Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9th January 1908, and she became one of France’s most influential and significant writers. She was born to a bourgeois family in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, not far from the Latin Quarter in the fifth arrondissement. This area is called the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) for its position on the river Seine, and before long was known as an intellectual and creative centre for philosophers, writers, artists, and filmmakers in the 1950s.

In her teenage years, de Beauvoir began rejecting her religion and eventually became an atheist. This lack of religious view would come to greatly influence her existentialist philosophy that she developed after graduation.

In 1928, at the age of twenty-one, de Beauvoir became the youngest ever person to pass the agrégation in philosophy at France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure University. The jury awarded her second place in the exam; first place was taken by another future philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a classmate of de Beauvoir at the École Normale Supérieure. Passing this exam gave de Beauvoir the right to teach at high school level, which she did from 1929-43.

De Beauvoir famously had an open relationship with Sartre throughout her life. Their relationship began in 1929 and they remained partners until Sartre’s death in 1980, but they never married, cohabited, or had children together. During these years, both also had other relationships, such as de Beauvoir’s relationship with her lover Nelson Algren, an American author who she met in Chicago. Before long, Algren became uncomfortable with the public nature of their relationship and they separated in the mid-1950s; however, de Beauvoir was still buried wearing a silver ring that he had gifted to her. She also had relationships with women and was publicly bisexual.

She Came to Stay

In 1943, de Beauvoir published her first novel, She Came to Stay (L’Invitée). It is thought to have been inspired by de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s relationship with actresses and sisters Wanda and Olga Kosakiewicz; the novel fictionalises and then explores the relationships between the four, as well as exploring in some detail the complicated relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre. This book is ground-breaking and revolutionary in its subject matter, as well as in its intimate and powerful portrayal.

De Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre was, however, much more than purely romantic; they were intellectual equals and regularly debated their ideas with each other. Together, they came to be the figureheads of the philosophical school of Existentialism.

What is existentialism?

The existentialist philosophy argues that humans are born free, rather than with a pre-ordained purpose (as was taught by Judeo-Christian religions), and as such, they are free to form their own meaning in life. In fact, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), de Beauvoir argued not only that it is each individual’s greatest imperative to define their own life’s meaning, but also that they must protect the freedom of others to create their own life purpose.

However, the exploration of this philosophy led de Beauvoir to consider another challenge: she saw that she was fundamentally limited in her freedoms because of being a woman. While her male colleagues didn’t have to struggle to be taken seriously, for de Beauvoir, becoming a writer and philosopher had been a risk, and this was not appreciated by the men who surrounded her. These considerations led to de Beauvoir writing her best-known and most revolutionary work, The Second Sex.

The Second Sex

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième sexe) was published in two volumes in 1949, and took fourteen months overall to research and write. In the book, she explores the condition of women from a variety of angles – biologically, psychoanalytically, historically, and sociologically, to name but a few. Her rigorous and ground-breaking study led to the work becoming known as one of feminist philosophy’s major works.

In The Second Sex, De Beauvoir argues that women are the ‘Other’ and that this condition has been compounded throughout history. For example, she criticises psychoanalysts’ (such as Freud) interrogation of the condition of women, arguing that he spoke about women only in relation to men and claimed that sexuality is the defining feature of women. De Beauvoir rejects this view, instead affirming that women need to be studied separately from men, rather than as an offshoot of them and that women are much more than their sexuality.

Linking to her existentialist philosophy, she famously writes, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ (‘on ne naît pas femme, on le devient’). Entire critical works have been written interpreting this quote, but it harks back to the existentialist idea that humans are born free. In the context of The Second Sex, this quote may be said to encompass the idea that the condition that we know as womanhood has been created by biological, sociological, psychological, and historical circumstances, and De Beauvoir argues that this condition is ultimately restrictive.

The Mandarins

Another of De Beauvoir’s most significant works was the novel The Mandarins (Les Mandarins), published in 1954. The novel is a roman à clef (like She Came to Stay), meaning that it fictionalises real events – in the case of The Mandarins, the characters represent real people such as de Beauvoir herself, Sartre, and writer and philosopher Albert Camus. The novel explores feminism and existentialism, like many of de Beauvoir’s other works, while following a group of French intellectuals navigating political and intellectual life in 1940s-50s France. In 1954, the novel won the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary award, and shortly after was published in English translation in 1956.

Simone de Beauvoir’s legacy

Simone de Beauvoir died in April 1986 and her work, especially The Second Sex, laid the groundwork for the second-wave feminist movement, which took place during the 1950s-80s. She also influenced numerous other feminist works, such as Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique which analyses the portrayal of women in the mainstream media. In addition, de Beauvoir’s analysis of the ‘Othering’ of women has opened up discussions and studies about other forms of ‘Othering’, such as discrimination based on race or class, as well as her original work being expanded on to include contemporary discussions surrounding gender identity and sexuality.