Simone de Beauvoir

From Philosopedia

Beauvoir, Simone de (9 January 1908 - 14 April 1986)

An existentialist, feminist author, freethinker, and consort of Sartre, Beauvoir taught philosophy in several colleges. The Vatican in 1956 prohibited reading of her The Second Sex (1949), a profound study of the status of women. Film critic David Denby, however, described the book in 1996 as “the single most important feminist text of the century.”

The Vatican also prohibited reading of her existentialistic novel, The Mandarins (1954).

Beauvoir’s monumental treatment of the aged in several cultures is The Coming of Age (1970).

Germaine Greer, in The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1992), uses Beauvoir as an example of anophobia, the irrational fear and hatred of old women, citing her “fizzled out“ mid-life affair with Claude Lanzmann.

In The Second Sex, according to biographer Margaret Crosland, Beauvoir displayed

• an energetic anger, directed not only towards men, the jailers of women in man-made institutions, but also, as the book proceeds, at women themselves.

But despite her anger, intelligence, and strength, Beauvoir lamentably allowed herself to be dominated by Sartre and other men, Crosland writes. In Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944—1956, Tony Judt faults Beauvoir as well as Sartre for having argued away the brutalities of Stalin. Either they were deluded or perverse, Judt states, for they refused to test their political thoughts against political realities.

Beauvoir’s love affair with novelist Nelson Algren is documented in her letters. On her death she was buried alongside her lifelong companion, Sartre, while wearing Algren’s wedding ring.

(For details of her love affair with Bianca Lamblin, a student she seduced and then introduced to Sartre, who seduced her also, see entry for Jean-Paul Sartre. See an internet biography by Shannon Mussett of Utah Valley State College, in which he discusses her views on ethics, feminism, lierature, and cultural studies.)

{Simone de Beauvoir, “Facts and Myths About Women,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999; CE; EU, Hazel E. Barnes; ILP, Index Additus, 15 December 1961; Clancy Sigal, The New York Times Book Review, 27 December 1998; TYD}