SIMONE DE

BEAUVOIR
Taylor Couty PowerPoint In Class Exercise
 She attended the College of Sorbonne in Paris, France to study philosophy.
A. She graduated college at the age of 17, and then got an advanced degree before the age
of 20. At 21, she was the youngest person ever to pass the aggregation in philosophy,
which as a profoundly difficult test that ranked French students nationally in subject. She
scored the second highest of all the students taking the test that year.
The one person who scored higher than her was Jean-Paul Sartre.
Shortly thereafter, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, and they continued on to form a
partnership and romance that shaped both of their lives and philosophical beliefs.
He was her partner in life, although never in marriage. They had outside sexual
affairs, although Jean-Paul was much more sexually active outside of their
relationship than she was. She participated in more long-lasting and passionate
affairs. They decided on the open relationship due to the kinds of people they
were and the fact that they worked in different parts of France. They both taught
philosophy.
While a teacher, de Beauvoir was known for seducing female students and
romancing them, and then passing them on to Sartre. Due to the controversial
teacher-student relationships she proposed, she had her teaching license
permanently revoked in 1943.
 The Second Sex is one of her best-known books.
A. In The Second Sex, she talks about the treatment of women throughout history and her
realization that her life had been affected in so many ways by her having been born a
woman.
She wrote the book in 14 months. The first volume came out in Paris in June 1949 and the
second one came out five months later.
The Second Sex argues against the either-or frame of the woman question (either women
and men are equal or they are different). It argues for womens equality, while insisting on
the reality of the sexual difference. She states that women and men treat each other as
equals and that to do so, their sexual differences be validated, further explaining that
Equality is not a synonym for sameness. She finds it unjust and immoral to use the sexual
different as an argument for womens subordination. She goes on to discuss the meanings
of the lived female body, exploring the ways that cultural assumptions frame womens
experience of their bodies and alienate them from their bodys possibilities. As an example,
she talks about how it is assumed that women are the weaker sex. But encourages the
reader to ask, what is the ground of this assumption? What criteria of strength are used?
Upper body power? Average body size? Is there a reason not to consider longevity a sign of
strength? Using this criteria, would women still be considered the weaker sex?
 If her functioning as a female is not enough to define women, if we decline
also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if nevertheless we
admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question,
What is a woman? To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once a
preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would
never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: I am a woman; on this
truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting
himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a
man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a
matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality, the relation of the two sexes
is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to
designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the
negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.
 In the midst of an abstract discussion, it is vexing to hear a man say:
You think thus and so because you are a woman; but I know that my
only defense is to reply: I think thus and so because it is true, thereby
removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the
question to reply: And you think the contrary because you are a man,
for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A
man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute
vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an
absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus:
these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her
within the limits of her own nature.
 She published a book in 1954, titled The Mandarin, that talks
about the struggle of herself and other intellectuals that are
close to her, and covers the struggles they endured to make their
intellectual views into something that provoked real change in
the world. She was awarded the highest literary honor in France,
the Prix Goncourt.
A. The Prix Goncourt is a prize that is given to an author of the
best and most imaginative prose work of the year.
 By the time she died, she had written 20 books and
several essays.
She died of a pulmonary edema on April 14, 1986.