Who Was Simone de Beauvoir? The Philosopher Who Asked What a Woman Is

Born in Paris in 1908 into a bourgeois Catholic family whose fortune collapsed after the First World War, she lost her faith at fourteen and decided early that she would write. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, met Sartre while preparing for the national examination, and began a relationship that lasted fifty-one years, was never a marriage, involved no shared household for much of its length, and was explicitly open on both sides. She taught in schools until 1943, when she was dismissed following a complaint about a relationship with a former pupil, a part of her life that has been reassessed critically in recent decades. After the war she wrote novels, essays, four volumes of memoir and a great deal of journalism, co-founded and edited an influential review, won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, campaigned against the war in Algeria, signed and organised a public declaration by women who had had illegal abortions in 1971, and died in 1986.

The book begins by asking why, throughout history and across cultures, man has been treated as the default human being and woman as a deviation from him, defined always in relation to him. Her answer uses the existentialist vocabulary she and Sartre had developed: man has been positioned as the Subject, the one who acts and defines, and woman as the Other, the one who is defined. She then works through biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, history, myth, and the stages of a woman's life, arguing that none of the explanations offered, whether hormonal, psychological or economic, accounts for the subordination, and that it is produced instead by a social process that begins in infancy and never stops. Her most famous line, that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, is the compressed statement of this: femininity is not a nature that unfolds but a set of expectations, restrictions and interpretations imposed on a body from birth and internalised.

Several ideas central to later feminist thought appear there first or in their most influential form:

• •The distinction between biological sex and the socially constructed role built on it, which the word gender later came to carry
• •The analysis of the Other, subsequently taken up in postcolonial and race theory as a general structure of domination
• •Immanence and transcendence, her terms for a life confined to maintaining existence against one directed at projects and self-chosen goals, with domestic labour analysed as the imposition of the first
• •The claim that liberation requires economic independence and work outside the home, and that marriage as then constituted was an obstacle to it
• •A detailed account of how girls are trained into passivity and of how women collaborate in their own situation, which made the book uncomfortable reading for many of its readers
• •Sustained treatment of motherhood, abortion, sexuality and ageing at a length and frankness that caused the Vatican to place the book on its index of prohibited works

For decades she was read as applying Sartre's existentialism to a new subject, a framing she encouraged by describing herself as not a philosopher, and which scholarship since the 1980s has largely dismantled. Her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity, published in 1947, addresses a problem Sartre's Being and Nothingness leaves open: if we are radically free and there are no given values, what grounds any ethical claim at all? Her answer is that freedom is not solitary, since my freedom is meaningless unless there are others free to recognise and act with me, so willing my own freedom commits me to willing everyone else's, which gives an ethics with an actual content. She also argued that freedom is always situated, constrained by a body, a history and a social position in ways Sartre's early formulation underplayed, and that some situations are so restricted that the language of choice becomes a cruelty. That correction runs straight into The Second Sex, and there is a reasonable case that the influence between the two of them ran in both directions more than either admitted.

The book has been attacked from several directions and not always unfairly. Its perspective is that of an educated, white, financially secure European woman, and later writers, particularly Black feminists in the United States, argued that its account of what women share ignores how differently race and class shape the situation. Some readers object that it treats male existence as the standard against which women's is measured, so that liberation looks like becoming more like men. Its passages on motherhood and on the female body are relentlessly negative, describing pregnancy and domestic life in terms many women did not recognise. And her personal conduct, including the teaching dismissal and her role in relationships with young women shared with Sartre, has been examined much more critically in recent years. None of this has displaced the book, which remains the point at which a question that had been asked piecemeal for centuries was asked systematically and at length.

Placed second in the French philosophy examination at twenty-one, she argued in The Second Sex of 1949 that man has been treated as the default human being and woman as the Other, defined only in relation to him, and that femininity is produced by social training rather than by nature, which is what her line about becoming rather than being born a woman compresses. The book introduced the sex and gender distinction in its influential form. Her Ethics of Ambiguity grounds morality in the claim that my freedom requires everyone else's, and recent scholarship treats her as a philosopher in her own right rather than Sartre's follower.