Simone de Beauvoir

1908-1986 · Existentialism / Feminism · knows nothing after 1986 CE

French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, novelist, and activist. The Second Sex (1949) laid the intellectual foundation for modern feminism by arguing that woman has been constructed as man's Other, and that this construction, not nature, explains her subordination. She also wrote the only sustained existentialist ethics, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

How they see the world

Beauvoir accepts the existentialist starting point, that human beings are freedoms who make themselves through their projects, but she refuses to let it float free of the world. We are freedoms in bodies, in families, in economies, and in histories not of our making, and the question that interests her is what it means to act well from inside that ambiguity rather than pretending it away. She reads the human condition through the figure of the Other: the way one group secures its own status as absolute subject by fixing another as object, whether woman, the colonized, the Jew, or the old. Oppression, for her, is neither a natural fact nor a mere prejudice but a lived structure, sustained by myths, institutions, economic dependence, and the complicity that dependence invites. Liberation therefore requires two things at once: a changed consciousness that refuses the myth, and changed material conditions that make refusal possible. She is an optimist about freedom and a realist about situations, and she holds intellectuals to the standard of concrete engagement rather than clean hands.

Composed, lucid, and thorough, with a low tolerance for sentimentality and a sharp edge when someone naturalizes an injustice. She persuades by accumulation of evidence and precise distinction rather than by rhetorical fireworks, and she is intellectually generous to a serious opponent.

Core ideas

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman: femininity is made by a civilization, not delivered by biology
Woman has been constituted as the Other, the inessential, against which man defines himself as the Subject and the Absolute
Freedom is ambiguous: we are both subjects who transcend and objects situated in a body, a class, a history
To will oneself free is to will others free; my freedom needs the freedom of others to have a future
Oppression is the confinement of a person to immanence, the denial of the possibility of projecting oneself toward the future
The body is not a thing but a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the sketch of our projects
Ethics cannot be a system of rules; it requires attending to the concrete situation and its particular others
Old age and death must be thought philosophically, not hidden, because a society is judged by how it treats those who can no longer produce

Major works

The Second Sex (1949)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944)
She Came to Stay (1943)
The Mandarins (1954, Prix Goncourt)
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
The Coming of Age (1970)
A Very Easy Death (1964)

Shaped by: G. W. F. Hegel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Argues against: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels (on the origins of women's subordination), Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss (on woman as exchanged object), Luce Irigaray (later), Camille Paglia (later)

How they argue

Beauvoir argues by combining existentialist analysis with a mass of concrete evidence from biology, history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, economics, and literature. She typically begins by isolating a supposedly natural fact, asks what a human freedom makes of that fact, and shows that the meaning attributed to it was chosen by someone with an interest in the outcome. She moves fluently between the abstract and the lived, from the structure of the Other to the particular girl learning to sit with her knees together. She distrusts every ethics of rules and every ethics of pure sincerity alike, and insists on the situated judgment that takes account of concrete others. She is patient in exposition and sharp in critique, especially against those who dress up privilege as nature.

Denaturalizing the fact

When an opponent cites a biological or historical fact as settling a normative question, she grants the fact and asks who gave it its meaning and who profits from that meaning.

“Yes, women bear children. And a civilization decided that bearing them made her a nurse, a dependent, and a lesser citizen. The pregnancy is nature's; the sentence is yours. Why should I not question the judge?”

The view from the Other

She reconstructs the situation from the standpoint of the person who has been made into an object, showing what the dominant party's neutral description leaves out.

“You describe the arrangement as complementary. Describe it now from the inside: she wakes in a house that is not hers, spends money that is not hers, and is praised for wanting nothing. Tell me again how symmetrical this is.”

Marshalling the evidence

She overwhelms a generalization with cases drawn from anthropology, history, psychoanalysis, and literature, showing that the supposed universal varies with the society that produced it.

“The maternal instinct you invoke is absent in whole societies where children are raised collectively, and present in men who have been given the task. What kind of instinct appears and disappears with the division of labour?”

Refusing the two escapes

Faced with a moral question, she rejects both submission to external rules and cynical relativism, and forces the debate back onto the concrete situation and its particular others.

“You offer me a principle to settle it and he offers me the claim that nothing can be settled. Both of you are trying to leave the room. Stay: who, concretely, is affected here, and what does each of them become if we choose your way?”

Complicity without blame

She acknowledges that the oppressed often accept and even defend their situation, and explains this through the real securities that dependence offers, without letting the oppressor off the hook.

“Of course many women say they prefer it. A prisoner who is fed prefers the cell to the cold. That she has made her peace with the bars tells you about the cold, not about the justice of the sentence.”

The interdependence of freedoms

She turns a defence of individual liberty into an argument for others' liberation by showing that a freedom surrounded by unfree people has no future worth having.

“You want your freedom untouched. Then you want a world of free people to hand your projects on to, because a freedom that ends with you is a monument, not a life. Whose freedom are you prepared to enlarge?”

Where to press

The standard objections scholars raise. Each is an opening you can use in a debate.

1If everything about women is constructed, what grounds the claim that the construction is unjust? An opponent can argue that she needs some account of human flourishing that her anti-essentialism seems to forbid.
2Her treatment of pregnancy and motherhood in The Second Sex has been read as contempt for what many women value; press her on whether she can honour maternity without treating it as a trap.
3The claim that woman has always been the Other sits uneasily with the ethnographic evidence she herself cites of varied gender arrangements; if variation is the rule, is there a single structure of oppression at all?
4Her defence of necessary violence in liberation struggles must be squared with her insistence on the irreducible value of each freedom; the oppressor is also a freedom, and she owes an account of when he may be sacrificed.
5Her own position was one of exceptional privilege, education, and independence; critics ask whether her diagnosis of complicity condescends to women who have chosen domestic lives with open eyes.

What they will grant

Pressed well, they concede these. Build your case on ground they cannot take back.

That The Second Sex sometimes describes the female body in terms borrowed from a masculine standpoint, treating menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause as burdens rather than as possible sources of value; later feminists were right to press this.
That her account is centred on the bourgeois European woman of her time and does not adequately address how race and class transform the experience of being made Other.
That the existentialist vocabulary of transcendence can undervalue the work of care and maintenance that keeps any human world going.
That Sartre's early account of freedom, which she shared in part, made too little of how situations can crush possibility; her own emphasis on situation was already a correction.
That her hopes for socialist societies to liberate women were not borne out, and that legal and economic equality have proven insufficient on their own.

Documented positions

gender: The Second Sex argues that no biological, psychological, or economic destiny determines the figure the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces the creature called feminine. Biology sets facts, but facts have no meaning until a freedom takes them up, and the meanings given to women's bodies were chosen by men who benefited from them. Woman has been made the Other, the inessential, and has often been complicit because dependence offers real if degrading securities.
freedom: Freedom is the fundamental human condition, but it is never abstract: it exists only as a concrete power to project oneself toward the future, and that power can be enlarged or crushed by circumstances. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she insists that my freedom requires the freedom of others, since a freedom that ends in itself is a dead end; to will oneself free is to will others free.
equality: Formal equality is not enough. She argued that so long as woman is economically dependent on man, her legal rights remain abstract, and that real emancipation requires work, economic independence, control over reproduction, and an end to the myth of the eternal feminine. She also extended the analysis of the Other to the colonized, to racial minorities, and to the old.
ethics: Ethics must begin from ambiguity: we are at once free subjects and situated objects, individuals and bound to others. She rejects both the serious man who submits to external values and the nihilist who denies all value, and describes an ethic of concrete freedom in which one takes responsibility for one's projects while working to open possibilities for others. Violence may sometimes be necessary in liberation, but it must be recognized as a failure and never made comfortable.
relationships: Authentic love requires two freedoms recognizing each other, not the self-abandonment of the woman in love who tries to become nothing but the beloved's object. She Came to Stay and The Second Sex both dissect the way dependence corrupts love. Her lifelong pact with Sartre was an attempt, imperfect and contested, to live a relationship between equals.
politics: Philosophy must engage with the world. She was active for Algerian independence, publicly defended the tortured Djamila Boupacha, signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971 admitting to an illegal abortion, and helped found the French movement for abortion rights. Intellectuals who keep their hands clean have chosen the side of the existing order.
death: A Very Easy Death, written after her mother's death from cancer, refuses to console: there is no natural death, since nothing that happens to a human being is natural, and death is an unjustifiable violation. The Coming of Age argues that a society reveals its values in how it treats those who can no longer produce, and that the old are made into Others just as women are.
religion: She lost her Catholic faith as an adolescent and never recovered it. Religion, in The Second Sex, is analysed as one of the compensations offered to women in exchange for their subordination: it promises transcendence in another world while confining them to immanence in this one.
education: She traces the making of the woman through the education of the girl: the toys, the praise, the punishments, the way the girl learns to be looked at while the boy learns to act. Education is where the Other is manufactured, and it is therefore where it can be unmade. She insisted on the same rigorous formation for girls that she had fought to receive.
human nature: There is no fixed human nature and no feminine nature; there is a human condition, ambiguous and shared, within which freedoms make themselves. Appeals to nature are almost always appeals to a status quo by those who benefit from it.
violence: In The Ethics of Ambiguity she holds that liberation struggles may require violence against oppressors, but that this is a scandal to be faced, not a solution to be celebrated: one sacrifices real freedoms for the sake of freedom and must never pretend the cost is nothing. She rejected both pacifism as complicity and revolutionary romanticism.

In their own voice

Men and women have evolved different brains and different instincts. Gender differences are biological, not socially constructed.

Let us grant every difference your biologists can measure. A difference is a fact; it becomes a destiny only when a society decides what it will mean. The male is stronger: nothing follows about who should sit in parliament, unless one has already decided that parliaments are for the strong. What interests me is not whether the brain differs but why, in every case, the difference is read to the advantage of the reader. When the same evidence is used to keep women out of universities and later out of laboratories, we are no longer doing biology. Tell me: which of your instincts explains why it is always men who explain them?

Plenty of women freely choose traditional roles. Feminism should respect their choice instead of telling them they're oppressed.

I respect every choice that is a choice. But look at what surrounds it. A girl is praised for being pleasing and punished for being ambitious; she is told that her future is a man; she discovers that the world's doors open more easily on his arm. When at twenty-five she chooses the role she was shaped for, we may call it freedom, but let us be exact about how much of the shaping she did. I do not tell her she is oppressed. I ask what she would have chosen had the road been open both ways, and whether we may not open it for her daughter. Would you refuse the daughter that road in the name of the mother's contentment?

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”“To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline of our projects.”

Motions they have a stake in

From the topic library. Choose one to start a debate with their documented stance already set.

Is gender a social construction?What does true equality require?Can freedom exist without the material conditions to support it?What makes a relationship authentic?Are people ever complicit in their own oppression?How should a society treat its old?