Historical Figures Codexery

Simone de Beauvoir

French existentialist philosopher and feminist activist

Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, and feminist activist born on 9 January 1908 and died on 14 April 1986.[1][2] She is best known for her trailblazing feminist work The Second Sex (1949) and her memoirs, notably Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958).[3][4][2] At the time of her death, Beauvoir was not regarded as a philosopher in her own right, yet her work substantially shaped feminist existentialism and feminist theory.[1][5]

Quick Facts

Birth name
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Born
9 January 1908
Birthplace
Paris, France
Died
14 April 1986
Resting place
Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris
Education
University of Paris (BA, MA); ENS (audit student)
Occupation
  • Philosopher
  • writer
  • social theorist
  • activist
Notable works
The Second Sex (1949)

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Beauvoir was born in Montparnasse, Paris, to Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise Brasseur, a devout Catholic.[6][7] She was raised Catholic and educated in convent schools, but at age 14 she began to question her faith and became an atheist in her teens.[8][9][7] At 21, she became the youngest person to pass the agrégation in philosophy, finishing second to Jean-Paul Sartre.[10][2][7] Beauvoir helped found the leftist journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945 and published extracts of The Second Sex there in 1949.[2]

Beauvoir declared herself a feminist in a 1972 interview and joined other Marxist feminists in founding the journal Questions Féministes.[11][2][12] Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins earned her the Prix Goncourt in 1954.[4][7] On 14 April 1986 in Paris, Beauvoir, aged 78, succumbed to pneumonia; her remains lie beside Sartre's at Montparnasse Cemetery.[13][5]

What the cited sources add

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Beauvoir's graduate thesis was on Leibniz and that her reading of Hegel was influenced by Kojève's interpretations.[5] The same source states that Beauvoir's first philosophical essay was Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944), though many interpreters identify She Came to Stay (1943) as her inaugural philosophical foray.[2][5] The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that Beauvoir believed her friend Zaza died from a broken heart due to a struggle with her family over an arranged marriage.[7] The Biography entry states that Beauvoir was dismissed from her teaching post by the Vichy government after the German army occupied Paris in 1940.[14]

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that Beauvoir's concept of situated freedom holds that our capacity for agency is constrained, though never determined, by the conditions of our situation.[5] The same source notes that Beauvoir argued we are "condemned to violence" because our actions produce the conditions within which others act.[5]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Pardina, "Simone de Beauvoir as Philosopher", Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 1994, p. 5–12; Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021; Cohen, "Beauvoir Emerges From Sartre's Shadow; Some Even Dare to Call Her a . . . Philosopher", The New York Times, 1998-09-26; Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 August 2010 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024. facts only, no text reused. plato.stanford.edu
  3. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Beauvoir, "Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée", Gallimard, 2007; Norwich, "Oxford illustrated encyclopedia", Oxford University Press, 1985–1993, p. 40 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 August 2010. facts only, no text reused. plato.stanford.edu
  6. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "UPI Almanac for Thursday, Jan. 9, 2020", United Press International, 9 January 2020; Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir", Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020; Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir", Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020; Freely, "Still the second sex", The Guardian, 6 June 1999; Hollander, "The Open Marriage of True Minds", 11 June 1990; "Lisa Appignanesi's top 10 books by and about Simone de Beauvoir", The Guardian, 8 January 2008; Mussett, "Beauvoir, Simone de Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Mussett, "Beauvoir, Simone de Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". facts only, no text reused. iep.utm.edu
  8. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir", Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  9. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Simone de Beauvoir", Biography, 9 July 2020; Thurman, "Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex'", The New York Times, 28 May 2010 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  10. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024; Menand, "Stand by Your Man", 19 September 2005 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  11. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  12. Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021. facts only, no text reused. plato.stanford.edu
  13. Wikipedia, "Simone de Beauvoir" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Encyclopędia Britannica's Guide to Women's History"; Traub, "Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris: Walking Paths & Famous Graves", Paris Unlocked, 2019-05-22; Bergoffen, "Simone de Beauvoir", Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018-07-10 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  14. "Simone de Beauvoir", Biography, 9 July 2020. facts only, no text reused. biography.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Simone de Beauvoir (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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