Ilse Aichinger
Jamika Ajalon
Hannah Arendt
Lilly Axster
Simone de Beauvoir
Monika Bernold
Dagmar Fink
Hannah Fröhlich
Tom Holert
Billie Holiday
Belinda Kazeem
Katherine Klinger
Anna Kowalska
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai
Adrian Piper
Yvonne Rainer
Rúbia Salgado
Shirley Tate
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 Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
Simone de Beauvoir, born in Paris in 1908, is considered a leading representative of French Existentialism. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and qualified as a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure, going on to teach philosophy at various high schools in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris from 1931 through 1941. She met Jean-Paul Sartre while still at university, and he remained her partner and intellectual fellow traveler until his death in 1980. In 1943, she gave up teaching and worked as a writer. She frequented the Café de Flore in Paris where she wrote, met friends, and made the acquaintance of writers like Albert Camus, who had been involved in resistance to the Nazis and the Vichy régime, publishing the underground magazine Combat. Sartre and Beauvoir, too, had been involved in resistance activities, founding the Socialisme et Liberté movement in 1941.
In 1949, she published Le deuxiéme sexe (The Second Sex, 1953), establishing her as France’s best-known intellectual. She received invitations from around the world, traveling throughout Europe, to North, Central, and South America, to the Middle and Far East, to the USSR, and to China. But the book also came under attack, as related in La Force des choses published in 1963 (Force of Circumstance, 1964). Again and again, Beauvoir was exposed to intense hostility. Besides the bourgeois-conservative camp, she was also attacked by the left, for example due to her conviction that the repression of women would not be automatically resolved under communism. Feminists, too, criticized her, above all regarding her descriptions of the female body and her “demystification” of motherhood.
Simone de Beauvoir loved not only men, but also women, a fact she herself rarely mentioned. As Dagmar Fink notes, even in feminist writings Beauvoir is associated mostly with Sartre and not with her female lovers. In 1980, Simone de Beauvoir adopted her companion Sylvie le Bon. This was common practice among lesbians to make a partner into a legal heir. But, as Alice Schwarzer remarks, this was not until after Sartre’s death: Beauvoir and Sartre shared everything, they were joined by what Sartre called a “necessary love,” and in spite of other passions, Beauvoir, too, never called this priority into question.
Selected publications
Le deuxième sexe, Paris, 1949
The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley: 1951 / new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier: London/New York, 2009
Novels
L’invitée, Paris, 1943
She Came to Stay, New York, 1954
Le sang des autres, Paris, 1945
The Blood of Others, New York, 1948
Tous les hommes sont mortels, Paris, 1946
All Men Are Mortal, Cleveland, 1955
Les Mandarins, Paris, 1954
The Mandarins, London, 1960
Autobiographical writings
Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Paris, 1958
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, New York, 1959
La Force de l’âge, Paris, 1960
The Prime of Life, New York, 1962
La Force des choses, Paris, 1963
Force of Circumstance, London, 1964
Une mort très douce, Paris 1964
A Very Easy Death, New York, 1966
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Sources: Wikipedia; The Second Sex, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance; Dagmar Fink, in: Conversations Dagmar Fink / Tom Holert”; Alice Schwarzer, “Beauvoir und die Frauen,” in: Emma magazine, Sept./Oct. 1994 ( http://www.emma.de/index.php?i... ) |
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