6 – Simone de Beauvoir
“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself–on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.” Simone de Beauvoir
Moving forwards through history, our next female rebel is one of the great theorists of women’s oppression and, indeed, of the 20th century in general. As with so many great women, Simone de Beauvoir is often overshadowed in the pages of history by a great man – in her case her long-term partner Jean-Paul Sartre – but her influence on thought in the last hundred years, and on the women’s movement in particular, is titanic.
Simone de Beauvoir was many things, but above all of them, she was a rebel. She wrote some of the defining works on female emancipation and some of the most cutting dissections of sexism that have ever been written, but also lived a life that constantly put her words into action, challenging stereotypes and pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a woman. Much of what we know today about sexuality, both homosexuality and heterosexuality, as well as much of what is now known as gender studies, can trace an ideological root right through Simone de Beauvoir.
She was born in Paris in 1908, into a wealthy family. Her father recognised her talents early – “Simone thinks like a man!” he is said to have remarked on his daughter’s intelligence – and encouraged her to read extensively. She studied Philosophy at the famed Sorbonne university in Paris and was just the ninth woman ever to graduate from there. She sat in classes that included Jean-Paul Sartre and came second to him in the final exam, above every other student and at the age of just 21, the youngest person of either gender ever to complete the class.
It was at this stage that her lifelong relationship with Sartre began. They first got together in 1929 and remained a couple until he died in 1980, but their relationship would do much to inform her work. They never married or lived together, had no children and maintained an open relationship, including several menage a trois arrangements. One such tryst became the basis of her first novel, She Came To Stay, which gave a female-focussed slant on the themes of existentialism, alienation and women as “the other”.
These themes would be continued into her masterpiece, The Second Sex, published in 1949. It was a deep analysis of the history of women’s oppression and set out the idea that the world was created for men, with women “the other”, always meant to be in second place. In the second half of the book, she channels the life of a girl from conception to death, detailing extensively the many ways in which it is defined and dictated by men. As critiques go, it is coruscating. The idea, promulgated by de Beauvoir, that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, is seen by many as the first philosophical separation of sex and gender.
The Second Sex made de Beauvoir a hero for women worldwide and is seen as the start of the second wave of feminism, following the original wave that began in the late 19th century with the fight for the right to vote. She continued to write and was seen as a figurehead and godmother to the new feminist movement that her book sparked. Her life as a public intellectual was characterised by her personality, which refused to compromise and which allowed her ideas to pass over into the mainstream. Within her lifetime, many of the goals which she espoused as a young woman became reality, including the legalisation of birth control and abortion in France.
She died in 1986, of pneumonia, and was buried next to Jean-Paul Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery in her native Paris.