Simone de Beauvoir

• 1. Introduction

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  Simone de Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, and at the time of her death in 1986 the world did not call her one either. Yet she wrote the sentence that opened a century of argument: "One is not born woman but becomes woman." She was born in Paris on the 9th of January 1908, into a bourgeois family, and she died of pneumonia there on the 14th of April 1986, aged 78. Between those dates she produced novels, essays, biographies, memoirs, and a single study of women's oppression that would carry her name across the world. This is a portrait of a woman who refused marriage, refused motherhood, refused God, and for a long time even refused the word feminist. Who was the schoolgirl who once intended to become a nun? What did she mean by the second sex? And how did a relationship that began on a bench outside the Louvre last fifty-one years?

• 2. A Man's Brain

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  Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a lawyer who once aspired to be an actor, boasted of his daughter, "Simone has a man's brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man." That encouragement shaped a precocious child in the 6th arrondissement, raised mostly by a nanny named Louise while her parents were often absent. Her mother, Françoise, was a wealthy banker's daughter and a devout Catholic, and the household ran on contradiction. Beauvoir later traced her intellect to that very split. "My father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching," she wrote, calling her life "a kind of endless disputation." The family struggled to remain bourgeois after losing much of its fortune shortly after World War I. With no dowry to offer, Beauvoir's marriage prospects collapsed, and she treated that loss as permission to earn her own living. A sister, Hélène, born on the 6th of June 1910, grew up beside her in the same straitened circumstances that pushed Simone toward independence.

• 3. The Convent And The Sorbonne

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  At fourteen, the deeply religious girl who had intended to become a nun began to question her faith, and she abandoned religion in her teens. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life, and she was unsparing about why. "Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly," she said, adding that the believer "derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself." In 1925, at seventeen, she passed baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris. She sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure while preparing for the agrégation, a fiercely competitive examination that ranked students nationally. In 1928 she completed her degree at the Sorbonne, and in 1929 she wrote her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg. When the agrégation jury met in 1929, it narrowly placed Sartre first and Beauvoir second. She was 21, the youngest person ever to pass, and the eighth woman to do so, a result that secured her economic independence.

• 4. A Two-Year Lease

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  In October 1929, Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre became a couple, a bond that would last 51 years until his death in 1980. Sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, after her father confronted them, Sartre proposed not marriage but a provisional arrangement. "Let's sign a two-year lease," he said. Beauvoir wrote that "marriage was impossible," since she had no dowry, but her objection ran far deeper than economics. "I think marriage is a very alienating institution, for men as well as for women," she said, calling it dangerous for trapped husbands, for financially dependent wives, and for children whose parents "vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them." Instead they entered a lifelong soul partnership that was sexual but not exclusive, and never involved living together. She chose never to marry and never had children. The arrangement freed her to study, write, teach, take politics seriously, and take lovers. It also overshadowed her academic standing. One scholar lecturing alongside her scolded their distinguished audience because every question about Sartre concerned his work, while every question about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.

• 5. The Teacher And The Charges

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  From 1929 through 1943 Beauvoir taught at the lycée level, including at the Lycée Molière in Paris between 1936 and 1939, until her writing alone could support her. Her years in the classroom produced relationships that would later define a darker chapter of her reputation. Beauvoir was bisexual, and her involvements with young women drew lasting controversy. In 1943 she was suspended from teaching after being accused of seducing her 17-year-old pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. Sorokine's parents charged her with debauching a minor, and her licence to teach in France was revoked, though it was later reinstated. The French author Bianca Lamblin, a student at the Lycée Molière, wrote in a memoir published in English as A Disgraceful Affair that Beauvoir, then in her 30s, sexually exploited her before introducing her to Sartre, a relationship that ran three years. Sorokine, Lamblin, and Olga Kosakiewicz all later said their relationships with Beauvoir had damaged them psychologically. In 1977 Beauvoir signed a petition supporting the freeing of three men arrested in the Affaire de Versailles for sexual relations with children aged 12-13.

• 6. One Is Not Born A Woman

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  The Second Sex appeared in 1949 in French as Le Deuxième Sexe, and it turned an existentialist creed into a feminist one with a single line: "One is not born woman but becomes woman." In that phrase Beauvoir first drew the distinction between biological sex and the social, historical construction of gender. She defined women as the second sex because they are defined as inferior to men, citing Aristotle, who called women "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities," and Thomas Aquinas, who called them "imperfect men." Men, she argued in the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality," had made women the Other by wrapping them in a false aura of mystery, an excuse not to understand or help them. Women, she insisted, are as capable of choice as men, able to move beyond immanence toward transcendence, taking responsibility for themselves and the world. The book's American journey was troubled. Howard Parshley, a biology professor at Smith College with only basic French and minimal grasp of philosophy, mistranslated and cut much of it, and for years the publisher Knopf blocked a better version. Only in 2009 did a second translation arrive, and in 2010 Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier reinstated a third of the original work.

• 7. Mandarins And Memoirs

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  She Came to Stay, Beauvoir's first novel, appeared in 1943, set just before World War II and built from the tangled relationships of Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz, fused into one character caught in a ménage à trois with fictional versions of Beauvoir and Sartre. Beneath the drama lay her abiding question, the relationship between the self and the other. The Blood of Others followed, telling a love story between two French students in the wartime Resistance and probing individual responsibility. In 1954 The Mandarins won France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. A roman à clef set after the war, it followed the intimate circle around Sartre and Beauvoir, including her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren, who appears as the character Lewis Brogan and to whom the book is dedicated. Algren, who had met Beauvoir in Chicago in 1947, was outraged at how frankly she described their sexual life, and he vented that anger when reviewing her work in translation. Yet she kept his memory close. Years after they separated, she was buried wearing his gift of a silver ring. Her most enduring contribution to literature, though, was her memoirs, beginning with Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée in 1958.

• 8. Feminist, At Last

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  Despite writing the foundational tract of contemporary feminism, Beauvoir was at first reluctant to call herself a feminist, fearing she would be enclosed in "a sort of feminist concrete block." Watching the movement surge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she changed her mind, concluding that a socialist revolution alone would not liberate women. She publicly declared herself a feminist in 1972. In 1971 she wrote and signed the Manifesto of the 343, a list of famous women, including Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and her sister Hélène, who claimed to have had an abortion while it was still illegal in France. Abortion was legalized there in 1974. Asked in a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan whether she would support a wage for housework, she refused, arguing that "no woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children," because too many would make that choice. Her influence reached the founders of second-wave feminism, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Friedan among them, who looked to her for philosophical authority. In 1980, at 72, Beauvoir legally adopted Sylvie Le Bon, her literary heir, who would later publish Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren. In Paris, the square named for Beauvoir and Sartre sits near 42 rue Bonaparte, where the pair once lived.