Who was Simone de Beauvoir?
Born in Paris in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. There she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who stayed her partner and thinking companion for life. She taught until 1943 and then lived by writing: novels, essays and memoirs. In 1947 she published The Ethics of Ambiguity, a work on freedom. Her landmark study of women, The Second Sex, appeared in 1949. Her novel The Mandarins took the Prix Goncourt in 1954. She protested during the Algerian War, and in the 1970s she took part in the French women's liberation movement. She died in 1986.
Political views
- Argued that a woman is made, not born: womanhood comes from society and history, not from biology or some eternal feminine nature.Source: marxists.org
- Rejected the idea that biological facts fix a woman's destiny or place the sexes in a natural ranking.Source: marxists.org
- Took a public stand against France's war in Algeria and exposed the torture of Algerian prisoners by French officers.Source: iep.utm.edu
- Put her name to the 1971 Manifesto of the 343, in which women said openly that they had undergone illegal abortions in France.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- In 1972 she described herself as a feminist, and she helped found Questions Féministes, a journal run with Marxist feminists.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Wrote The Coming of Age in 1970, attacking the way society treats old people.Source: iep.utm.edu
Legacy
The Second Sex is seen as a cornerstone of second-wave feminism, and it shaped writers such as Betty Friedan and later gender theory. Philosophers now study Beauvoir as an original existentialist, not just as Sartre's partner. Admirers credit her with separating biological sex from socially built gender. Her critics are mixed. Conservative and religious thinkers reject what she said about marriage, motherhood and abortion. Some feminists say she undervalued motherhood or drew too much from the lives of educated Western women. Others fault her and Sartre for warmth toward Soviet and Chinese communism, and for aspects of her personal life.
In their own words
“She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.”