Simone De Beauvoir Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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French novelist and political activist and critic, Simone Ernestine Lucie Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was born in Paris into a bourgeois family. She is best known for her nonfiction work, The Second Sex (1949), in which she argued that women had become “the other” after centuries of being compared with the male nor m. Like Mary Wollstonecraft before her, Beauvoir observed that women were bullied into viewing themselves as inferior beings dependent on the males around them, and she proclaimed that women were not born as such but became so through socialization. Her declaration has remained controversial as feminists and other scholars debate the issue of nature versus nurture.

Published during the “feminist wasteland” that followed the grant of women’s suffrage in Western democracies in the early twentieth century, The Second Sex issued a wake-up call to women around the world. The book combined with Beauvoir’s lectures in the United States to provide the foundation for the second wave of American feminism that began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. By the 1970s, Beauvoir had revaluated earlier political positions and endorsed the right to reproductive freedom and lobbied for laws to protect women from domestic violence.

Rebelling against her Catholic upbringing, Beauvoir’s body of work endorsed existentialism, the notion that individuals are responsible for their own fate. She did not believe in God and rejected the rationalist concepts of classical liberalism that had been dominant in Western political thought since the Enlightenment. Beauvoir refused to accept the notion that human nature was formed by either society or the mode of production, arguing that individuals form their own nature.

Beauvoir received attention for her nontraditional decades long relationship with fellow writer Jean Paul Sartre, her mentor, friend, and lover, whom she met as a student at the Sorbonne in 1926. Despite her commitment to Sartre, Beauvoir refused to marry or to give birth. In addition to Sartre, Beauvoir’s worldview was heavily influenced by philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and by the groundbreaking work of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.

In 1945, Beauvoir and Sartre joined fellow existentialist writer Maurice Merleau-Ponty in founding the highly respected French political journal, Les Temps Moderne. Beauvoir’s first novel, She Came to Stay (1943), was followed by Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), which was a critique of Hegel’s views on the individual. In 1951, Beauvoir published a scathing criticism of the Marquis de Sade, Must We Burn Sade? and continued the critique in Djamila Boupacha (1962). Repudiating monogamy, Beauvoir had a tempestuous affair with American novelist Nelson Algren and penned a fictionalized version of the affair in The Mandarins (1954).

Beauvoir was a prolific writer for more than forty years. Among her many works, she addressed the issue of death both personally and philosophically in All Men Are Mortal (1946), A Very Easy Death (1966), and A Farewell to Sartre (1984) and dealt with the realities of aging in Coming of Age (1972).

Bibliography:

Bainbrigge, Susan. Writing against Death:The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Rodopi, 2005.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Card, Claudia, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Scarth, Fredrika. The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Schole, Sally J. On Beauvoir. Belmont, Calif.:Wadsworth, 2000.