Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a philosopher, novelist, memoirist and political activist, and the author of The Second Sex (1949), the founding work of modern feminist philosophy. Its most famous sentence — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — compressed an argument of a thousand pages: that what is called “femininity” is not a natural essence but a situation produced by biology as interpreted, by history, myth, education, economics and the constant gaze of men, who have defined themselves as the Subject and woman as the Other. With Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong companion, she was the centre of postwar existentialism, but her own philosophy — above all The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) — differed from his in its stress on the body, on situation, and on the claim that my freedom requires the freedom of others. Her novels (She Came to Stay, The Mandarins), her four volumes of memoirs, her account of her mother’s death (A Very Easy Death) and her study of old age (The Coming of Age) made her one of the great writers of the century.

Life

A dutiful daughter

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9 January 1908 into a bourgeois Catholic family. Her father, Georges, was a lawyer with aristocratic pretensions and a passion for the theatre; her mother, Françoise, was devoutly religious. After the First World War, the family lost much of its money; with no dowries, Simone and her sister Hélène (a painter) would have to work. Her father said, “Simone thinks like a man” — praise and wound at once.

She was educated at a Catholic girls’ school, the Cours Désir, and was intensely pious until, at fourteen, she lost her faith: “I no longer believed in God.” Her intense friendship with Zaza (Élisabeth Lacoin), a brilliant girl crushed by her family’s refusal to allow her to marry the man she loved, ended with Zaza’s death at 21 in 1929, probably from encephalitis. Beauvoir long felt that Zaza had been killed by bourgeois conventions, and that her own freedom had been “paid for” by Zaza’s death. This story closes Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958).

The Sorbonne and Sartre

She studied mathematics, literature and philosophy at the Institut Catholique, the Institut Sainte-Marie and the Sorbonne, writing a thesis on Leibniz. In 1929 she came second in the agrégation in philosophy, just behind Sartre, who was repeating it; at 21 she was the youngest person ever to pass. Sartre, who had been watching her, adopted her into his circle; they nicknamed her “Castor” (“Beaver”, from the English “Beauvoir/beaver” and her industriousness).

They made a pact: theirs was an “essential” love, but they would allow each other “contingent” loves and tell each other everything. They never married, never lived together, never had children; they addressed each other with the formal vous all their lives. The relationship included affairs on both sides — some with young women, former students of hers, which later drew harsh criticism and cost her her teaching licence in 1943.

She taught philosophy at lycées in Marseille, Rouen and Paris in the 1930s.

War and the existentialist years

Her first novel, She Came to Stay (L’Invitée, 1943), drew on the trio formed by Sartre, Beauvoir and Olga Kosakiewicz. Its epigraph is from Hegel: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” Françoise, unable to bear the reality of another consciousness that judges her, finally kills Xavière.

With the Liberation came fame. She co-founded Les Temps modernes, wrote philosophical essays — Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) — and the novel The Blood of Others (1945) on the Resistance.

In 1947 she toured the United States, meeting the novelist Nelson Algren in Chicago, with whom she had a passionate transatlantic affair; America Day by Day (1948) recorded her impressions, including of racism.

The Second Sex

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) was published in two volumes in 1949. It caused a scandal. François Mauriac wrote to a contributor of Les Temps modernes: “Now I know everything about your employer’s vagina.” The Vatican put it on the Index. It sold 22,000 copies in its first week. The 1953 English translation by Howard Parshley, a zoologist, was severely abridged and mistranslated philosophical terms; a full translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier appeared in 2009.

Later life

The Mandarins (1954), a novel about the postwar left intelligentsia — with characters resembling Sartre, Camus and Algren — won the Prix Goncourt. She wrote her memoirs: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972). A Very Easy Death (1964) recounted her mother’s death from cancer. The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse, 1970) did for old age what The Second Sex had done for women. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981) described Sartre’s last decade with an unflinching honesty that shocked his admirers.

She opposed the Algerian War, championing Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian woman tortured and raped by French soldiers. In the 1970s she embraced the women’s liberation movement, declared herself a feminist, signed the Manifesto of the 343, co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions féministes and the league for women’s rights.

She lived from 1955 on the rue Victor-Schœlcher with her later companion Claude Lanzmann (later director of Shoah), and in old age with her adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon. She died on 14 April 1986, six years almost to the hour after Sartre, and is buried beside him.

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Ambiguity

Human beings, Beauvoir argues, are fundamentally ambiguous: we are free consciousness, yet also bodies, things among things; we are unique, yet one among billions; we aim at the eternal, yet die. Most philosophies try to escape this ambiguity, reducing us to mind or matter. Existentialism accepts it: “Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.”

Freedom and others

Against the charge that existentialism, by denying God and fixed values, makes ethics impossible, Beauvoir answers that freedom is the source of all value — and that to will freedom consistently is to will the freedom of others: “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” My projects require a world of free people who can take them up and carry them on. Oppression is the only real evil: it cuts people off from their future, confining them to immanence.

Attitudes of flight

She gives a typology of ways people flee freedom:

• The sub-man, who refuses to commit to anything, fleeing in apathy.
• The serious man, who subordinates freedom to an absolute — the Nation, the Party, Science, Money — and will sacrifice people for it; the most dangerous.
• The demoniacal man, who rebels against bourgeois values but remains dependent on them.
• The nihilist, who, discovering that nothing has meaning, wills himself to be nothing.
• The adventurer, who loves action for its own sake, indifferent to its ends.
• The passionate man, who devotes himself to a single object.

The genuinely free person engages in the world while respecting the freedom of others.

Children and the oppressed

Children live in a “serious” world given ready-made by adults; adolescence is the discovery of freedom. Many adults — slaves, women in many societies — are kept in a kind of childhood. Their “seriousness” is not bad faith but a situation imposed on them. This is Beauvoir’s key departure from Sartre’s early view that freedom is absolute in all situations: situation can limit freedom.

The Second Sex

The question

For a long time, I have hesitated to write a book on woman… What is a woman?

Beauvoir begins by noting that a man would never write a book about “the situation of men”. Man is the norm; woman is the deviation. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.” Drawing on Hegel’s master–slave dialectic (Lordship and Bondage), she argues that every consciousness posits itself against an Other — but between men, the relation is reciprocal. Women have been made the absolute Other, without reciprocity. Why have women accepted this? Because they lacked the concrete means to organise as a group; because they were dispersed among men; because there are advantages in being a protected Other (“complicity”); and because women, like men, are tempted to flee freedom.

Volume I: Facts and Myths

She examines and rejects three explanations of women’s subordination:

• Biology: real differences (pregnancy, menstruation, strength) exist, but they do not determine a destiny; their meaning depends on society. “The body is not a thing, it is a situation.”
• Psychoanalysis: Freud’s account of penis envy takes for granted the social privilege of men.
• Historical materialism: Engels rightly linked women’s oppression to private property, but cannot explain why men wanted to dominate.

She then surveys history from nomadic hunting societies to the vote, and the myths of woman — as Nature, Mother, Virgin, Temptress, Muse, Mystery — in five writers: Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton and Stendhal. The “eternal feminine” is a male projection.

Volume II: Lived Experience

The second volume opens with the most famous sentence:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.

She then traces a woman’s formation — childhood (the girl is taught to be a doll, an object, while the boy runs and climbs), the young girl, sexual initiation, the lesbian — and situations: the married woman, the mother, social life, prostitution, maturity and old age. Marriage and housework condemn women to immanence — repetitive tasks that maintain life without creating anything new, “like the torture of Sisyphus”, while men are free for transcendence. She analyses “justifications” — the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic — as attempts to find salvation within dependence.

The book ends with the independent woman and the hope of liberation: economic independence, contraception, abortion, collective childcare, and a transformed relationship between the sexes, in which “men and women… unequivocally affirm their brotherhood”. On the last page she quotes Marx: the relation of man to woman shows how far humanity has become natural to itself.

Old age

The Coming of Age (1970) begins with the Buddha’s encounter with an old man, and asks why society hides old age. She surveys biology, anthropology, history and literature, and the lived experience of ageing. Society treats the old as “a species apart”. A society’s treatment of its old people reveals the truth about its principles.

Influence

• Second-wave feminism: Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone (“dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir”).
• Gender theory: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) built on “one becomes a woman”, arguing that gender is performative.
• Phenomenology of the body: Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl”.
• Philosophy: since the 1990s, scholars (Margaret Simons, Kate and Edward Fullbrook) have argued that she, not Sartre, originated key existentialist ideas.

Critics

• Essentialist feminists (Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous) say she valued male “transcendence” and devalued women’s bodies and motherhood.
• Postcolonial and Black feminists note her universal “woman” is white, European and middle-class.
• Her relationships with young women have been condemned as abuses of power.

Key terms

The Other

The inessential being defined in relation to the Subject — woman's position.

Ambiguity

The human condition as both subject and object, free and bodily.

Situation

The concrete conditions within which freedom is exercised, and which can limit it.

Immanence / transcendence

Repetitive maintenance of life versus creative projection into the future.

The serious man

One who sacrifices freedom to an absolute idol.

Using Beauvoir in conversation

• On gender: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
• On freedom: “To will oneself free is also to will others free.”
• On norms: “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.”
• On the body: “The body is not a thing, it is a situation.”