Author and polemicist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was among the most prominent feminist philosophers of the twentieth century and the author of the landmark book The Second Sex (1949). She was also, along with her lifelong partner, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), one of the few modern philosophers to become a genuine international celebrity.
Beauvoir was the youngest-ever graduate of the philosophy program at France’s most prestigious university, the Sorbonne, where she met Sartre. The two classmates began their relationship in 1929 and would remain partners—romantic, political, and intellectual—until his death in 1980.
Beauvoir’s first novel was published in 1943; several essays in philosophy followed. She released her best-known work, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), in 1949. It was translated into English in 1953 and released in the United States, where it was an enormous bestseller.
The Second Sex is part history, part philosophical argument. In the book, Beauvoir relates the history of the oppression of women by men and by society at large. Women, she argued, are constrained by a definition of femininity that robs them of opportunity and artificially limits their prospects. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” she wrote. “It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
Since its release, women’s rights leaders such as Gloria Steinem (1934–) and Betty Friedan (1921–2006) have hailed The Second Sex as one of feminism’s founding texts; Steinem said after Beauvoir’s death, “If any single human being can be credited with inspiring the current international woman’s movement, it’s Simone de Beauvoir.”
Beauvoir remained a prolific writer and political activist throughout her life, penning a four-volume autobiography between 1958 and 1972 and lending her support to a procession of left-wing causes. Her relationship with Sartre, meanwhile, became one of the most celebrated love affairs in French society. The two never married, and they carried on numerous affairs with others. (As Sartre wrote, “What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.”) They exchanged hundreds of letters explicitly detailing their liaisons with others. But each remained the other’s muse and closest confidant, and she was buried beside him after her death at age seventy-eight.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- At the Sorbonne, Beauvoir’s classmates nicknamed her le Castor—French for “the beaver”—in recognition of her industrious work ethic.
- Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt—a French literary award roughly analogous to the Pulitzer Prize—in 1954 for her novel Les Mandarins (The Mandarins), which satirized the academic establishment.
- In 1971, Beauvoir joined the movement to legalize abortion in France, signing a document along with other famous French women disclosing that they had had illegal abortions. Abortion was decriminalized in France in 1974.
