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 French
philosopher, novelist, and essayist, who was concerned with safety
for factory workers, abortion rights for women, rights of the elderly,
and the social status of women. Beauvoir was a lifelong companion
of Jean-Paul Sartre. Her two-volume treatise Le deuxième sexe
(1949, The Second Sex) is among the most widely read feminist documents.
"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."
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris into a bourgeois family. Her
father was a lawyer, whose fortunes declined after World War I,
and her mother was a devout Roman Catholic, who raised her daughters
in a strict, traditional mode. Beauvoir began to write when she
was eight years old. She was educated in private institutions and
as an adolescent she rejected the religious and social values of
her family. Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met
Sartre there in 1929, joining his circle. At the age of 21 she passed
the difficult final examination, agrégation.
From 1931 to 1943 she taught philosophy in several schools in Marseille,
Rouen and Paris, and was professor at the Sorbonne from 1941 to
1943. During the Nazi occupation of France, Beauvoir apparently
was not involved with the activities of the Resistance, and she
continued to work without opposition from the Germans. In 1945 she
published Le Sang des autres, a novel reflecting on the question
of political involvement and the French Resistance.
 After
the war de Beauvoir founded with Sartre the monthly review Les
Temps modernes. She travelled widely, visiting Portugal, Tunis,
Switzerland, Italy, USA, and China.
De Beauvoir's first book, L'Invitée, was published in 1943.
It was a fictionalised treatment of Sartre's affair with Olga Kosakievicz,
and one of the several works dealing with her relationship with
Sartre. Her breakthrough work was the semi autobiographical Les
Mandarins, which appeared in 1954. The central characters, psychologist
Anne Dubreuilh, and her husband Robert, were thinly veiled de Beauvoir
and Sartre, and the third wheel, American Lewis Brogan, was the
novelist Nelson Algren. De Beauvoir had met Algren in 1947 in the
United States where she was on a lecture tour. Algren wished to
marry her but in the end she remained loyal to Sartre.
"I raise myself on my elbow, I look at the house, the linden
tree, the cradle in which Maria is sleeping. It's a day like any
other, and in appearance the sky is blue. But what a desert! Everything
is still. Perhaps that stillness in only the silence of my heart.
There is no more love in me, for anyone, for anything. I used
to think, "The world is vast inexhaustible; a single existence
is hardly enough to drink your fill of it." And now, I look at
it with indifference; it's nothing but a huge place of exile."
(from The Mandarins)
The book was addressed to the leftist intellectuals to abandon
their elitist "mandarin" status, and to participate in the real
world political struggle. Roman Catholic authorities banned the
novel and Beuvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex (1949).
Beauvoir stated in it that 'one is not born a woman; one becomes
one'. Women are "'the other'" the sex defined by men and patriarchy
as not male, and consequently they are less than fully human. Recent
authors have questioned Beauvoir's assumptions of the male as norm
but her views about misogyny in myth and literature have been extremely
influential.
 In
1958 Beauvoir published Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée,
the first of her four volume memoirs. She described her happy childhood,
intellectual development and of course Sartre. It was followed by
La Force de l'âge (1960), La Force des choses (1963),
and Tout compte fait (1972). They examined in an existentialist
perspective her choices between love and work, to become an intellectual
and a writer, and to live honest and free.
Beauvoir's engagement with feminism was largely intellectual at
first. She became involved with the Feminist movement in the late
1960s and began to be a vocal champion of women's rights, particularly
on issues such as abortion and sexual violence. In her later works
Beauvoir depicted the problems of aging and society's indifference
to the elderly. A Very Easy Death dealt her mother's illness
with clinical precision.
In 1981 appeared her memoirs of Sartre's last years, Adieux:
A Farewell to Sartre. After Sartre's death Beauvoir's life was
marked by sometimes-bitter disputes with the philosopher's adopted
daughter Arlette Elkaim. Her dependence on alcohol and amphetamines
hastened her physical and mental collapse. Beauvoir died in Paris,
on April 14, 1986, and she was buried in the same grave as Sartre.
For further reading: Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography by
D. Bair (1990); Simone de Beauvoir by J. Heath (1989); The Novels
of Simone de Beauvoir by E. Fallaize (1988); Simone de Beauvoir
by L. Appignanesi (1988); Simone de Beauvoir: An Annotated Biography
by J. Bennett and G. Hochmann (1988); Simone de Beauvoir: A Life,
a Love Story by C. Francis and F. Gontier (1987); Simone de Beauvoir
by J. Okely (1986); Simone de Beauvoir, a Femnist Mandarin by
M. Evans (1985); After the Second Sex by A. Schwartzer (1984);
Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment by A. Whitmarsh
(1981) - Place to see: Café de flore, 172 boulevard Saint-Germain,
75006 - Haut of Sartre, de Beauvoir and the Existentialists. -
Other important feminist writers: Marilyn French, Betty Friedman,
Germaine Greer, Doris Lessing.
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