A lot of things happened in Simone de Beauvoir’s life, most having to do with women and the way they were treated. She was a very observant person, and her writing reflects that. Simone de Beauvoir’s writings attempted to deal on paper with the vast emotions conjured by her life experiences, particularly women she knew who were “assassinated by bourgeois morality.” (“Simone”) Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France on January 9, 1908. She was raised by a Catholic mother from Verdun, and a father who was a lawyer who enjoyed participating in amateur theatrical productions.
As family finances dwindled during World War I, Beauvoir saw the household chores that were burdened on her mother and decided that she herself would never become either a homemaker or a mother. She had found so much pleasure in teaching her younger sister, Helene, everything she herself was learning at school that she decided to pursue a teaching career when she grew up. (“Simone”) Beauvoir and her best friend, Zaza, would talk about the greatness of bringing nine children into the world, as Zaza’s mother had done, and of creating books, which Beauvoir believed to be worthwhile. As the girls matured, Beauvoir saw the degree that Zaza’s mother had used her daughter’s love and commitment to Christianity to control Zaza’s choice of career and husband. When Zaza, tormented by her parents’ refusal to grant her permission to marry Maurice Merle au-Ponty died at twenty-one, Beauvoir felt that her friend had been “assassinated by bourgeois morality” (“Simone”). Many of Beauvoir’s early fictional writings attempted to deal on paper with the emotions conjured by the memory of the family and of Zaza’s death.
(“Simone”) Despite her warm memories of going to early morning mass as a little girl with her mother and of drinking hot chocolate on their return, Beauvoir eventually pulled away from the traditional values with which Francoise de Beauvoir hoped to infuse in her. She and her sister began to rebel. (“Simone”) Weighing the good things against the bad things in this world evoked a belief in an afterlife, and the fifteen-year-old Beauvoir chose to stay with her life here on earth. Her loss of faith created a serious lack of communication with her mother.
(“Simone”) Beauvoir was convinced during several years of her adolescence that she was in love with her cousin Jacques Champigneulles, who introduced her to books by such French authors as Andre Gide, Alain-Fournier, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valery. These books enraged Beauvoir’s mother, who had pinned together pages of books in their home library that she did not want her daughters to read. Jacques Champigneulles, however, was unwilling to make a commitment either to Beauvoir or to anything else, and the Beauvoir sisters were shocked when he chose to marry the wealthy sister of one of his friends. Even as a young girl, Beauvoir had a passion for capturing her life on paper: In the first volume of her autobiography, Memoires d’une jeune fille range (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), she looked back with amusement at her determination, recorded in her adolescent diary, to ‘tell all’; yet her memoirs, her fiction, her essays, her interviews, and her prefaces do indeed record events, attitudes, customs, and ideas that help define approximately seven decades of the twentieth century. (“Simone”) It was through Rene Mahe u, a classmate, that Beauvoir first met Jean-Paul Sartre in a study group. In Sartre, Beauvoir found the partner that she dreamed of as a child: As she remarked in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, ‘Sartre corresponded exactly to the ideal I had set for myself when I was fifteen: he was a soulmate in whom I found, heated to the point of incandescence, all of my passions.
With him, I could always share everything.’ (“Simone”) And so she did, for fifty-one years, from the time they met in 1929 until his death on April 15, 1980. It would be fit that the first comprehensive and widely influential feminist study of recent times should focus on the simple task of defining what a woman is in modern times. De Beauvoir provides her readers with a highly logical exercise in examining some generally accepted statements by scientists and theoreticians such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Engels, whose combined efforts shaped the image of women during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, she establishes her own concept of women as not significantly different from men biologically yet socially very distant from the superior position occupied by men. (Terras) De Beauvoir fully agrees that the human race shares its biological differences between male and female with other species, but she also insists that membership in a species is irrelevant in human terms, because human beings create societies with set human values and impose customs, restrictive as well as supportive, on their members. (Terras) Emphasizing the mutual need for a willed coexistence in both male and female, de Beauvoir: rejects the psychoanalysts’ view of women as alienated from their biological and psychological destiny and frustrated in a vain attempt to be men.
She sees alienation for both men and women as an existential dilemma precipitated by the burden of self-determination and the exercise of free will. She rejects Engels’ theory that the oppression of women is merely the result of men acquiring private property with a subsequent profit-oriented need for slave labor done by women. (Terras) Instead, she traces women’s enslavement to the invention of tools. The invention of tools brought about a change enabling man to settle and to liberate himself from the uncertainties of his environment. The new life-style eliminated the need for women to function as the incarnation of the secrets of nature; women, however, failed to meet this function, while men created productive work for themselves. This “disturbance of a previous existing equilibrium” (Terras) led to women’s devaluation and their oppression in modern societies (Terras).
De Beauvoir’s theory rests on two important concepts: ‘otherness’ and the related ideas of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence.’ She stands behind otherness as a fundamental category of human thought. The Other is usually set up by individuals or groups who need a foil in an inferior position to define themselves as superior. Therefore, the Other never exists as a “wholly autonomous entity” (Terras) on its own terms. Otherness produces separation, but it also creates the bond of need between two entities wanting to define themselves, a concept de Beauvoir has taken from the work of G. W.
F. Hegel. In the relationship between men and women, otherness is bound to the constant desire of man to possess what he is not and to seek a union with the Other, which he is not. Transcendence implies activity, freedom, being in charge, while immanence means confinement within an uncreative, passive, and limited existence. (Terras) Man has long been seen as the doer who invented tools and created society’s fabric, while woman remained restricted a cycle of repetitious duties of childbearing and nurturing, and mostly household chores.
(Terras) Men are favored from a biological standpoint, because their sexual life is fully integrated with their existence as a person. Women, on the other hand, are profoundly alienated because of their enslavement to reproduction, which, according to de Beauvoir, is unwillingly accepted. Women, too, feel the urge to “transcend but are biologically destined to give life in a society which values posterity in its offspring” (Terras). Facing the “constant temptation to forgo liberty and become objects rather than affirm their subjective existence,” (Terras) women have failed to set up female values in opposition to male values (Terras). It is not until menopause that women are allowed to “break free.” Postmenopausal women, in a sense, form a “third sex,” not male but also no longer female. In practice, nothing but gainful employment will guarantee their freedom (Terras).
De Beauvoir’s influence on feminist thought is tremendous. Early American feminists blindly subscribed to de Beauvoir’s contention that economic independence and integration into the productive labor force could not fail to bring full equality to both sexes. Her suggestion of reorganizing a family-oriented society into one where the care of children would become the responsibility of the community as a whole has remained a “viable concept reflected in many attempts to solve the lingering child care question on a state and federal level.” (Terras) In the song “Just a girl” by No Doubt, the lyrics say “I can’t do the little things I hold so dear, ‘Cause it’s all those little things that I fear.” Those words are linked to the way Simone never wanted to become a mother after viewing the hardships she had to endure, yet she felt the need to be a mother because she was a woman. Simone de Beauvoir has lived through many tough times, but she’s been able to cope with them, whether it be by stress or on paper. Our time has received many great, and essential books because of some hardships that she’s had to endure. Simone de Beauvoir has written some of the most influential books on feminism in recent history, all because she was an observant person; she was observant of injustices done to women.
Works Cited Magill, Frank, ed. Cyclopedia of World Authors. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983″Simone (Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand) de Beauvoir” (1908-1986). Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000.
WTHS IMC. 18 Dec. 2000 Terras, Rita The Second Sex. MagillOnLiterature. WTHS IMC 22 Feb.
2001″Just a Girl.” My house. 16 March 2001.