Simone de Beauvoir

10 Key excerpts on "Simone de Beauvoir"

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  Self and Subjectivity

  • Kim Atkins(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  18 COMMENTARY ON DE BEAUVOIR Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was one of the most famous female intellectuals of her time, and her work has been central to the feminist movement the world over. Her work is heavily influenced by Hegel and Heidegger and developed in close collabora-tion with her lifelong intimate, Sartre. It has been suggested that the similarities between the work of Beauvoir and her friend Merleau-Ponty is not so well known because of Beauvoir’s own silence on this point – an attitude that Monika Langer attributes to Beauvoir’s personal commitment to Sartre. 1 In the Introduction to The Second Sex , Beauvoir provides a lively description of the situation of women and the unequal relations between men and women. She goes on to explain this oppressive relation by reference to two features of women’s lives: the mediating role of political structures and social institutions in the formation of subjec-tivity, and the lived experience of female embodiment. Like Sartre, Beauvoir sets out with a Hegelian model of consciousness and a conception of freedom as transcendence, but she develops these accounts considerably by drawing out the implications of the inherent ambiguities of human existence. In doing so, she lays the ground for a theo-retical framework in which to understand the invisible psychological dimensions of oppression that will later become important to feminist moral and political philosophy and to Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and power. Beauvoir begins by asking what may seem like an odd question:“What is a woman?” Stranger still, she asks whether women still exist.These are metaphysical questions, asked with a certain irony. Beauvoir’s point is that it is widely and mistakenly believed that there is some positive content, some essence, that the concept of “woman” expresses. The irony is that this purported “essence” is conceived as something inessential.

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  Critical Theorists and International Relations

  • Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Simone de Beauvoir

  Kimberly Hutchings

  Simone de Beauvoir’s life stretched across most of the twentieth century, encompassing tremendous events and changes from the impact of two world wars to post Second World War violent processes of decolonisation in Asia and Africa, the civil rights movement in the US, uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, student radicalism and the birth of second wave feminism in Europe and the USA. She was a philosopher, a feminist, a novelist, a political commentator and (sometimes) a political activist. She was also a public intellectual, part of a group of thinkers and writers who helped to develop the distinctively French phenomenological philosophy: existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading exponent of existentialist philosophy, was Beauvoir’s lover, friend and philosophical partner for fifty years, until his death in 1980. As commentators on Beauvoir have noted, her association with Sartre has often led to the dismissal of the independent value of Beauvoir’s philosophical work. However, Beauvoir did make a significant contribution to traditions of critical theory, in her work on ethics and politics in The Ethics of Ambiguity (first published in 1947, see Beauvoir 1948) and in her groundbreaking feminist text The Second Sex (first published in 1949, see Beauvoir 1997).

  We have an unusually detailed knowledge of Beauvoir’s life. Not only did she use her personal experiences in her novels, but she was also very public about the unorthodox way she chose to live her personal life, and wrote about this extensively in her autobiographical works (Beauvoir 1959, 1965a, 1965b, 1972, Rowley 2007). Beauvoir came from a middle class family and was brought up with the stultifying expectations on girls that this implied in early twentieth century France. She challenged these expectations, however, through her brilliance as a scholar, becoming a graduate student in philosophy at the Sorbonne. During the 1930s, she developed her philosophical ideas in dialogue with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others, whilst also teaching philosophy and studying German phenomenology, including the work of Husserl and Heidegger. She spent most of the war in occupied Paris, during which time she studied Hegel, and published her first novel in 1943. Although Beauvoir herself played no major role in any resistance movement, it is clear from The Ethics of Ambiguity that the example of the French resistance during the war, for Beauvoir, posed key questions about the meaning of ethical responsibility and resistance to injustice, and the role of violence in politics. In the aftermath of the war, Beauvoir was one of the founders of the leftist journal Les Temps Modernes, and also aligned herself with the anti-Stalinist left in France. As an increasingly famous (notorious) public intellectual and writer, she openly opposed the French war in Algeria, and in her later years supported student radicals in 1968 and the women’s movement, including campaigns against legal and political discrimination and for the legalisation of abortion. As second wave feminism took off in the 1960s, feminist scholars began to study The Second Sex

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  Simone de Beauvoir

  • Karen Green(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Few feminists identify as existentialists, and Beauvoir ’ s insist- ence that she had adopted a great deal of Sartre’ s existentialism as her own has been difficult for some to swallow (Le Doeuff, 1980; 1990, 164–5; Simons, 1986). Yet, even as they explicitly distance themselves from her, subsequent writers in the feminist tradition have adopted and developed methods and concepts that she pioneered. By fusing the interior perspective of existentialist phenomenology with the exterior analysis of social relations offered by Marxists, Beauvoir facilitated the turn towards ‘feminist consciousness raising’ and the articulation by women of their personal experience of oppression (Marks, 1986). Her proposition that woman is the Other of man feeds into accounts of sexual objectification and continues to have an enormous influence on feminist discourse. Her philosophy, as we have seen, was one of ambiguity, 51 Simone de Beauvoir so that different interpreters have taken up different aspects of her work, developing them in their own way. At least some of the roots of quite different forms of feminist thinking can be traced back to her writing. There are, indeed, two Simone de Beauvoirs. One, the author of The Second Sex, represents women as the Other of man, a dependent consciousnesses, constrained by social conventions to represent themselves to themselves through the eyes of men, who transform women into objects and confine them to a socially inferior status. The other, the author of the autobiographies, represents herself as an independent individual who may, from time to time, have been tempted to become emotionally dependent on some other, but who courageously carved out a career for herself and enjoyed a series of egalitarian sexual and personal relationships with men who treated her as their intellectual collaborator and equal, the most important of these being Sartre. The second Beauvoir operates as something of a pragmatic contradiction of the first.

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  A-Z Guide to Modern Social and Political Theorists

  • Professor Stuart Sim, Noel Parker(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Beauvoir's account of the Other describes woman's situation as the other of the same; but to accept equality to the same is to accept the laws of men; the laws of the self-same subject are male, since they exclude or repress sexual difference. Irigaray argues that women's specific differences are not represented by our present laws, language or culture; she aims to move beyond Beauvoir with a radical transformation of the world of men. It is not enough to claim equality with men; rather women must first discover and then express sexual difference.

  ______________

  In being recognised as an independent, intellectual woman Simone de Beauvoir gave many twentieth-century women a significant role model. But at the same time Beauvoir has been treated with suspicion by subsequent feminists, frequently because of her life-long relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. According to Beauvoir herself, Sartre was ‘the philosopher’; it was he who insisted that she write on the myths which had shaped her upbringing as a woman. The result was The Second Sex . Yet Le Doeuff contends that Beauvoir produced influential philosophy for the next generation of women.

  In The Second Sex , Beauvoir presented a crucial and formative feminist argument concerning a woman's status. She developed from Sartre's existentialism an account of woman's otherness and of the need for every woman to transcend her situation as the Other in order to become a subject. Her conclusion proposes a political project of liberation requiring that men and women work together in solidarity. However, Beauvoir's distinctiveness seems to rest upon a certain degree of awareness of women's oppression and of the social construction of every self as a gendered being. Precisely in revealing the social constraints on women's free choice she departs from the strict tenets of Sarrrean existentialism and liberal individualism. Today we can see in the light of her writings what Beauvoir failed to recognise fully for herself: that women have lived constrained by the contradictions of individual freedom and social oppression.

  Major works

  She Came to Stay (1943), trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, London: Fontana, 1984.

  The Ethics of Ambiguity

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  French Feminist Theory

  An Introduction

  • Dani Cavallaro(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  ‘The body’, for Sartre, ‘is . . . the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world’ (Sartre 1978: 430). Beauvoir moves beyond Sartre’s ethics by acknowledging the inherently gendered status of social and historical relations and by insisting that the constitution of woman as man’s Other affects vitally any resulting notion of, and opportunity for, freedom. Whereas Sartre’s universalized subject strives to transcend the corporeal domain, Beauvoir’s gendered subject is inevitably caught in a web of material and culturally contingent structures and relations of power and has to recognize that freedom is not a context-independent, transhistorical achievement, since ‘all acts of freedom occur in a situation or field that is not individually created and not all situations are alike’ (Stavro-Pearce 1999). Ultimately, invoking a purely voluntarist philosophy encoura-ging women to will their emancipation would be naive and misleading: we must first address the question of whether a subject is capable of willing anything at all within conditional parameters. 1968 AND BEYOND: THE MLF AND ITS DISCONTENTS The Sartrean notion of engagement underpins the political positioning of subsequent generations of French feminists, as evinced by the genesis of the feminist movement, or Mouvement de Libe´ration des Femmes , in the context of the momentous events ( les e´ve´nements ) of May 1968. Indeed, the movement endeavoured, in a variety of ways, to translate the aims of feminism as a philosophy devoted to the promulgation of women’s rights into Backgrounds and Contexts 15 a concrete intervention in the revolutionary politics of the time. As Moi points out, 1968 produced ‘an exuberant political optimism among left-wing intellectuals in France’ and it is in ‘this politicized intellectual climate, domi-nated by various shades of Marxism . . . that the first French feminist groups were formed’ (Moi 1985: 95).

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  Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History

  From the Middle Ages to the Present

  • Tjitske Akkerman, Siep Stuurman, Tjitske Akkerman, Siep Stuurman(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11 However, Beauvoir did not simply copy Sartre's ideas and her thinking does not fit his Cartesianism at all. By way of her ethical theory, she developed a new version of the existentialist philosophy in which solidarity with fellow human beings, corporality and emotion had a very great place.

  Beauvoir's general philosophical framework can be traced back to an affinity with a ‘phenomenological’ perspective, especially in the field of philosophical anthropology, a perspective which approaches humans as situated beings. She shares this approach, which is influenced by Heidegger and others, with Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. The point of departure of the phenomenological perspective is that humans are always involved in the world, and so can only be understood within the total, highly complex context of that world. The person should thus be understood within his or her situation. Not only are humans always involved in the world but they are also seen as beings who continually give meaning to their situation. Thus, humans are objective subjectivity and subjective objectivity. Their bodily existence in time and place always has a signifying component. A work in which Beauvoir expresses this phenomenological approach most clearly is her essay on the Marquis de Sade, entitled Must we burn De Sade? (1952). Here she presents an entirely different concept of man compared to that of Sartre, which amounts to an altogether different concept of emotion. For Sartre emotion is ‘bad faith’ and self-deceit. For Beauvoir, on the other hand, emotion is a positive experience, through which contact with others occurs. In her essay on Sade, not being able to experience emotion represents a lack of full humanity. It is through emotion that we become a ‘psycho-physiological unity’ and achieve ‘immediate communication’ with the other. In the experience of emotion there is a confluence of body and mind, which can be contrasted to pure, individuated consciousness. Beauvoir herself says that she and Sartre disagreed about emotion from the start: ‘He had no taste, he said, for all those disordered physical reactions – violent palpitations of the heart, trembling, or giddiness – which paralyse verbal communication.’ Not only had Sartre no sense for emotion, he is contemptuous of it. Emotion is not authentic, because it is not lucid: ‘If you gave way to tears or nerves or sea-sickness, he said, you were simply being weak.’12

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  Being Feminist, Being Christian

  Essays from Academia

  • A. Jule, B. Pedersen, A. Jule, B. Pedersen(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R F O U R In Search of Bodily Perspective: A Study of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray Elizabeth Powell To be a feminist today is to be part of a contentious and creative legacy. As feminist thinkers and writers, it is important that we recognize the women who have gone before us, who have enabled our work and practice. To understand them will be, to a great extent, to understand ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray are two French feminist theorists who have deeply shaped my feminist questioning and living even though I am half-a-world away geographically and perhaps even further removed culturally and in matters of faith. What is more, the two are themselves often understood as representing philosophical and political perspectives that are opposite one another. Despite this, my common affection for both is neither accident nor contradiction, for all three of us share passionate concern for one matter in particular: the establishment of woman’s subjectivity. Beauvoir first expresses the problem involved in this process in her introduction to The Second Sex. She writes, In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: “You think thus and so because you are a woman”; but I know that my only defense is to reply: “I think thus and so because it is true,” thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to retort: “And you think the contrary A. Jule et al. (eds.), Being Feminist, Being Christian © Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen 2006 because you are a man,” for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. (xxi) The problem here is how women may hold on to their embodied subjective self and still be accorded speaking status in a world where the masculine defines what it is to be a subjective self.

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  Politics with Beauvoir

  Freedom in the Encounter

  • Lori Jo Marso(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Simone de Beauvoir is lauded as the exemplary feminist (indeed, as the “mother” of feminism) or lamented as typical of everything that is wrong with feminism. 1 She is celebrated or condemned for advancing a liberal in-dividualist form of feminism. 2 She is denounced for thinking that socialism will automatically liberate women. 3 She is taken to task for not saying she was a feminist soon enough. 4 Her work was ignored by philosophy departments for decades on the grounds that she merely applied Sartre’s framework to women, but feminist philosophers have rehabilitated her as the real brain be-hind Sartre’s pen. 5 She is reprimanded for not paying attention to racial and class divisions among women and for caring only about middle-class white women. 6 She is rebuked for disavowing the body or, contrarily, for magnify-ing the importance of unseemly bodily functions. 7 She is admired for disdain-ing motherhood, housework, and other “feminine” activities or reviled for the same. 8 She is chastised for advancing gender as an essentialist category or for not paying enough attention to l’écriture féminine . 9 Although her famous insight, “One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” has been taken up by trans and queer feminists as a rallying cry for the plasticity and hybridity of gender, she is considered by many to be thoroughly passé. 10 These readings each claim Beauvoir as their own: to be loved, lamented, or disavowed. But they tend to miss what I will argue is at the heart of her femi-INTRODUCTION OUR BEAUVOIR 2 / Introduction nism, which is also what makes her politics of interest to an audience beyond feminist theory. 11 To my horror, as I was finishing this book, a feminist theory colleague said to me, “There’s nothing new to say about Beauvoir!” I show in this book there is not only something new to say, but there is much that femi-nists, literary theorists, and philosophers, all parsing “our” Beauvoir, have not seen.

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  Because of Beauvoir

  Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius

  • Alison E. Jasper(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  Pamela Sue Anderson (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 176. 35 Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter , trans. James Kirkup (Harmond-sworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 344. 36 Miranda Fricker, “Life-story in Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 218. 37 Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29. Beauvoir and The Second Sex 15 She brushes aside what is often regarded as happiness—being at rest, she says, is tantamount to the “en soi” of that brutish life. 38 The existentialist subject must constantly strive for greater freedom: “There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an infinitely open future” to engage in “freely chosen projects.” 39 Beauvoir’s Legacy Today, any reflection on women writers is read in the light of Beauvoir’s anal-ysis, and this in itself indicates that her ideas have effected some change to the previous masculinist imaginary. Her radical reading of women’s disadvantage as having to do with a set of philosophical assumptions that govern even the most intimate of embodied practices—such as the construct “woman” herself—cannot now be easily ignored in the Western context. As a result of The Second Sex in particular and the discussions it engendered, it became accepted wisdom among feminist activists and academics within a couple of decades that questions of equality needed to be considered alongside issues of gender difference, viewed to a greater or lesser extent as the product of human philosophy and social organization. Within twenty years, a new generation of women who had grown up reading the book began responding in earnest to Beauvoir’s earlier ideas, though at first perhaps more strongly in Europe than in the United States.

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  Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

  • Ruth Evans(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Formation, from the baby girl to the young girl and into age, sexuality from a to z, Situations ... And To become or not to become then Beauvoir demonstrates all the consequences that flow from the production of the being that's called feminine. She does prove her point, over and over again, in a text brimming with quotations from wide cultural sources. She marries a beautifully anchored, practical and literary form of existentialism (no smoky baroque nonsense unlike her mate Sartre) with the ability never to lose sight of her central, and crucial, idea. Femininity is a construct. Like any form of sexuality. Exposing constructs frees you. Recent or not so recent theorists, based in the US mostly, de Lauretis, Butler, Haraway, Wittig, Riley, Garber, have explored and expanded that. It's the right direction to go. Beauvoir may not be referred to as often as she ought to be, but she is the seed - the pathfinder.' 'Well, there's my point.' Paula has waited for the full flow of Jo's enthusiasm to subside. 'I think it's not philosophical. I think Beauvoir is full of assumptions, of unargued assertions. No worse than Sartre, mind you, and I do agree she's more to the point - she doesn't try to cover her tracks, she doesn't go into rhetorical or romantic excess, she's better grounded. But she's still guilty of what she accuses men thinkers and writers of. Whilst demys- tifying she doesn't see how she herself mythologises.' 'I just don't get you. You're repeating yourself.' Jo is getting annoyed, Anne observes. Paula breathes deeply, as if about to dive. 'For a start, Beauvoir - rightly mind you - exposes Benda, Leiris, and countless others, philosophers from Aristotle onwards, or poets, as having solemnly or angrily pontificated about women's inferiority.

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