Beauvoir Simone de - Becoming Beauvoir: a life

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Antigone, Slavoj iek

For Pamela
in memoriam amoris amicitiae

All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. [] almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONES OWN

To emancipate woman is to refuse to enclose her in the relations that she sustains with man, but not to deny them to her.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX

Contents

Simone surrounded by her paternal family at Meyrignac

Franoise de Beauvoir with Hlne and Simone

Simone and Zaza

Drawing by Ren Maheu, The universe of Mlle Simone de Beauvoir

Drawing by Jacques-Laurent Bost

Beauvoir and Sartre at Juan-les-Pins

Beauvoir at work in Les Deux Magots

On air in 1945, the year of the existentialist offensive

With Nelson Algren in Chicago

Signing books in Sao Paolo, Brazil

Claude Lanzmann, Beauvoir and Sartre at Giza

With Sylvie le Bon and Sartre in Rome

At home in Paris

A scene from activist life: at the Women and the State Debate

One day in 1927 Simone de Beauvoir had a disagreement with her father about what it means to love. In an era when women were expected to aspire to marriage and motherhood, 19-year-old Simone was reading philosophy and dreamt of finding a philosophy she could live by. Her father claimed that to love meant services rendered, affection, gratefulness. She begged to differ, objecting with astonishment that love was more than gratitude not something we owe someone because of what theyve done for us. So many people, Beauvoir wrote in her diary the next day, [have] never known love!

This 19-year-old did not know that she would become one of the twentieth centurys most famous intellectual women, that her life would become copiously written about and widely read. Her letters and autobiography alone would amount to over a million words, and she would publish philosophical essays, prize-winning novels, short stories, a play, travelogues, political essays, journalism not to mention her magnum opus, The Second Sex, which has been celebrated as the feminist Bible. She would co-found political journals, successfully campaign for new legislation, object to the inhumane treatment of Algerians, give lectures around the world and lead government commissions.