Simone de Beauvoir

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy

Simone de Beauvoir
Name Simone de Beauvoir
Birth January 9, 1908 ( Paris, France )
Death April 14, 1986 ( Paris, France )
School/tradition

Existentialism
Feminism

Main interests Politics, Feminism, Ethics

Notable ideas ethics of ambiguity, feminist ethics, existential feminism
Influences

Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Husserl,

Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Sade

Influenced Butler, Camus, Deleuze, Sartre, Paglia, Friedan, Hoagland

"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation).

Simone de Beauvoir (French IPA: [si'mn d bo'vwa]) (January 9, 1908 April 14, 1986)
was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and
social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her
metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise

The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of
contemporary feminism.

Contents
[hide]

1 Early years
2 Middle years
o 2.1 She Came to Stay and The Mandarins
o 2.2 Existentialist Ethics
o 2.3 Sexuality, Existentialist Feminism, and The Second Sex
o 2.4 Les Temps Modernes
3 Later years
4 Death and afterwards
5 Bibliography
o 5.1 Translations
o 5.2 Sources
5.2.1 Bibliographic sources
6 External links

7 See also

[edit] Early years

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris to
Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Franoise, ne Brasseur, the elder of two daughters. Her
childhood and adolescence involve her sister Hlne (whom she calls Poupette) and her friend
Zaza. She traces back to her relationship with Poupette, whom she sought to teach and influence
from an early age, her taste for teaching, and it is the tragic life and death of Zaza that forms part
of the subject matter for her first serious novel, which did not turn out to Beauvoir's liking. Later
in life she split the manuscript from this novel into a series of short stories.

[edit] Middle years

After passing the baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, she studied mathematics
at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, then philosophy at
the Sorbonne. In 1929, while at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir gave a presentation on Leibniz and was
thereafter pursued by Jean-Paul Sartre. It is a common misconception that Beauvoir studied at
the Ecole Normale. She was, however, well acquainted with the school and its curriculum,
thanks to Sartre and others within their philosophic circle.
In 1929, Beauvoir also became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrgation in philosophy.
While at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir acquired her lifelong nickname, Castor, the French word for
"beaver" given to her because of the resemblance of her surname to the English word "beaver".

[edit] She Came to Stay and The Mandarins

In 1943, Beauvoir published She Came to Stay, a fictionalized chronicle of her and Sartre's
relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in

the Rouen secondary school where she taught during the early 30s. She grew fond of Olga.
Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she denied him; he began a relationship with her sister Wanda
instead. Sartre supported Olga for years until she met and married her husband, Beauvoir's lover
Jacques-Laurent Bost. At Sartre's death, he still supported Wanda. In the novel, Olga and Wanda
are made into one character with whom fictionalized versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a
mnage trois. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it
was affected by the mnage trois.
Beauvoir's metaphysical novel She Came to Stay was followed by many others, including The
Mandarins, which won her the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary prize. The Mandarins is
set just after the end of World War II, whereas She Came to Stay is set just before the dawn of
that war. The Mandarins depicted Sartre, Nelson Algren, and many philosophers in Sartre and
Beauvoir's intimate circle.

[edit] Existentialist Ethics

In 1944 Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus et Cinas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics, which inspired
her to write more on the subject. This book, Pour Une Morale de L'ambigut (The Ethics of
Ambiguity, 1947) is perhaps the most accessible point of entry into French existentialism. Its
simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the abstruse nature of Sartre's Being and
Nothingness. The ambiguity about which Beauvoir writes clears up some inconsistencies that
many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness.

The Second Sex was originally published as a two-volume book in France. These works were
very quickly published in America as The Second Sex owing 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 much of her intended message. Nevertheless, to
this day, Knopf has prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's
work, having declined all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.
In her own way, Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of Erica Jong and Germaine
Greer. Algren, no paragon of primness himself, was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir later
described her American sexual experiences in The Mandarins (dedicated to Algren and on whose
character Lewis Brogan is based) and in her autobiographies, venting his outrage when
reviewing American translations of her work. Much bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life,
including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.
In the essay Woman: Myth and Reality, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other"
in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. And she argued that men used this as
an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them and to subjugate
them. She argued that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the
hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy so that the lower group became the "other" and had
a false aura of mystery around it. And she said that this also happened with other things such as
race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men
stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.
Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in French in 1949, sets out a feminist existentialism which
prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir accepts the precept that existence

precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the
concept of The Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that
Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression.
The principal 1932 treatment by the feminist author Adrienne Sahuqu, borne circa 1890,
entitled Les dogmes sexuels (Paris, Alcan, 1932) had already approached, fifteen years prior to
the publication of The Second Sex the question of sexist prejudices against women.
Beauvoir argues that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She submits
that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should
aspire. Beauvoir says that this attitude has limited women's success by maintaining the
perception that they are a deviation from the normal, and are outsiders attempting to emulate
"normality". For feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.
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.
A critical essay, "Le Malentendu du Deuxime Sexe," was written by Suzanne Lilar in 1969.

[edit] Les Temps Modernes

At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes, a political journal
Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used Les Temps
Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning
essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death.

[edit] Later years

Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about her travels 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.
In 1979 she published When Things of the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories centered
around and based upon important women to her earlier years. The stories were written well
before the novel She Came to Stay, but Beauvoir did not think they were worthy of publication
until about forty years later.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to no longer work
with Les Temps Modernes. Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with MerleauPonty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and
contributed more than Sartre, who she often had to force to offer his opinions.
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 Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She signed the
Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a list of famous women who claimed, mostly falsely, to have had

an abortion. Beauvoir had not actually had an abortion. Signers were diverse as Catherine
Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Poupette. In 1974, abortion was legalized in
France.
Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age) is a very rare instance of an intellectual
meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about age
60. In 1981 she wrote La Crmonie 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 Sartre did not read before its publication. She and Sartre always read one another's
work.
After Sartre died, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of some
people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and
literary heir Arlette Elkam 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,
quite unlike Elkam, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren.

[edit] Death and afterwards

Beauvoir's grave at the Cimetire du Montparnasse

Beauvoir died of pneumonia. She is buried next to Sartre at the Cimetire du Montparnasse in
Paris. Since her death, her reputation has grown, not only because she is seen as the mother of
post-1968 feminism, especially in academia, but also because of a growing awareness of her as a
major French thinker, existentialist philosopher and otherwise.
There is much contemporary discussion about the influences of Beauvoir and Sartre on one
another. She is seen as having influenced Sartre's masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, while
also having written much on philosophy that is independent of Sartrean existentialism. Some
scholars have explored the influences of her earlier philosophical essays and treatises upon
Sartre's later thought. She is studied by many respected academics both within and outside of
philosophy circles, including Margaret A. Simmons and Sally Scholtz. Beauvoir's life has also
inspired numerous biographies.
In 2006, the architect Dietmar Feichtinger designed a sophisticated footbridge across the Seine,
which was named after Beauvoir. The bridge features feminine curves and leads to the new
Bibliothque nationale de France.
For music lovers, Simone de Beauvoir was immortalized by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
and the heroine Jodie of the title track to their classic 'Rattlesnakes' Album.

[edit] Bibliography

She Came to Stay, (1943)

Pyrrhus et Cinas, (1944)
The Blood of Others, (1945)
Who Shall Die?, (1945)
All Men are Mortal, (1946)
The Ethics of Ambiguity, (1947)
The Second Sex, (1949)
America Day by Day, (1954)
The Mandarins, (1954)
Must We Burn Sade?, (1955)
The Long March, (1957)
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, (1958)
The Prime of Life, (1960)
Force of Circumstance, (1963)
A Very Easy Death, (1964)
Les Belles Images, (1966)
The Woman Destroyed, (1967)
The Coming of Age, (1970)
All Said and Done, (1972)
When Things of the Spirit Come First, (1979)
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, (1981)
Letters to Sartre, (1990)
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, (1998)

[edit] Translations

[edit]

Patrick O'Brian was Beauvoir's principal English translator, until he attained commercial
success as a novelist.
Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margaret
A. Simons et al.) contains a selection of essays by 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.