Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir in 1967
Born
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

(1908-01-09)9 January 1908
Paris, France
Died14 April 1986(1986-04-14) (aged 78)
Paris, France
Resting placeMontparnasse Cemetery, Paris
EducationUniversity of Paris (BA, MA)
Occupations
  • Philosopher
  • writer
  • social theorist
  • activist
Notable workThe Second Sex (1949)
Partners

Philosophy career
Era
Existential feminism
Signature

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death,[4][5][6] she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.[7]

Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiographies, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was best known for her "trailblazing work in feminist philosophy",

Personal life

Early years

Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908,

Catholic. Simone had a sister, Hélène, who was born two years later, on June 6, 1910. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I
, and Françoise insisted the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school.

Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would boast, "Simone thinks like a man!"[17] Because of her family's straitened circumstances, she could no longer rely on her dowry, and like other middle-class girls of her age, her marriage opportunities were put at risk. She took this opportunity to take steps towards earning a living for herself.[18]

She first worked with

École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination that serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for it that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or "beaver").[16] The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.[19] Additionally, Beauvoir finished an exam for the certificate of "General Philosophy and Logic" second to Simone Weil. Her success as the eighth woman to pass the agrégation solidified her economic independence and furthered her feminist ideology.[8]

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."[20]

Education

Beauvoir pursued post-secondary education after completing her high school years at

Diplôme d'Études Supérieures Spécialisées [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis) on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg (the topic was "Le concept chez Leibniz" ["The Concept in Leibniz"]).[22] Her studies of political philosophy through university influenced her to start thinking of societal concerns.[citation needed
]

Religious upbringing

Beauvoir was raised in a Catholic household. In her youth, she was sent to convent schools. She was deeply religious as a child, at one point intending to become a nun. At age 14, Beauvoir questioned her faith as she saw many changes in the world after witnessing tragedies throughout her life.[23] Consequently, she abandoned her faith in her early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of her life.[24] To explain her atheist beliefs, Beauvoir stated, "Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself."[25]

Middle years

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Balzac Memorial

From 1929 through 1943, Beauvoir taught at the

lycée level until she could support herself solely on the earnings of her writings. She taught at the Lycée Montgrand [fr] (Marseille), the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc (Rouen) [fr], and the Lycée Molière (Paris) [fr] (1936–39).[26]

Jean-Paul Sartre

Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met during her college years. Intrigued by her determination as an educator, he intended to make their relationship romantic. However, she had no interest in doing so.[23] Her resistance to Sartre failed, and in October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir became a couple for the next 51 years, until his death in 1980.[27] After they were confronted by her father, Sartre asked her to marry him on a provisional basis. One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease".[28] Though Beauvoir wrote, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry", scholars point out that her ideal relationships described in The Second Sex and elsewhere bore little resemblance to the marriage standards of the day.[29]

I think marriage is a very alienating institution, for men as well as for women. I think it's a very dangerous institution—dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren't financially independent and end up by depending on men who can throw them out when they are 40; and very dangerous for children, because their parents vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them. The very words 'conjugal rights' are dreadful. Any institution which solders one person to another, obliging people to sleep together who no longer want to is a bad one.[30]

Instead, she and Sartre entered into a lifelong "soul partnership", which was sexual but not exclusive, nor did it involve living together.[31] She chose never to marry and never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, write and teach, and take lovers.[32] Unfortunately, Beauvoir's prominent open relationships at times overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. A scholar who was lecturing with her[33] chastised their "distinguished [Harvard] audience [because] every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life."[34]

Sartre and 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

Phenomenology of Spirit.[36][37]
However, Beauvoir, reading Hegel in German during the war, produced an original critique of his dialectic of consciousness.

Allegations of sexual abuse

Beauvoir was bisexual, and her relationships with young women were controversial.[38] French author Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (Memoirs of a deranged girl, published in English under the title A Disgraceful Affair) that, while a student at Lycée Molière, she was sexually exploited by her teacher Beauvoir, who was in her 30s.[39] Sartre and Beauvoir both groomed and sexually abused Lamblin.[40] Bianca wrote her Mémoires in response to the posthumous 1990 publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres: 1926-1963 (Letters to Castor and other friends), in which she noted that she was referred to by the pseudonym Louise Védrine.[41]

In 1943, Beauvoir was suspended again from her teaching position when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939.[42] Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against Beauvoir for debauching a minor (the age of consent in France at the time was 13 until 1945, when it became 15)[43][44] and Beauvoir's licence to teach in France was revoked, although it was subsequently reinstated.[45]

Beauvoir described in La Force de l'âge (The Prime of Life) a relationship of simple friendship with Nathalie Sorokine[46] (in the book referred to as "Lise Oblanoff").[47]

Natalie Sorokine, along with Bianca Lamblin and Olga Kosakiewicz, later stated that their relationships with de Beauvoir damaged them psychologically.[38]

Later years

Sartre and Che Guevara
in Cuba, 1960.
Sartre
in Cairo, 1967.

Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in the United States[48] and China and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her 1955 travels in China were the basis of her 1957 travelogue The Long March, in which she praised the efforts of the Chinese communists to emancipate women.[49]

She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging. She lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959,[50] but perhaps her most famous lover was American author Nelson Algren. Beauvoir met Algren in Chicago in 1947, while she was on a four-month "exploration" trip of the United States using various means of transport: automobile, train, and Greyhound. She kept a detailed diary of the trip, which was published in France in 1948 with the title America Day by Day.[51] She wrote to him across the Atlantic as "my beloved husband."[52] Algren won the National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm in 1950, and in 1954, 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.[53]

Waist high portrait of middle aged man reading
Algren in 1956

When Beauvoir visited Algren in Chicago, Art Shay took well-known nude and portrait photos of Beauvoir. Shay also wrote a play based on Algren, Beauvoir, and Sartre's triangular relationship. The play was stage read in 1999 in Chicago.

Beauvoir also 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.[54] In 1964 Beauvoir published a novella-length autobiography, A Very Easy Death, covering the time she spent visiting her aging mother, who was dying of cancer. The novella brings up questions of ethical concerns with truth-telling in doctor-patient relationships.[55]

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.[56]

In the 1970s 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. Signatories were diverse[clarification needed] as Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Hélène. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France.

When asked in an 1975 interview with Betty Friedan if she would support a minimum wage for women who do housework, Beauvoir answered: "No, we don’t believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be 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", further stating that motherhood "should be a choice, and not a result of conditioning”.[57][58]

In about 1976, Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon made a trip to New York City in the United States to visit Kate Millett on her farm.[59][clarification needed]

In 1977, Beauvoir signed a

paedophiles.[60][11] The petition explicitly addresses the 'Affaire de Versailles', where three adult men, Dejager (age 45), Gallien (age 43), and Burckhardt (age 39) had sexual relations with minors from both genders aged 12–13.[61][62]

When Things of the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories Beauvoir had written decades previously but had not considered worth publishing, was released in 1980.[54]

Cimetière du Montparnasse
.

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, Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication.[citation needed]|

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.[63]

After Sartre died in 1980, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After 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 Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren.

Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir

Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir and Simone de Beauvoir met in the 1960s, when Beauvoir was in her fifties and Sylvie was a teenager. In 1980, Beauvoir, 72, legally adopted Sylvie, who was in her late thirties, by which point they had already been in an intimate relationship for decades. Although Beauvoir rejected the institution of marriage her entire life, this adoption was like a marriage for her. Some scholars argue that this adoption was not to secure a literary heir for Beauvoir, but as a form of resistance to the bio-heteronormative family unit.[64]

Death

Beauvoir died of pneumonia on 14 April 1986 in Paris, aged 78.[65] She is buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.[66] She was honored as a figure at the forefront of the struggle for women's rights around the time of her passing.[67]

The Second Sex

sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes.[69] Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's oppression is its [femininity's] historical and social construction as the quintessential" Other.[70]

Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined as inferior to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas referred to women as "imperfect men" and the "incidental" being.[71] She quotes "In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."[72]

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.[73]

Chapters of The Second Sex were originally published in Les Temps modernes,[74] in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France.[75] It was published soon after 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 Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message.[76] For years, Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.[76]

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.[77]

In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex,[78] Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by the 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.[citation needed]

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, Beauvoir was initially reluctant to call herself a feminist.

Le Nouvel Observateur.[79]

In 2018, the manuscript pages of Le Deuxième Sexe were published. At the time her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon-Beauvoir, a philosophy professor, described her mother's writing process: Beauvoir wrote every page of her books longhand first and only after that would hire typists.[80]

Other notable works

She Came to Stay

Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943.[81] It has been assumed that it is inspired by her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where 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 Beauvoir. However, the main thrust of the novel is philosophical, a scene in which to situate Beauvoir's abiding philosophical pre-occupation – the relationship between the self and the other.[citation needed]

In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, 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 Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois.[citation needed]

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.[54]

Existentialist ethics

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Beijing, 1955

In 1944, Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion on 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, 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, Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance.[7]

Les Temps Modernes