Simone de Beauvoir always considered herself a writer. She disdained calling herself a philosopher, although she did take credit for acting the role of “midwife” (her term) to the existentialism of her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre. Only late in her life and after her death, were her contributions to philosophy fully recognized, especially in politics, ethics, existentialism, and feminist theory. Indeed, she artfully synthesized existentialism and feminism, lending greater urgency and immediacy to both. Moreover, she also elevated feminism to the level of political philosophy with The Second Sex, her breakthrough 1949 two-volume answer to the question “What is a woman?”
Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908, into a middle-class Parisian family that suffered a financial crisis following World War I and thereafter struggled to maintain its bourgeois status. Profoundly religious as a child, Beauvoir considered becoming a nun but abandoned her religion in her early teens and lived from then on as an atheist.
Thanks to her family’s straitened circumstances, Beauvoir realized she would have no dowry and thus decided to prepare to make her own way in the world. She passed baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature and languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie before entering the Sorbonne, from which, in 1928, she received the equivalent of a master’s degree in philosophy, writing a thesis on Leibniz.
She prepared for a career as a secondary-school teacher—in company with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss—and unofficially attended courses at the École Normale Supérieure to prepare for the prestigious agrégation post-graduate examination in philosophy. There she met Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom first place in the agrégation was awarded, with Beauvoir placing second. At twenty-one, she was the youngest candidate ever to pass the examination.
Beauvoir taught in a lycée from 1929 to 1943, at which time she became sufficiently established as a writer to support herself with her pen. The year 1929 also marked the beginning of her lifelong relationship with Sartre, which the couple described as a partnership of the soul. A sexual relationship, it was non-exclusive, and the couple did not live together. They did, however, faithfully read one another’s work, a circumstance that triggered an unending debate over who influenced whom in what.
Beauvoir’s formal entrée into philosophy came in 1944, when she published Pyrrhus et Cinéas, an essay on existentialist ethics. This was followed in 1947 by The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), which three generations of philosophy professors have recommended as the most comprehensive introduction to French existentialism.
With Sartre, she edited Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), a political periodical Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others founded at the end of World War II. She used the journal to publish some of her shorter works and continued as its editor until her death in 1986. In 1949, The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) was published. The central theme, building on Sartre’s classic existentialist formulation “existence precedes essence,” is that “One is not born but becomes a woman,” thereby distinguishing between sex and gender and arguing that biological sex did not necessarily coincide with the social construction of gender. This, Beauvoir argued, has resulted in the social oppression of women because of the sociohistorical female identity imposed upon them. The essential oppression is that women are defined exclusively in relation to men, thereby becoming relegated to the status of the “second sex.” Beauvoir used the lessons of existential thought to reveal women as the equal of men in terms of choice in life.
With The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir effectively popularized existentialism among women and, conversely, introduced existentialists—male and female—to feminism. In The Second Sex, existentialism and feminism are inextricably bound. As provocative as the 1947 book was, her 1954 roman à clef, The Mandarins, revealed in frank, albeit novelistic, detail the personal lives of the philosophers and others who made up Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s circle, thereby providing a unique view of the makers of philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. Recognizable are intimate portraits of herself, Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and the American novelist and short-story writer Nelson Algren. Beauvoir wrote in especially intimate detail of her extended affair with Algren, who was outraged by her appropriation of their intimacy for public consumption.
Beauvoir succumbed to pneumonia on April 14, 1986 and was buried beside Sartre (who had died six years earlier) in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.
