Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French feminist, philosopher and woman of letters. An important figure in feminism, she participated in the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.
Childhood and studies
Born January 9, 1908 in Paris, Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir is the daughter of Françoise Brewer and Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir. At the age of 5, she entered the Cours Desir, where girls from good families were educated. Very quickly, she is distinguished by a keen intelligence. Her parents encourage their daughters to study, believing that this is the only way for a girl to succeed. His father also hoped to have a son to make him a polytechnician.
After her baccalaureate in 1925, Simone de Beauvoir began higher education at the Institut Sainte-Marie in Neuilly for letters, wishing to become a writer. In 1928, she obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy and worked on a dissertation on Leibniz. At the Faculty of Letters in Paris, she meets Jean-Paul Sartre with whom she immediately becomes friends. In 1929, she was received 2nd in the philosophy aggregation competition, just behind him.
The author and the feminist
After her aggregation, Simone de Beauvoir became a professor of philosophy. Transferred to Marseille, Jean-Paul Sartre offers to marry her so that she can get a job with him in Le Havre, but she refuses. According to her, marriage “doubles the family obligations and all the social chores”. In 1936, they were both transferred to Paris. Simone bonds with several of her students and has affairs with some. In 1939, she was expelled from the Lycée Molière for her affair with Bianca Bienenfeld. In 1943, she was suspended from the National Education for corruption of minors, following the complaint of a student's mother, but she was reinstated after the Liberation.
Simone de Beauvoir's first novel, Primacy of the Spiritual , was refused by the publishers, but his novel L’Invitée was published in 1943 by Gallimard. The success is immediate. After several essays and novels, Simone obtains financial independence and decides to devote herself entirely to her profession as a writer. She travels a lot and meets many communist personalities like Fidel Castro or Che Guevara.
In 1949, she published her famous The Second Sex . This book which analyzes male domination is a huge success; it is also scandalous, especially for the chapters dealing with abortion, motherhood and marriage. Simone de Beauvoir then became an important theoretician of feminism.
The 343 Manifesto
In 1954, Simone de Beauvoir won the Goncourt Prize for Les Mandarins and became a famous and widely read author. In 1958, she began to write her autobiography. In 1964, she published A Very Sweet Death who, through the death of his mother, evokes the questions of therapeutic relentlessness and euthanasia. In 1971, she wrote the Manifesto of 343, an appeal by women declaring that they had had an abortion and demanding the right to free and free abortion. She signs this manifesto herself, among other personalities such as Catherine Deneuve, Marguerite Duras, Gisèle Halimi, Jeanne Moreau and Françoise Sagan. With Gisèle Halimi, she co-founded a feminist movement fighting for the decriminalization of abortion.
In 1980, after Sartre's death, she published La Cérémonie des adieux where she retraces the last years of her companion. She died in 1986 in Paris and her funeral was attended by women from all over the world. In 2008, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom was created in her honor.