Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86,) fully Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and feminist. Beauvoir’s fame is primarily attributed to her groundbreaking study of women’s oppression in The Second Sex (1949,) her post-World War II novel The Mandarins (1954,) and her lifelong partnership with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
Born in Paris, de Beauvoir entered the Sorbonne, where she became the youngest person to receive a degree in French history. She met and fell in love with another philosophy student, Sartre, who would later become the father of existentialism. They remained associates and lovers for the rest of their lives.
Inspired by Sartre, de Beauvoir studied how women had been treated throughout history. After weeks of research at the Paris’s National Library, de Beauvoir published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949,) in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first wide-ranging arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature. It became the basis of the modern feminist movement. The Second Sex laments the female condition but does not propose any tangible solutions except “that men and women rise above their natural differentiation and unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.”
De Beauvoir also wrote novels and autobiographical works, including Mémoires D’une Jeune Fille Rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958,) the story of her rejection of the bourgeois values of her parents’ lives, La Force de l’âge (The Prime of Life, 1960,) which tells the story of her relationship with Sartre and the years they spent together during World War II.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Simone de Beauvoir
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Sex
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished—that of man also.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Men & Women
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Truth, Certainty
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
—Simone de Beauvoir
The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength—each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Marriage
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Originality, Writing
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside—from others. We do not accept it willingly.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Age, Aging
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning—the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.
—Simone de Beauvoir
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
—Simone de Beauvoir
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles—desire, possession, love, dream, adventure—worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us—giving, conquering, uniting—will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Hypocrisy
Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Change
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
—Simone de Beauvoir
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Acceptance
Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Change, Miscellaneous, Future
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Equality
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Marriage, Husbands, Jobs
One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Genius
The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Home
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Women, Feminism
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Freedom
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Men & Women
Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
—Simone de Beauvoir
If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Victory, Success is not everything, Defeat, War
It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Parenting, Parents
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
—Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born a woman, one becomes one.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Women
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Topics: Society
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
—Simone de Beauvoir
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