Simone de Beauvoir

Born: 1908

Died: 1986, at the age of 78

Country of origin: France

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• Major Books written by Simone de Beauvoir:
  
  
  • "She Came to Stay" (1943)
    
  • "All Men Are Mortal" (1946)
    
  • "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947)
    
  • "America Day by Day" (1948)
    
  • "The Second Sex" (1949)
    
  • "The Mandarins" (1954)
    
  • "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" (1958)
    
  • "The Coming of Age" (1970)
    
  • "Adieu: A Farewell to Sartre" (1981)
    
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Simone de Beauvoir's main ideas:
  
  
  Simone de Beauvoir is best known for her Feminist writings and her long association with the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Her life-long, intimate connection to Sartre had the effect of her often being publically perceived as living in his shadow, serving as a sort of spokesman for his ideas, channeled through a Feminist perspective. But she was an innovative thinker in her own right and an important figure in both Philosophy and modern Feminism, with her Sartrean connection probably causing more harm to her ideas' reception than helping them.
  
  Her best-known book was "The Second Sex" from 1949 and it's famous quote, "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman". This idea defined the theme of this 2-volume book, in which she analyzed the "otherness" of women from the male perspective, with men defining themselves through what she called "external projects" and women being forced to define themselves by primarilly biologial, care-giving roles. She argued that this division of definition was entirely arbitrary and could easily be changed by allowing for greater freedom for women to choose other activities to "authenticate" themselves.
  
  She utilized the techniques of Phenomenology, with it's clearing away of theory and just focusing on direct experiences, to look behind cultural mores and traditions to discover the ultimate causes of gender inequality in society. She argued that the ideals of Existentialism - that humans are born with infinite potential and are free to authenticate themselves through their own free choices, an "act of the will" - was the most effective method to change this inequality. She argued that this freedom could be enabled in society by instituting universal child-care and more liberal laws regarding birth-control and abortion.
  
  Like many of her intellectual peers of the time, she was very much influenced by Karl Marx's ideas of the progression of history towards an inevitable state of social equilibrium via a disolving of all Classes in society, instituted via revolution. She suggested that it was not just social Classes that needed to disolve in any Communist revolution but also the traditional roles between genders, as well as discriminatory attitudes towards the elderly in society, which she analyzed in her later book "The Coming of Age", in 1970.
  
  She also added to a long list of French observations of American culture in her book "America Day by Day", written during a lecture-tour through America in 1947. In the book, she viewed America as a culture with great potential, but at the same time as a country largely hypnotized by novelty, materialism, and a short attention-span regarding history (attributes that show little sign of dying out any time soon, thanks to Reality Television and MTV). She was also concerned about anti-intellectual tendencies in American popular culture (hello?), with its emphasis on the image as opposed to the idea.
  
  She had the honor of having 2 of her books placed on the Vatican's official list of banned books: "The Second Sex" because of its radical ideas about family structure, and "The Mandarins" due to its Leftist political arguments, arguing that Leftist intellectuals should abandon their ivory towers and live their revolutionary ideals "in the street". For an atheist Existentialist, having her books banned by the Church was a big boost to her Philosophical street-credentials (sort of like a prison tattoo), and more people went out and read her books.
  
  Beauvoir rejected many trappings of modern life that she viewed as "bourgeois": materialistic, frivolous, Middle Class, property-owning trivialities. This included the institution of marriage and the raising of children. While romantically involved with Jean-Paul Sartre for most of her adult life, she never married him. (Sartre proposed to her once, in 1931, but she turned down his bourgeois gesture). They pursued a very visibly "open relationship" throughout their lives, taking on other lovers as the desire struck them, but they always came back to each other, viewing each other as having an "essential love", with room for temporary "contingent loves". They never even lived in the same house together, being sort of like very intimate friends their entire lives, spending a lot of time together sitting in cafes on the Left Bank of Paris, discussing philosophy, politics, and revolution over espresso with other like-minded Existentialists.
  
  
• Simone de Beauvoir praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Beauvoir's contribution to Feminism is beyond question and she contributed heavily to to exploring the theoretical underpinnings of modern Feminist causes. However, some have questioned her assumption of the male as being the norm against which women are compared. Typically, agnostic Feminism views the "norm" as something outside of either gender, to which both should aspire to. This doesn't question the foundation of her arguments, but aims suspicions against what sounds like a remnant of old patriarchal assumptions.
    
    Many have also questioned why Beauvoir devoted so much of her adult life to Sartre, since almost none of her views appear to have rubbed off on him, even slightly. He held to many traditional male-chauvenistic ideas throughout his life, and at his death he left his entire literary estate to another woman, not to Beauvoir. Yet she asked to be buried next to Sartre's body in Paris, which is where her remains rest to this day. This kind of blind loyalty to a man is ironic given her consistenly progressive Feminist views.
  
  
• Notable Facts about Simone de Beauvoir:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Simone de Beauvoir was raised in a very religious Catholic family and was deeply religious as a child. But she left the faith at around age ### and devoted the rest of her life to the intellectual implications of atheism and speaking out against discrimination. The absence of God was the starting point to her Existentialism, and she never looked back.
    
    
  • Her full name was Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir. Jean-Paul preferred to call her "Castor".
    
    
  • Sartre's nickname for her means "Beaver" in French. One assumes he was referring to the animal.
    
    
  • Beauvoir was confident of her and Sartre's exalted mission in life, along with their circle of friends, which included the likes of Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "We were to provide the postwar era with its ideology". This turned out to be largely true, for better or worse.
    
    
  • Her association with Albert Camus was long and intellectually intimate, at least up until the early 1950's. At one point, early in their friendship, she had wanted to become physically intimate with him, but he turned her down, despite the fact that he shared the same lifestyle of "open relationships" (he was married) that Beauvoir and Sartre did. She assumed he found her unattractive, but Camus may have been more concerned with Sartre's possible reaction. He maintained his close friendship with her for the next several years.
    
    She once said, regarding Camus: "Because I was a woman... he would end up telling me intimate secrets about himself. He gave me bits of his notebooks to read and told me about the difficulties of his private life... When we went out together, drinking, laughing, chatting late into the night, he was funny, cynical, rather course and often very bawdy in his conversation. He would admit his emotions, give way to his impulses. He was capable of sitting down in the snow on the edge of the sidewalk at two in the morning and meditating pathetically about love."
    
    
  • Her association with Sartre inevitably put her in his shadow to a certain degree. She once said, referring to their growing fame after the end of World War II, "I was pushed out into the limelight. My own baggage weighed very little, but Sartre was now hurled brutally into the arena of celebrity, and my name was associated with his. Gossip about us and our books appeared everywhere... At the Flore, people stared at us and whispered."
    
    
  • Simone de Beauvoir died of a lung infection in Paris in 1986.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman".
    
    
  • "Man enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over woman, it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jews, Mohammedans, and the Christians, among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God, therefore, will repress any impulse toward revolt in the downtrodden female."
    
    
  • "When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."