de Beauvoir, Simone

de Beauvoir, Simone (1908–86) A Parisian-born philosopher and novelist who graduated from the élite École Normale Supérieure. She is most celebrated for her two-volume The Second Sex (1949) which has been grossly translated and truncated in its English-language version. This was a wide ranging analysis of the subordination of women, examining biological, historical, and ethnographic aspects. ‘Woman is made not born’, she argued. Literature and belief systems revealed that women were always seen as the ‘other’ to man as subject. Women, she concluded, are seen as nature while man is seen as culture. Such claims rest sometimes on Eurocentric ideological assumptions disguised as universals. Many descriptions of women's existence were in effect vivid details from de Beauvoir's first-hand experience and observations of mid-century Paris and gave authenticity to her text. The book inspired thousands of women readers. She answered a post-war unease, when the question of women's subordination had disappeared. Since the more recent growth of feminist perspectives in many specialisms, there have been few such multi-disciplined studies.

De Beauvoir also wrote novels, her earliest being She Came to Stay (1943). The Mandarins (1954) received the Prix Goncourt. An existentialist philosopher, she explored moral and political dilemmas in essays and plays. There were also autobiographical volumes; for example Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), and accounts of both her mother's death (A Very Easy Death, 1964) and that of her long-term companion Jean-Paul Sartre (Adieux, 1981).