Simone de Beauvoir

Based on Wikipedia: Simone de Beauvoir

The Philosopher Who Refused the Title

Simone de Beauvoir never called herself a philosopher. Neither did anyone else, at least not while she was alive. And yet her ideas about what it means to exist as a woman in a world built by and for men have shaped how millions of people understand themselves. She wrote what many consider the founding document of modern feminism. She helped create existentialism. She lived in open defiance of nearly every social convention of her time.

She also did things that, by contemporary standards, would end careers and invite criminal prosecution.

Beauvoir's life presents a challenge: how do we reckon with a thinker whose ideas liberated generations of women while her personal conduct caused documented harm to young people in her care? There is no clean resolution here, only the uncomfortable truth that humans are capable of profound insight and profound moral failure simultaneously.

A Man's Brain in a Woman's Body

Born on January 9, 1908, in Paris's elegant sixth arrondissement, Simone grew up in what the French call a bourgeois family—comfortable, respectable, concerned with appearances. Her father was a lawyer with frustrated theatrical ambitions. Her mother was a devout Catholic from banking money. Between them stretched a philosophical gulf that would shape their daughter's entire intellectual life.

Her father, Georges, reportedly boasted: "Simone has a man's brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man."

The statement captures both the encouragement he offered and the limitations of his imagination. He could see his daughter's brilliance, but the only framework available to him for describing intellectual power was masculinity. This paradox—being recognized while being misrecognized—would become central to Beauvoir's later work on women's experience.

Beauvoir herself understood exactly what was happening. In her memoirs, she wrote that her father's "pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual."

Growing up caught between two contradictory worldviews, she had no choice but to think her way through them.

Losing God at Fourteen

Beauvoir was raised Catholic in the thorough way that French Catholics of her generation understood—convent schools, daily devotions, the assumption that a spiritual life would culminate in becoming a nun. She took it seriously. She genuinely intended to take religious vows.

Then, at fourteen, she started questioning.

By her late teens, she had abandoned religion entirely and would remain an atheist until her death at seventy-eight. Her explanation was characteristically blunt: "Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself."

This wasn't adolescent rebellion. It was the first expression of what would become her life's central commitment: refusing comfortable illusions in favor of difficult truths about the human condition.

The Examination That Changed Everything

In 1929, Beauvoir sat for the agrégation in philosophy, a brutally competitive French examination that ranks the entire nation's graduate students in a given subject. It determined teaching positions, career trajectories, futures. She was twenty-one years old—the youngest person to ever pass.

She came in second.

First place went to a young man named Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she had met while preparing for the exam at the École Normale Supérieure. The jury reportedly debated their rankings extensively. Some thought Beauvoir deserved first place. In the end, they gave it to Sartre—who was taking the examination for the second time, having failed the previous year.

A woman who was younger, who passed on her first attempt, who some jury members thought was actually better—and yet she was ranked second. If you wanted a neat illustration of what Beauvoir would later analyze in The Second Sex, you could hardly do better.

The same examination period produced another notable moment. Beauvoir took a certificate examination in "General Philosophy and Logic" where she finished second to another remarkable thinker: Simone Weil. Two Simones, both destined to become major philosophers, one a future atheist existentialist, the other a Christian mystic who would starve herself to death in solidarity with occupied France. The French philosophy students of 1929 had an embarrassment of genius.

The Beaver and the Sartre

Among the students Beauvoir met while preparing for the agrégation was René Maheu, who gave her a nickname that stuck for life: "Castor." It means "beaver" in French—a play on the similarity between "Beauvoir" and the English word "beaver." Sartre and their circle would call her Castor for the next fifty years.

When Sartre first encountered Beauvoir, he was intrigued by her intellectual seriousness and decided to pursue her romantically. She was not interested. Then she changed her mind. By October 1929, they were a couple.

This is where the story becomes unusual.

Beauvoir's father confronted them about their relationship. Sartre responded by proposing marriage, but in a characteristically strange way. Sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said: "Let's sign a two-year lease."

Beauvoir declined. She would never marry, never have children, never live with Sartre in any conventional domestic arrangement. They maintained what she called a "soul partnership" for fifty-one years, until his death in 1980. It was sexual. It was not exclusive. They took other lovers, sometimes shared them, lived in separate apartments, and read each other's every word.

Her rejection of marriage was philosophical, not circumstantial. "I think marriage is a very alienating institution," she said in an interview. "Dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren't financially independent and end up depending on men who can throw them out when they are forty; and very dangerous for children, because their parents vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them."

The key phrase is "conjugal rights"—the legal and social assumption that marriage entitles spouses to each other's bodies. Beauvoir found this dreadful. Any institution that soldered one person to another, obliging people to sleep together who no longer wanted to, was fundamentally wrong.

Who Influenced Whom?

The question of intellectual influence between Beauvoir and Sartre has generated decades of scholarly debate. The traditional view—the one that prevailed during their lifetimes—was that Sartre was the original thinker and Beauvoir applied or popularized his ideas. She sometimes reinforced this view herself, deflecting credit and attention toward him.

Recent scholarship has complicated this picture considerably.

Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay was published in 1943, the same year as Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Both works engage existentialist themes about consciousness, freedom, and relations with others. Scholars now recognize that the development was mutual—they thought together, argued together, revised their ideas in conversation with each other.

More significantly, researchers have traced influences on Beauvoir that had nothing to do with Sartre. She read Hegel in German during World War Two and developed original critiques of his philosophy of consciousness. She engaged seriously with Leibniz—her master's thesis had examined his concept theory. The Neo-Hegelian revival of the 1930s, led by philosophers Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, influenced an entire generation of French thinkers, Beauvoir very much included.

There is something almost comic about the disparity in how audiences treated them. A scholar who lectured alongside Beauvoir later complained that their Harvard audience asked every question about Sartre concerning his work, while every question about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.

The Second Sex

In 1949, Beauvoir published a book that would become, in the words of later scholars, "trailblazing work in feminist philosophy." The Second Sex runs to nearly a thousand pages in its complete form. It examines women's oppression from every conceivable angle: biological, psychoanalytic, economic, historical, mythological, literary.

Its most famous line is often misquoted. Beauvoir wrote: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

This sentence contains her central insight. There is no eternal feminine essence. What we call "woman" is a social construction, a set of behaviors and expectations imposed from outside. Girls are not born passive, emotional, nurturing, or any of the other qualities their societies attribute to femininity. They are trained into these characteristics through relentless conditioning that begins at birth.

The book's title refers to woman's position as "the Other"—the deviation from a male norm. Men are the default human; women are the second sex, defined by their difference from men rather than in their own terms. This condition was not natural or inevitable but rather the product of specific historical circumstances that could, in principle, be changed.

The Vatican promptly placed The Second Sex on its Index of Forbidden Books. The French intellectual establishment dismissed it as vulgar or excessive. Albert Camus reportedly said it made French men look ridiculous.

None of this mattered. The book was translated into dozens of languages. It became foundational to what would later be called second-wave feminism. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer—the thinkers who shaped feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s—all acknowledged Beauvoir's influence.

The Abuse of Power

Here the story turns darker.

Beauvoir was bisexual and had relationships with women throughout her life. Some of these relationships involved her students—young women over whom she held institutional power as their teacher.

Bianca Lamblin was sixteen years old when Beauvoir, then in her thirties, began what Lamblin later described as sexual exploitation. Beauvoir groomed the teenager, eventually introducing her to Sartre. The three had a sexual relationship that continued for three years.

Decades later, Lamblin published a memoir titled Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée—a bitter echo of Beauvoir's famous autobiography Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. The English translation was published under the title A Disgraceful Affair. In it, Lamblin described feeling "nauseated and disgusted" when she discovered the true nature of the woman she had loved all her life.

In 1943, Beauvoir was suspended from teaching after being accused of seducing Natalie Sorokine, a seventeen-year-old student. Sorokine's parents filed formal charges for debauching a minor. Beauvoir's teaching license was revoked, though later reinstated.

In her autobiography, Beauvoir characterized her relationship with Sorokine as simple friendship. But Sorokine herself, along with Lamblin and another woman named Olga Kosakiewicz, later stated that their relationships with Beauvoir had damaged them psychologically.

There is no way to soften this. The philosopher who wrote so penetratingly about women's oppression participated in the exploitation of young women who trusted her. The thinker who analyzed power relations with such clarity abused her own power over students. Whatever one concludes about Beauvoir's intellectual legacy, these facts must be part of the reckoning.

Love Letters Across the Atlantic

In 1947, Beauvoir traveled to the United States on a four-month exploration by automobile, train, and Greyhound bus. In Chicago, she met a writer named Nelson Algren.

Their affair lasted years, conducted mostly through letters across the Atlantic. She addressed him as "my beloved husband"—an interesting choice of words from a woman who rejected the institution of marriage. Algren gave her a silver ring that she wore for the rest of her life and was buried wearing.

The relationship eventually became public through Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins, which won France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1954. The character Lewis Brogan was unmistakably based on Algren. He objected strenuously to having their intimacy exposed.

Three years earlier, Algren had won America's National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm, his novel about heroin addiction in Chicago. The two prize-winning novelists on opposite sides of the ocean, each writing the other into their fiction—it makes for a romantic image, though the reality was messier. Beauvoir also lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959, and her relationship with Sartre never ceased.

The Activist Years

In 1971, Beauvoir signed the Manifesto of the 343—a public declaration by famous French women claiming to have had abortions, which were then illegal in France. The signatories included the actress Catherine Deneuve, the filmmaker Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's own sister Hélène. Three years later, abortion was legalized in France.

Her feminism was not the mild, reformist kind. When Betty Friedan asked in a 1975 interview if Beauvoir would support paying women a minimum wage for housework, Beauvoir answered with characteristic bluntness: "No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children."

This was not a slip of the tongue. She continued: "Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction."

The position is authoritarian by contemporary standards—using state power to prevent women from choosing domestic life. But it reflects Beauvoir's conviction that choice itself is shaped by conditioning. A woman raised to see motherhood as her highest calling cannot freely choose motherhood; she can only fulfill her programming. True freedom required restructuring society so that women's choices were not constrained by ideology before they even began to choose.

Controversies That Cannot Be Reconciled

In 1977, Beauvoir signed a petition alongside other French intellectuals—including Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault—calling for the release of three men arrested for having sexual relations with children aged twelve and thirteen. The petition explicitly addressed this case, known as the Affaire de Versailles.

The cultural context of 1970s France helps explain but does not excuse this. A significant portion of the French intellectual left believed that liberating sexuality meant removing all restrictions, including age of consent laws. They were wrong. The harm to children is real regardless of what philosophers theorize about liberation.

Coming from a woman who had herself exploited students, the signature takes on an even grimmer aspect. Beauvoir's theoretical commitments to freedom and her personal history of abuse were perhaps more consistent than we would like them to be.

Adopting a Daughter

Beauvoir met Sylvie Le Bon in the 1960s. Beauvoir was in her fifties; Sylvie was a teenager. By the time Beauvoir was seventy-two and Sylvie in her late thirties, they had been in what scholars describe as an "intimate relationship" for decades.

In 1980, Beauvoir legally adopted Sylvie.

This was not about inheritance or literary executorship, though Sylvie did become Beauvoir's literary heir. Scholars argue that for Beauvoir, who had rejected marriage her entire life, adoption was the closest available legal recognition of their bond. It was, in its own way, a form of resistance to what scholars call the "bio-heteronormative family unit"—the assumption that kinship must flow through biology and heterosexual reproduction.

Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir, as she later styled herself, has been a conscientious steward of Beauvoir's legacy. Unlike Sartre's adopted daughter Arlette Elkaïm, who heavily restricted access to Sartre's letters, Sylvie published Beauvoir's correspondence unedited—including the letters to both Sartre and Algren.

The End and the Legacy

Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980. Beauvoir wrote A Farewell to Sartre, a painful account of his final years—the only major work of hers he never read before publication. She published his letters to her, editing them slightly to protect people still living. She continued writing, continued her activism, continued living in the way she had always lived.

She died of pneumonia on April 14, 1986, in Paris. She was seventy-eight years old.

The irony of her posthumous reputation would not be lost on her. During her lifetime, she was not considered a philosopher—just a novelist, a memoirist, a public intellectual, Sartre's partner. Now she is taught in philosophy departments worldwide. The Second Sex appears on countless syllabi. Her existentialist contributions are recognized as original, not derivative of Sartre.

She has become exactly what she refused to call herself.

Thinking About Beauvoir Today

What do we do with a thinker whose work liberated millions while her actions harmed individuals directly in her care? This is not a rhetorical question. It is the central difficulty of engaging with Beauvoir's legacy.

One approach is to separate the work from the person—to say that The Second Sex stands or falls on its own merits regardless of its author's conduct. There is something to this. Ideas can be true even when spoken by people who do not live them. Beauvoir's analysis of power, conditioning, and the social construction of gender does not become less accurate because she herself abused power.

Another approach notes that Beauvoir's personal contradictions illuminate her arguments. She analyzed how people become complicit in their own oppression and in the oppression of others. She understood that liberation was not automatic, that people could theorize freedom while enacting domination. Her failures demonstrate her own insights.

Neither approach is fully satisfying. The women Beauvoir harmed are real people whose suffering deserves acknowledgment, not sublimation into theoretical lessons. At the same time, abandoning Beauvoir's ideas because of her behavior would impoverish feminist thought and let her off the hook too easily. The discomfort is appropriate. It is what honesty requires.

Beauvoir herself insisted on confronting difficult truths without evasion. She rejected the believer's comfortable certainties. She demanded that we look at the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were. Applying that standard to her own life produces conclusions she might not have welcomed but could not, in principle, have rejected.

She was a philosopher who refused the title. She was a liberator who caused harm. She was brilliant and she was wrong. She changed how we understand what it means to be human, and she failed to extend that understanding to the humans closest to her.

The disputation continues.