No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
simone De Beauvoirquotes
1908 - 1986
French author and activist, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), is considered the mother of the modern feminist movement. In her famous treatise, The Second Sex, she rejects the artificial femininity created to support a male-driven worldview that theirs is the essential sex, calling for a moral revolution.
Raised by middle-class, Catholic parents, Simone rejected her faith and upbringing (Memoirs of Dutiful Daughter) to pursue the philosophical examination of existence. Her radical, open-relationship with the father of existentialism himself, Jean-Paul Sartre, influenced her writing more than anyone else, even declaring their relationship her greatest achievement.
Her many memoirs endeared her to the public despite her embrace of communism. A Very Easy Death, her most touching memoir, contains reflections on her mother’s last days. The novel She Came to Stay examines jealousy and angst in a fictionalized account of Simone’s strained love-triangle with Sartre and former student, Olga.
From philosophy (The Ethics of Ambiguity) to travel accounts of China (The Long March) and the U.S. (America Day by Day), recurring themes of femininity and existentialism, in all her works, continue to engage and inspire.
Her most famous novel, The Mandarins, won the acclaimed French Literary award, the Prix Goncourt. It chronicles the lives of postwar, French intellectuals who leave their elite and privileged social status for a life of political activism. De Beauvoir always did find the French overly obsessed with money and class.
In the words of the headline that announced de Beauvoir’s death, feminists today still proclaim, “Women! You owe her everything!”
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.