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Simone de Beauvoir Introduction Beauvoir's life and activity Beauvoir's existentialism Beauvoir's view on womens role in society Beauvoir's works Beauvoir in United States Conclusion Ironically, at present many people dismiss Simone de Beauvoir as actually being a feminist. These accusations deliberately confuse her disbelieve of the female with resentment to women. They also ignore her hard work on behalf of women during her career as a writer. Simone de Beauvoir is a person who is well-known by many women in the world, having the rare ability to impress and delight the reader by passionate responses, no matter if they are positive or negative.
Passionately defending the truth, the writer is considered to be the mother of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France and during all her life she was praising the equal rights of both sexes. In her opening to one of her greatest works The Second Sex (1949), Simone said: One is not born a woman, one becomes one. Beauvoir's words proved that she is struggling for freedom trying to stop female oppression, and also brought her success and recognition all over the world. The Second Sex dramatically describes the seriousness of a philosophical problem of being a woman, or, to define it more precisely to what extent it is a problem for philosophy and of philosophy. If we consider that this is a problem for philosophy, we assume that as a philosophy does not take into account the concept of being a woman it is unable to argue about the universality for which it has to struggle; it does not have the standards which are used to explain the use of a word man without the account of a woman.
By assuming that this is a problem of philosophy we suggest that it is impossible to discover the attitude of philosophy towards the being of woman. Nobody is able to define the type of this problem, and therefore, one may lock some possible ways of approaching it. Beauvoir suggested that the reason for society's limitations of women was the view that maleness was normal and at the same time femaleness was different. She expressed her opinion in the following words: The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. (Beauvoir) The woman studied in Sorbonne. Also, in this city an important event happened in her life she met a partner who was over 50 years.
His name was John-Paul Sartre, and this person helped Beauvoir to become a leader in existential philosophy. Beauvoir was working both as a writer and a teacher, and her excellent work A Very Easy Death appeared in the year of 1965. This sensual and expressive novella astonishes the reader by the story about writers mother, who was sick for a long time and died from cancer. Sometimes she talks about things that are obvious, but we do not pay proper attention to them. I think that her words arise real sympathy and admiration among all of her readers: One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendships, indignation, and compassion. (Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death) Beauvoir's existentialism has very much in common with social constructivist view. According her view as an existentialist, she considers that pre-given or pre-ordained human nature does not exist; therefore, there is no innate female nature.
Women refuse to follow their womens roles that are assigned to them by the society. Simone's aim was to make peoples lives something more important that just existence. While in our society the roles of men and women differ and their values oppose each other, both men and women are unable to build their identities taking into account only their humanity. The gender roles that are stereotypically prescribed to man and women eventually lead them into traps. Simone de Beauvoir tried to reach the goals of feminism, and she was convinced that this accomplishment could help to attain the prosperity of all humanity.
Therefore, she emphasized the importance of eliminating the suppression of women. She considered that this suppression is caused by the position of women throughout the history; we see that women, being the child bearers and keepers of the house, were not involved in the process of production. (Moi 167 - 175) Beauvoir tried to prove that womens weakness was the primary form of oppression, as women, intersecting all sectors of society, were unable to form a common identity. For instance, comparing the Marxist notion of the class division of labor with Beauvoir's notion of division of labor by gender, we see that while Marx states that the ruling class can attain the desirable surplus without paying for it, Beauvoir shows that women, being wives or daughters, are financially insecure by themselves and depend on men their husbands or fathers. In response to belief that women should have the choice to stay at home and raise their children if that is what they wish to do, the writer replied: No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. (Beauvoir Interview) However, the history shows that women themselves reduced the chances to participate in the process of public production.
The dependence on men caused them to possess only few ways of self-determination, at least before the development of capitalism and industrialism. The rise of capitalism and the beginning of present bureaucracy brought women the opportunity of having out-of-house jobs and becoming more secure and independent financially. As Beauvoir says herself, [Women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They live disperse among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men fathers or husbands more firmly than they are to other women. (Simons 249) However, this explanation does not aim to be general. We do not automatically relate it to the areas outside the Western world or to women in the West. For example, slave women took part in the process of production, though not by their own will.
But even though the practical aspect of writers argument may be right and also may be wrong, the philosophical aspect of it does not depend on the part on whether the practical part is correct or not. Simone De Beauvoir has also rather unusual view on religion, connecting it with the oppression of womens rights. She argued that religion could be used by the oppressors (men) to control the oppressed group (women) and it also serves as a way of compensating women for their second-class status. She saw men as using religion to maintain their dominance over women. De Beauvoir notes that men have generally exercised control over religious beliefs.
She says, 'man enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the code he writes: that code uses divine authority to support male dominance. (Haralambos and Holborn 441) She argued that women are deceived by religion into thinking of themselves as equal to men despite their evident inequality. Like Marx's proletariat, religion gives women the false belief that they will be compensated for their sufferings on earth by equality in heaven. She also argued, that the fear of god will repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female. (Beauvoir) Still it has not been showed that the textual message of female imagination affects r evolutionarily the real proclaim. But what we can say for sure is that the real changes in the past situation of women affected female imaginary. To the extent that every single woman is able to be selected as arousing those changes in the situation of women, Simone de Beauvoir has to be there first.
The Second Sex starts the modern feminism. Its totalizing though in some sense problematic theory made it possible to make a translation into a political praxis, supporting it philosophically. After publishing The Second Sex, Simone actively participated in all main political struggles striving to stop the oppression of women in France and throughout the world. Beauvoir analysis in The Second Sex problematized the original existential phenomenological notion of the self she had used in her earlier writings, which was the notion of the for-itself, because in The Second Sex Beauvoir showed that the self was also gendered. Consequently, in her description of woman, existentialism gave way, to some extent, to a type of empiricism.
But, though she performed a study of woman in her theoretical writing, she made a study of one particular woman through her autobiographical writing about herself. This she did by calling upon both the existential-phenomenological self and the gendered self. Because autobiography is a form of reflection on the self, existential phenomenology would assume that autobiography could only produce a past self, since in its analysis, autobiography makes the for-itself into an in-itself, and conscious being begins to resemble a thing. (Pilardi 125) While The Second Sex suggests that patriarchy is guilty in depriving women of their subject position by excluding them from the project and devaluating the fleshed erotic experience, The Coming of Age claims that the non-subject position of the aged people can be traced to the fact that they are expelled from their projects and their erotic potential. The old man, Beauvoir states, looks like a different species to others because unlike active members of the community he is not engaged in a project... (Beauvoir, The Coming of Age) Just like The Second Sex, The Coming of Age also addresses the issues of biology. Beauvoir considered that that when aged people lack engagement, we could explain that it is both in the outer and in the inner part, because as people become older, their bodies change, becoming an obstacle that makes our contact with the world complicated. But the main idea of The Coming of Age is that we should not use these hardships to approve reducing the aged people to the position of the Other.
It can be proved by the fact that diminished Sartres body never disengaged him from his projects. He was unable to do all his work by himself, but others did not consider that his diminished body is equal to diminished humanity. The Coming of Age tries to prove us that Sartres example should be our common destiny. Simone de Beauvoir was a very absorbing traveler, as she was moving very often through her life. She visited United States many times.
Beauvoir's way of traveling emerged from her existential philosophy that each person creates her own existence and experience of life. Contrary to strict existential method, Beauvoir demonstrated that emotions over landscape could shape rational, systematic analyses of society and culture (Vintges 51 - 67). Beauvoir used these travels in the United States to style her life like a work of art, integrating the rational and the emotional. Like the dying sage to whom Beauvoir refers, being able to say she had "lived well" addresses the role of travel in shaping her life. She recalls, "Usually, traveling is an attempt to annex a new object to my universe; this in itself is a fascinating undertaking" (Cosman 3). She was in a state of wonder over how she absorbed what she saw.
Nevertheless, it is true that Beauvoir's reputation as being a feminist faces either a success or failure, mostly as for writing The Second Sex. But it is clear that for a large number of women, the work symbolized a lifeline that helped them to find a sense in their lives. Many readers responded to the writers work. Total Moi sums up the books significance as follows: [] Beauvoir provided women all over the world with a vision of change.
This is what gives her essay such power and such a capacity to inspire its readers to action, and it is also the reason why The Second Sex remains the founding text for materialist feminism in the twentieth century. (Moi 213) Of course, there is no firm answer to the question, whether Simone de Beauvoir is a feminist or not. But in spite of that we can say that Simone de Beauvoir has occupied an important place in the women's movement which happened at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Works Cited: de Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by H. M.
Parsley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. de Beauvoir, Simone. Coming of Age.
Translated by P. O'Brian, New York: Putnam, 1972 de Beauvoir, Simone. Interview. Saturday Review June 14, 1975 Cosman, Carol (Translator).
Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. English translation of L'Amerique au Jour le Jour.
Haralambos, M. , Holborn, M. (eds. ), Sociology: themes and perspectives, London, Harper Collins, 2000 Moi, T. , Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994 Pilardi, Jo-Ann. Simone de Beauvoir. Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobiography. Praeger, 1999 Simons, Margaret A. , ed. Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir.
University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1995. Vintges, Karen. Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
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