Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86,) fully Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and feminist. Beauvoir’s fame is primarily attributed to her groundbreaking study of women’s oppression in The Second Sex (1949,) her post-World War II novel The Mandarins (1954,) and her lifelong partnership with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
Born in Paris, de Beauvoir entered the Sorbonne, where she became the youngest person to receive a degree in French history. She met and fell in love with another philosophy student, Sartre, who would later become the father of existentialism. They remained associates and lovers for the rest of their lives.
Inspired by Sartre, de Beauvoir studied how women had been treated throughout history. After weeks of research at the Paris’s National Library, de Beauvoir published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949,) in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first wide-ranging arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature. It became the basis of the modern feminist movement. The Second Sex laments the female condition but does not propose any tangible solutions except “that men and women rise above their natural differentiation and unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.”
De Beauvoir also wrote novels and autobiographical works, including Mémoires D’une Jeune Fille Rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958,) the story of her rejection of the bourgeois values of her parents’ lives, La Force de l’âge ( The Prime of Life, 1960,) which tells the story of her relationship with Sartre and the years they spent together during World War II.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
—Simone de Beauvoir
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
—Simone de Beauvoir
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Feminism, Women
All oppression creates a state of war; this is no exception.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Future, Change
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
—Simone de Beauvoir
The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength –each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Marriage
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
—Simone de Beauvoir
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Husbands, Marriage, Jobs
One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Compassion, Service
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
—Simone de Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Certainty, Truth
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles — desire, possession, love, dream, adventure — worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us — giving, conquering, uniting — will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Hypocrisy
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