigorously,
especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
She published several volumes of short stories,
including The Woman Destroyed, which, like
some of her other later work, deals with aging.
1980 saw the publication of When Things of
the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories
centred around and based upon women important
to her earlier years.
Though written long before the novel She Came
to Stay, de Beauvoir did not at the time consider
the stories worth publishing, allowing some
forty years to pass before doing so.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding
feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les
Temps Modernes.
De Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to
associate with Merleau-Ponty.
In de Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the
journal's editorial meetings in her flat and
contributed more than Sartre, whom she often
had to force to offer his opinions.
De Beauvoir also notably wrote a four-volume
autobiography, consisting of: Memoirs of a
Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force
of Circumstance (sometimes published in two
volumes in English translation: After the
War and Hard Times); and All Said and Done.In
the 1970s de Beauvoir became active in France's
women's liberation movement.
She wrote and signed the Manifesto of the
343 in 1971, a manifesto that included a list
of famous women who claimed to have had an
abortion, then illegal in France.
Some argue most of the women had not had abortions,
including Beauvoir.
Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve,
Delphine Seyrig and de Beauvoir's sister Poupette.
In 1974, abortion was legalised in France.
Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse (The Coming
of Age) is a rare instance of an intellectual
meditation on the decline and solitude all
humans experience if they do not die before
about the age of 60.
In an interview with Betty Friedan, de Beauvoir
said: "No, we don’t believe that any woman
should have this choice.
No woman should be authorised to stay at home
to bring up her children.
Society should be totally different.
Women should not have that choice, precisely
because if there is such a choice, too many
women will make that one.
It is a way of forcing women in a certain
direction."In about 1976 de Beauvoir and Sylvie
Le Bon made a trip to New York City in the
United States to visit Kate Millett on her
farm.
In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux
(A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account
of Sartre's last years.
In the opening of Adieux, de Beauvoir notes
that it is the only major published work of
hers which Sartre did not read before its
publication.
She contributed the piece "Feminism – alive,
well, and in constant danger" to the 1984
anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International
Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin
Morgan.After Sartre died in 1980, de Beauvoir
published his letters to her with edits to
spare the feelings of people in their circle
who were still living.
After de Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted
daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm
would not let many of Sartre's letters be
published in unedited form.
Most of Sartre's letters available today have
de Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions
but mostly the use of pseudonyms.
De Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary
heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published
de Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre
and Algren.
De Beauvoir died of pneumonia on 14 April
1986 in Paris, aged 78.
She is buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse
Cemetery in Paris.
== Prizes ==
Prix Goncourt, 1954
Jerusalem Prize, 1975
Austrian State Prize for European Literature,
1978
== Works ==
=== List of publications (non-exhaustive)
===
L'Invitée (1943) (English – She Came to
Stay) [novel]
Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) [nonfiction]
Le Sang des autres (1945) (English – The
Blood of Others) [novel]
Who Shall Die?
(1945)
Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946) (English
– All Men Are Mortal) [novel]
Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947) (English
– The Ethics of Ambiguity) [nonfiction]
"America Day by Day" (1948) (English – 1999
– Carol Cosman (Translator and Douglas Brinkley
(Foreword) [nonfiction]
Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) (English – The
Second Sex) [nonfiction]
L'Amérique au jour le jour (1954) (English
– America Day by Day)
Les Mandarins (1954) (English – The Mandarins)
[novel]
Must We Burn Sade?
(1955)
The Long March (1957) [nonfiction]
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
The Prime of Life (1960)
Force of Circumstance (1963)
A Very Easy Death (1964)
Les Belles Images (1966) [novel]
The Woman Destroyed (1967) [novel]
The Coming of Age (1970) [nonfiction]
All Said and Done (1972)
Old Age (1972) [nonfiction]
When Things of the Spirit Come First (1979)
[novel]
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981)
Letters to Sartre (1990)
Journal de guerre, Sept 1939–Jan 1941 (1990);
English – Wartime Diary (2009)
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson
Algren (1998)
Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926–27 (2006)
Cahiers de jeunesse, 1926–1930 (2008)
=== Selected translations ===
Patrick O'Brian was de Beauvoir's principal
English translator, until he attained commercial
success as a novelist.
Beauvoir, Simone (1997), ""Introduction" to
The Second Sex", in Nicholson, Linda, The
second wave: a reader in feminist theory,
New York: Routledge, pp. 11–18, ISBN 9780415917612.
Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University
of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margaret
A. Simons et al.) contains a selection of
essays by de Beauvoir translated for the first
time into English.
Among those are: Pyrrhus and Cineas, discussing
the futility or utility of action, two previously
unpublished chapters from her novel She Came
to Stay and an introduction to Ethics of Ambiguity.
== See also ==
Art Shay
Simone Weil
List of women's rights activists
== References ==
== Sources ==
Appignanesi, Lisa, 2005, Simone de Beauvoir,
London: Haus, ISBN 1-904950-09-4
Bair, Deirdre, 1990.
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography.
New York: Summit Books, ISBN 0-671-60681-6
Rowley, Hazel, 2005.
Tête-a-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre.
New York: HarperCollins.
Suzanne Lilar, 1969.
Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe (with collaboration
of Prof. Dreyfus).
Paris, University Presses of France (Presses
Universitaires de France).
Fraser, M., 1999.
Identity Without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir
and Bisexuality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common
Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
Hélène Rouch, 2001–2002, Trois conceptions
du sexe: Simone de Beauvoir entre Adrienne
Sahuqué et Suzanne Lilar, Simone de Beauvoir
Studies, n° 18, pp. 49–60.
Seymour-Jones, Carole (2008).
A Dangerous Liaison.
Arrow Books.
ISBN 978-0-09-948169-0.
Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar,
Nathalie Sarraute, 2002.
Conférence Élisabeth Badinter, Jacques Lassalle
& Lucette Finas, ISBN 2717722203.
== Further reading ==
Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe, by Suzanne
Lilar, 1969
Feminist theory & Simone de Beauvoir, by Toril
Moi, 1990
de Beauvoir, Simone (2005), "Introduction
from The Second Sex", in Cudd, Ann E.; Andreasen,
Robin O., Feminist theory: a philosophical
anthology, Oxford, UK Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing, pp. 27–36, ISBN 9781405116619.
Appignanesi, Lisa.
Simone de Beauvoir, London: Penguin, 1988,
ISBN 0140087370
Bair, Deirdre.
Simone de Beauvoir, a biography, New York:
Summit Books, 1990.
ISBN 0671606816
Francis, Claude.
Simone de Beauvoir: A Life, A Love Story.
Lisa Nesselson (Translator).
New York: St. Martin's, 1987.
ISBN 0312001894
Okely, Judith.
Simone de Beauvoir, New York: Pantheon, 1986.
ISBN 0394747658
== External links ==
Bergoffen, Debra.
"Simone de Beauvoir".
In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
"Simone de Beauvoir".
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Works by or about Simone de Beauvoir at Internet
Archive
Madeleine Gobeil (Spring–Summer 1965).
"Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No.
35".
Paris Review.
Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile
and links to further articles.
Petri Liukkonen.
"Simone de Beauvoir".
Books and Writers
Victoria Brittain et al discuss Simone de
Beauvoir's lasting influence, ICA 1989
Mim Udovitch – a contributing editor for
Esquire (6 December 1988).
"Hot and Epistolary: 'Letters to Nelson Algren',
by Simone de Beauvoir".
The New York Times.
Retrieved 9 June 2012.
Louis Menand (26 September 2005).
"Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of
Sartre and Beauvoir (Book review of the republished
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir)".
newyorker.com.
Retrieved 9 June 2012.
Murray, Jenni (22 January 2008).
"Simone de Beauvoir".
Woman's Hour.
BBC Radio 4.
"Simone De Beauvoir", Great Lives, BBC Radio
4, 22 April 2011
