Simone de Beauvoir
1908–1986, Paris
Existentialism and feminist philosophy
Womanhood is not a fact of biology but a situation that is built and can be rebuilt.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
The life
Beauvoir was raised in a devout, downwardly mobile bourgeois family in Paris. She lost her faith at fourteen and never returned to it. Because the family fortune had gone, she could not expect a dowry and had to be able to earn, which she later described as an accidental liberation.
In 1929 she took the agrégation in philosophy and placed second, behind Sartre, at twenty-one, the youngest person ever to pass it. The examiners reportedly debated which of the two was the real philosopher before awarding him first place.
She taught, then wrote full-time. The Second Sex appeared in 1949, sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week and was placed on the Vatican's index of prohibited books. She won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins. In 1971 she signed the Manifesto of the 343, publicly declaring she had had an illegal abortion, as part of the campaign that legalised it in France.
What shaped the ideas
French women had only received the vote in 1944. Beauvoir set out to write a short essay about what being a woman had meant in her own life and found she could not answer the question without excavating biology, history, myth, psychoanalysis and economics. The book grew to nearly a thousand pages.
She was working with existentialist tools, freedom, situation, the Other, but she used them on material Sartre had never examined, and in doing so found the limits of his abstract account of freedom.
Core arguments
- 01
One becomes a woman
Gender is a construction built over a lifetime, not a biological given.
No destiny in biology, psychology or economics determines what a female human becomes in society. The figure called "woman" is produced by upbringing, expectation, myth and law. Separating the body from the social role makes it possible to ask which parts are natural and which were installed.
- 02
Woman as the Other
Man is treated as the default human, and woman as the deviation from it.
Humanity is defined as male, and woman is defined relative to him rather than in her own terms: he is the subject, the absolute; she is the Other. Unlike other oppressed groups, women have no shared history, territory or memory of a time before, which is why the arrangement has been so hard to name, let alone contest.
- 03
The ethics of ambiguity
Freedom is always situated, and it is not the same for everyone.
Sartre's freedom is abstract and equal. Beauvoir points out that a woman in a harem and a man with property are not free in the same way: material conditions can shrink the range of live options to almost nothing. Freedom is real, but it is exercised inside a situation that can be more or less confining, and changing the situation is therefore an ethical task.
- 04
My freedom needs yours
Willing your own freedom commits you to willing everyone else's.
Freedom is not exercised in a vacuum; it requires a world of open possibilities, and that world is made by other free people. Oppressing others therefore undercuts the conditions of your own freedom. This gives existentialism the ethical content Being and Nothingness never supplied.
Commonly got wrong
- She was long filed as Sartre's disciple. Her Ethics of Ambiguity solves the ethical problem Being and Nothingness leaves open, and the analysis of situated freedom is a correction to him, not an application of him.
- "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" is not a denial that bodies exist. It distinguishes the biological female from the social role, which is the move that makes the sex-gender distinction possible.
- The Second Sex is not only about the oppression of women. Roughly half of it is a phenomenology of ordinary life, from childhood to old age, and it is far more concrete than its reputation suggests.
Works
The Ethics of Ambiguity 1947
The ethics Sartre promised and never wrote. Short and underrated.
The Second Sex 1949
Two volumes. Volume I is myth and history, Volume II is lived experience and contains the famous line.
The Mandarins 1954
A novel about post-war intellectuals, and a roman à clef about her own circle.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 1958
The first of four volumes of autobiography, on her escape from a Catholic bourgeois upbringing.
The Coming of Age 1970
On old age as a socially produced erasure. Does for the old what The Second Sex did for women.
The Introduction to The Second Sex. It sets out the whole argument in about twenty pages.
Why they still get taught
She founded modern feminist philosophy and supplied the distinction between sex and gender that everything after, Butler included, argues with. Her account of situated freedom is now the standard correction to abstract theories of choice.
Chapters
- Existence Precedes Essence · Freedom & Meaning
- One Is Not Born a Woman · Naming the Subject