1908–1986
○ Died of pneumonia
French philosopher and writer who wrote in The Second Sex that "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman"
In The Second Sex (1949) she analysed how women in a patriarchal society are defined and assigned as the "Other" of men.
A French philosopher and writer, born in Paris. Placed second after Sartre in the 1929 philosophy agrégation, she taught at lycées in Marseille, Rouen and Paris until her dismissal from teaching in 1943. After the war she co-founded Les Temps modernes with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others, and The Second Sex (1949), her analysis of how women have been defined as the "Other" of men, became a classic of modern feminism. Les Mandarins won the 1954 Prix Goncourt. Never a member of the French Communist Party, she long remained a fellow traveller before breaking with the Soviet regime after the Prague Spring of 1968. She opposed the Algerian War, drafted the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971 and co-founded Choisir with Gisèle Halimi to fight for legal abortion. She died of pneumonia in Paris in 1986.
Activities and affiliations
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1929–1943
Education
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1943–1986
Literature and arts
From Paris to The Second Sex
She was born on 9 January 1908 into a bourgeois family on the boulevard du Montparnasse in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and from the age of five until the baccalauréat attended the Cours Desir, a school for daughters of "good families". Preparing for the philosophy agrégation while auditing courses at the École Normale Supérieure, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, and in 1929 she passed second, just behind him. She went on to teach philosophy at the Lycée Montgrand in Marseille, the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc in Rouen and elsewhere.
In 1943, in occupied Paris, she published her first novel, L'Invitée. In June that year she was suspended over a complaint of inciting a minor to debauchery, filed in 1941 by the mother of her pupil Natalie Sorokin; the case was dropped, but she was dismissed from the national education service for good. She then organised music broadcasts for Radio-Paris (Radio Vichy). After the Liberation she founded Les Temps modernes with Sartre, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, Boris Vian and others.
The Second Sex (1949) sold over 22,000 copies in its first week and caused such a scandal that the Vatican placed it on the Index. In it she analysed how women in a patriarchal society have been regarded, defined and assigned as the "Other" from man's point of view, and wrote that "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman". On 6 December 1954 she won the 51st Prix Goncourt for Les Mandarins.
From fellow traveller to women's liberation
Beauvoir never formally joined the French Communist Party. When her relationship with Claude Lanzmann, who was close to the party, began in the summer of 1952, she and Sartre drew nearer to Marxism; on 2 July that year she wrote that Les Temps modernes was moving still closer to the communists, "without liking them, of course, but with the conviction that one must be with them against the others". In its triple issue on Hungary of January 1957 the review reaffirmed its adherence "to socialism as embodied in the USSR, despite the faults of its leaders". She travelled to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, and her 1955 visit to China became The Long March (1957). Only after the Prague Spring of 1968, after decades of support, did she truly break with the Soviet regime.
During the Algerian War she strongly opposed the use of torture; in 1960 she signed the Manifesto of the 121 on the "right to insubordination", and in 1962 published, with Gisèle Halimi, a book on the torture victim Djamila Boupacha.
In the 1970s she joined France's women's liberation movement. She drafted the Manifesto of the 343, published by Le Nouvel Observateur in April 1971, and co-founded Choisir with Gisèle Halimi, which played a decisive part in the legalisation of abortion. In 1977 she became director of Questions féministes, the main organ of materialist feminism, and from 1981 until her death directed Nouvelles Questions féministes. She died of pneumonia in Paris on 14 April 1986 and was buried beside Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery.