Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986

Living in Thailand October 1986

When I was going to school, in Ireland in the early 1970s, young girls of good family attended the local convent and wore their uniforms just below the knee. They read what they were told to and got moony-eyed gazing at magazines with pin-ups of David Cassidy and Mark Boland. Many read The Exorcist under the sheets with a torch after lights-out. Only the clever girls read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It had the kind of title you blushed to mention, and anyway it was too big a book to hide.

The Second Sex was published in 1949, a score of years before women’s liberation became the bra-burning, vociferous, aggressive movement that in many ways the media made of it. The intellectual side of the movement resurfaced as feminism. The feminist struggle, women’s study groups, equal opportunity – these became common currency for any free-thinking, free-acting woman. One has only to look at the rise of feminist literature published by the feminist presses. None of this would have been possible without Simone de Beauvoir.

She was born above the Café de la Rotonde in Paris in 1908. Her father was a lawyer and her family, if not first rank, was firmly embedded in the bourgeois ideals of turn-of-the-century France. Her mother was a practising Catholic who toed the line. It was a time when young girls did not go out on their own, when all letters were opened by one’s parents and suitable marriages were ‘arranged’ with suitable sons, preferably rich. The dowry was all and love was a four-letter word. As a young girl Simone saw that her only chance of escape from the stupefaction of husband, home and children was through books - books and study.

‘My mother’s whole education and upbringing had convinced her that for a woman the greatest thing was to become a mother of a family: she couldn’t play the part unless I played the dutiful daughter, but I refused to take part in a grown-up pretence...’

Early on she decided to devote her life to writing: ‘To have children, who in their turn would have more children, was simply to go on playing the same old tune ad infinitum; the scholar, the artist, the writer, and the thinker created other worlds, all sweetness and light.’

She was clever. She studied for her philosophy degree at the Sorbonne and in 1929 was placed second only to Jean-Paul Sartre, no mean feat. He became a lifelong friend and accomplice.

The ‘30s and ‘40s were the heyday of existentialism. On one level a lifestyle – much over-dramatised – gravitating from the bars of St. Germain and the caves or disreputable jazz clubs of post-Occupation Paris. Les Deux Magots, Le Dôme, Brasserie Lipp, La Coupôle epitomized the hectic life of the Latin Quarter. On another level existentialism has remained one of the 20th century’s seminal philosophical stances.

Beauvoir spent the ‘30s teaching in Marseilles and Paris. Like many good teachers she was loved by her students but treated with some suspicion by her colleagues. During the ‘40s she published novels, plays and philosophical essays. Only Sartre matched her prolific output and enthusiasm for the intellectual venture, her reasoned and lucid approach to the problems of the time. She frequented all the luminaries of the day: Albert Camus, Picasso, Cocteau. With Sartre she founded the celebrated journal of ideas Les temps modernes.

In 1949 The Second Sex, a two-volume study of woman and her historical and contemporary situation in Western culture, assured her place in the foremost rank of contemporary thinkers. Since then it has become the bible of feminists everywhere.

In it she analysed the reasons for women’s place as second citizen in the world of men: biological, psychological, social. She ranged her argument from the nomads to the French Revolution and beyond. She looked at particular female types: the lesbian, the prostitute, the mother, and unlocked their mysteries and placed them in the context of her argument: ‘...in what kind of universe she is confined, what modes of escape are vouchsafed her.’

The reaction, predictably enough, was scandal. But, though it is one of her principal achievements, Simone de Beauvoir did not rest with theory.

In 1945 she was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her novel The Mandarins, which recounted the glorious years of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

She began her magnificent four-volume autobiography, a careful, tender picture of her childhood, adolescence, years of study and maturity. With Sartre she took sides on Algerian independence. She travelled to China, Cuba, Brazil, Japan and the Middle East – giving conferences, writing articles, books, protesting and marching, becoming involved, engagée.

In her sixties she became something of a prima donna for the women’s movement. Visitors came from all over the world seeking advice. A new generation of spokeswomen acknowledged her eminence. She championed and elucidated the cause of the old in her book Old Age.

Then Sartre, with whom she still lived, died in 1980. I remember seeing them occasionally on the streets or emerging from the cafés of Montparnasse: an old couple, Sartre blind, still writing and analyzing and putting forth with scintillating energy.

She continued to write, even in her seventies, this time about Sartre: ‘His death separates us. My death will not unite us. That’s the way it is. It is already quite marvelous that our two lives should have harmonized for so long.’

Thousands of people attended her funeral in April, many of them women: from America, from Africa, Asia, the young and the old. The flower-burdened cortège took to the streets she had helped to mythify. Past the Square Bourcicaut where she had made sand-pies as a child. Past La Rotonde, La Coupôle, Le Dôme, and on into the cemetery at Montparnasse. It had been a long and fruitful life and women in many respects were the better for it.