Simone de Beauvoir
by Emma Gray
Simone de Beauvoir was a French feminist philosopher and author. Her best known book, Le Deuxième Sexe or The Second Sex (1949), is a vitally important work of 20th-century feminist theory (Buchanan). In The Second Sex, Beavoir examines the construction of women’s position of inferiority and “Otherness” in the patriarchy. She claims that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” which exemplifies her existentialist perspective which was later embraced by feminists Shulamith Firestone and Betty Friedan (de Beauvoir 267, cited in Chatterjee). Beavoir studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure where she formed close relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merlau-Ponty (Buchanan). Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty would go on to start the influential literary and philosophical journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945 (Chatterjee). Upon graduating from the ENS, Beavoir taught philosophy at multiple schools in rural France. While Beauvoir was a gifted philosopher, she aimed to write fiction; however, her early attempts were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, after she began writing in a more autobiographical style, she became one of the foundational authors of feminist theory. Memoires d’une jeaune fille rangee or Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1987) chronicled the challenges women faced in the mid-20th century.
Until relatively recently, Beauvoir’s contributions to philosophy were not given the scholarly attention that male existentialist philosophers like Sartre received. Works like Toril Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, on the other hand, present Beauvoir as a philosopher who deserves to be approached in the same manner as her male contemporaries, not as a mere footnote to them (Epright & Hengehold). Similarly, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) expands Beauvoir’s assertion of the social construction of womanhood. Butler states that femininity and masculinity are performed, and that normative gender constructions are produced and maintained by patriarchal society. Thus, Butler emphasizes the existentialist roots of Beauvoir’s feminism, and calls to mind the social construction of womanhood as detailed in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Chatterjee).
Primary Reading:
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Print. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Moi, Toril. Simone De Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Further Reading:
Chatterjee, Ranita. "de Beauvoir, Simone." The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Michael Ryan, Wiley, 1st edition, 2011. Credo Reference, http://libproxy.union.edu/login?auth=shibboleth&url=https://search.credoreference.com/c ontent/entry/wileylitcul/de_beauvoir_simone/0?institutionId=5120.
Buchanan, Ian. “Beauvoir, Simone de.” A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Epright, M. C., and Hengehold, L. "Feminist Interpretations of Simone De Beauvoir / Simone De Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman." NWSA Journal 8.3 (1996): 177-80. ProQuest. Web. 23 Feb. 2021.