Beauvoir, Simone de

Most widely known as the author of The Second Sex ([1949] 1989) and the intellectual and sexual partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a novelist and essayist as well as a feminist theorist and philosopher. Born and educated in private schools in Paris, Beauvoir passed the Sorbonne's agrégation, its difficult final examination, when she was 21 years old. Her thesis there was on Leibniz. From 1931 to 1941, she taught school in Marseille and Rouen. Between 1941 and 1943, she taught at the Sorbonne. Widely traveled and influential in her day, Beauvoir was a feminist public intellectual.

Beauvoir's best-known book helped to launch the second wave of feminism. Together with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), The Second Sex stimulated feminist thought and activism during the second half of the twentieth century. Building on the first wave of feminism that lasted from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression, this second wave had the same broad focus as the first. It aimed to further female citizens' rights to control their lives to the same extent and in the same ways that male citizens are legally entitled to control theirs.

Expressed in her memoirs and novels as well as in her philosophical tracts and essays, Beauvoir's feminist theorizing was pathbreaking in the extreme. Abjuring both essentialism and determinism, whether biological or otherwise, Beauvoir adopted a feminist phenomenology capable of probing women's embodied consciousness and lived experiences in ways both philosophical and practical. Appropriating and putting to feminist uses the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as those of Sartre at times, Beauvoir theoretically countermanded the ideas of René Descartes and Sigmund Freud, while putting Karl Marx's ideas to distinctly feminist uses.

Long before it was commonplace to discuss women's embodiment and its ramifications, Beauvoir's The Second Sex analyzed women's embodiment by looking at menstruation, “frigidity,” menopause, and beauty; it tackled the experiences of pregnancy and aging before these were widely theorized as institutionally shaped and regulated; it asked hard questions about what love, subjectivity, desire, and work typically mean in the lives of women and men. As she theorized in this masterpiece as well as in her fiction and her other philosophical works, Beauvoir formulated ideas that inspired many later feminist theorists.

Her work opened theoretical pathways for notions such as maternal thinking, for instance. Beauvoir ([1949] 1989:655) emphasized that motherhood is the one undertaking where women can harbor no practical hope of “complete liberty.” Beauvoir's work also laid grounds for all kinds of feminist literary criticism, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1971). Reading D. H. Lawrence in terms of “phallic pride” and looking at the myth of woman in other male writers' works as well, Beauvoir ([1949] 1989:185–237) showed how popular as well as academic culture constructs Woman as Other: that is, woman as different, with man being the standard-issue human being. Thus emphasizing how “woman” is socially and culturally constructed, Beauvoir theorized a great deal not about “laws of nature” or universal differences between women and men, but about “difference[s] in their situations.” Assigned different kinds of work in society and expected to exhibit different kinds of commitments and interests, women and men typically develop along different lines.

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