Simone de Beauvoir
The Parisian philosopher who ushered in the second wave of feminism.
Text
Tucked away in the beautifully cluttered confines of Montparnasse Cemetery is a marble headstone stained pink with lipstick, left over decades by adoring fans. This headstone marks the graves of Parisian philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, known best for their contributions to the field of existentialism and western socialism. After meeting in secondary school and graduating neck and neck for best in class, Sartre and Beauvoir carried on a lifelong relationship as life partners and intellectual equals.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in the sixth arrondissement in 1908 to a rather bourgeois family. This affluency allowed her to receive a quality education; despite her father’s disapproval, Beauvoir continued her studies into university, hoping to earn a living for herself rather than relying on the wealth of a husband. In 1928, she graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in philosophy.
Though her ambition in school was focused mainly on a future as a professor, Beauvoir is best known for her writings. She published philosophical works across a range of genres, including novels, autobiographies, and researched argumentative essays. Her first book, a novel entitled She Came to Stay (1943) dealt with themes of sexuality and interpersonal relationships. In a way, this novel acted as a precursor to Beauvoir’s most celebrated work, The Second Sex (1949). After engaging in a conversation with her male colleagues and friends, including Sartre, in 1945, Beauvoir came to the realization that no man – even the existentialist philosophers with whom she associated – would think to author a book on what it meant to be a man. This revelation prompted her to complete three years of research on what she felt it meant to be a woman in the modern western world. The Second Sex consists of a series of essays, ranging in topic from traditional myth, to biology, to psychology, and to Marxism – just to name a few.
When she published her research in 1949, Beauvoir was met with a wave of backlash. Detractors accused her of “embarrassing the French man” and promoting lesbianism and misandry (despite her very public relationship with Sartre). Others dismissed her ideas as “Sartrean” in nature, derivative of her partner’s writings.
Still, The Second Sex found an audience in the sprouting feminist movement in the United States. Beauvoir’s ideas of women holding the same ethical and logical abilities as men, and therefore being capable of achieving freedom of intellectualism, professionalism, and personality, struck a chord with the housewives of the 1950s, who had recently been forced back into the home after carrying the American workforce through the Second World War. In 1963, housewife and mother Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book carefully deconstructing the myth that all women would find happiness entirely within the domestic sphere. This myth, the “feminine mystique,” echoed Beauvoir’s assertion published 14 years earlier: “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” The incoming second wave of feminism would cement Beauvoir as a leader in Western feminist theory.
