BIOGRAPHY

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was the elder of two daughters born to attorney Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise Brasseur de Beauvoir. The noble-sounding "de" in their name indicated some family prestige, but they were only comfortable, not wealthy. Apart from a five-year period during adulthood, de Beauvoir spent her entire life in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Her mother was a devout Catholic, and as a young girl de Beauvoir regularly attended church and went to confession. She studied in a Catholic school and considered God her personal companion. However, by adolescence she had given up her faith. She later recounted that this loss of belief was both freeing and terrifying: "Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone: without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge."

After the First World War, de Beauvoir's father suffered financial setbacks. He was forced to tell his daughters he could not provide them a dowry and concluded, "My dears, you'll never marry; you'll have to work for your livings." De Beauvoir decided to pursue a career as a philosophy teacher. She was drawn to philosophy because

It went straight to essentials.... I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to satisfy this desire, for it aimed at total reality.

Simone de Beauvoir.

She enrolled at the Institut Sainte-Marie in 1925 and studied there for the next four years, simultaneously hearing lectures at the Institut Catholique and the Sorbonne.

In 1929, de Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre and studied with him for the agrégation in philosophy (which he had failed the previous year). After both passed the examination with high honors, she agreed to a "two-year lease" relationship with Sartre. During this period she was an assistant at a lycée in Paris. In 1931, de Beauvoir accepted a full-time position at a lycée in Marseille and a year later moved to nearby Rouen. Though Sartre took a similar position at a lycée in Le Havre, on the opposite side of the country, their relationship continued. In fact, their "two-year lease" became a lifelong companionship, though they never married and were free to have "contingent" relationships.

By 1936, de Beauvoir was back in her beloved Montparnasse, Paris. For the next eight years, she taught at various lycées in Paris until the involvement of a student in her unusual lifestyle led to charges of corrupting a minor, and she was suspended. Though reinstated, she resigned in 1944 and supported herself for the rest of her life by her writings. Her first novel, She Came to Stay, was published that year to critical acclaim and financial success. She was heralded (with Albert Camus and Sartre) as one of the leaders of the new existentialist movement. The following year with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre she founded the influential journal Les Temps modernes and served as an editor and contributor to the magazine.

The Sorbonne in Paris

In her later years, de Beauvoir became increasingly involved in political issues. With Sartre, she visited Cuba, attended the International War Crimes Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam, and joined the student demonstrations at the Sorbonne. On her own, she worked vigorously for such feminist issues as legalized abortion and care for unmarried mothers. While leading the involved life of a left-wing political activist, de Beauvoir published a total of five novels, two collections of stories, and a play. She also published five volumes of memoirs, giving a picture of France in the twentieth century and of her relationship to Sartre. But de Beauvoir is best known for her philosophical works, especially the groundbreaking feminist text The Second Sex (1949).

THE SECOND SEX

The Second Sex is actually two separate volumes united around the question, "What is woman?" The first section, entitled "Facts and Myths," explores biology, psychology, sociology, history, myth, and literature to explain the answers given to this basic question. The second section, "Woman's Life Today," focuses on women's various roles and explores ways to move beyond these roles.

According to de Beauvoir, woman is the "second sex" because she is defined by man. Borrowing terminology from Sartre, she claims, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute--she is the Other." Man sets himself up as the standard, the "One"--the definition of what it is to be human--so that immediately woman becomes the "Other." As the "Other," woman is relegated to existence as "en-soi": a being-in-itself, an object. Woman is not able to exist as "pour-soi," a being-for-itself. She cannot choose her existence because her role is already defined for her as the "Other."

De Beauvoir goes on to ask why women allow this to happen: "Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty?" After all, throughout history other groups have been treated as the "Other" and have redefined themselves. Why not women? Later in the book, de Beauvoir speculates that a woman's identity as the "Other" derives in part from her body--especially her reproductive capacity. But in our selection, she points outs that women have always (with rare exceptions) been subordinated to men, "and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change--it was not something that occurred." Women have accepted their role as the "Other" because otherness "lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts." Women have no past, no history of their own. They are not grouped together as women, they have no solidarity of employment since as a rule they work dispersed among men. In short, they do not have the "concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit."

The goal of The Second Sex is to move beyond analysis to a "concrete means" for organizing women. According to de Beauvoir, there must be two changes in order to accomplish this goal: (1) Women need to act as authentic subjects choosing their own histories and (2) society must be changed to make this possible. The first of these needed changes reflects de Beauvoir's existentialism, the second her Marxism.

Whereas traditionalists condemned the entire work, feminist critics raised questions about some of de Beauvoir's specific analyses. Many contemporary feminists claim that she did not go to the roots of patriarchy and its pervasive infection of even our language. Other feminists question her existentialist or Marxist assumptions (and her apparent hostility to the female body). But most feminists salute de Beauvoir for calling attention to feminist issues. As one writer put it, The Second Sex is for feminists "the base-line from which other works either explicitly ... or implicitly ... take off."