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00:00Women who change the world.
00:30I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to
00:36take charge of me entirely.
00:37Simone de Beauvoir.
00:39The first of two daughters of George and Francois de Beauvoir, a middle-class couple.
00:45Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France on January 9, 1908.
00:50Her father was a lawyer and had no religious beliefs.
00:54Her mother was a strong believer in Catholicism.
00:57Simone was educated at a strict Catholic school for girls.
01:02After World War I, her father suffered money problems and the family moved to a smaller
01:07home.
01:08When Beauvoir was 21, she joined a group of philosophy students, including Jean-Paul Sartre.
01:14Her relationship with Sartre was to continue throughout most of their lives.
01:20Sartre was the father of existentialism.
01:23A belief that man is on his own, condemned to be free, as Sartre said in Being and Nothingness.
01:30When the agreement ended, Sartre was offered a job teaching philosophy in Le Havre, France,
01:35and Beauvoir was offered a similar job in Marseille, France.
01:39He suggested they get married.
01:41But after some thought, they both rejected the idea.
01:44The first installment of Beauvoir's autobiography, The Story of Her Life, Memoirs of a Dutiful
01:51Daughter, describes her rejection of her parents' middle-class lives.
01:56The second volume, The Prime of Life, covers the years 1929 through 1944, a time when she
02:04and Sartre were both teaching in Paris, and she was, she said, too happy to write.
02:09That happiness ended with the beginning of World War II, from 1939 to 1945, and problems
02:17in her relationship with Sartre, who became involved with another woman, and was also imprisoned
02:23for more than a year.
02:25During this unhappy time, Beauvoir composed her first major novel, She Came to Stay, 1943,
02:33a study of the effects of love and jealousy.
02:35In the next four years, she published The Blood of Others, Pyrus et Sineas, Le Bouche
02:42in Utiles, and All Men Are Mortal, America Day by Day.
02:47Written in 1949, the second sex had two main ideas, that man, who views himself as the essential
02:54being, has made woman into the inessential being, the other, and that femininity, as a
03:01trait, is an artificial posture.
03:03Sartre influenced both of these ideas.
03:07The second sex was perhaps the most important writing on women's rights through the 1980s.
03:13When it first appeared, however, it was not very popular.
03:17The second sex does not offer any real solutions to the problems of women, except the hope that
03:23men and women rise above their natural differentiation, differences, and inequivocally, firmly affirm
03:30their brotherhood.
03:31The description of Beauvoir's own life revealed the possibilities available to the woman, who
03:38found ways to escape her situation.
03:41Hers was a life of equality, and she remained a voice and a model for those women not living
03:47free lives.
03:48The fourth installment of her autobiography, All Said and Done, was written when Beauvoir was
03:5463.
03:54In it, she describes herself as a person who has always been secure in an imperfect world.
04:01Quote, Since I was 21, I have never been lonely.
04:05The opportunities granted to me at the beginning helped me not only to lead a happy life, but
04:10to be happy in the life I led.
04:12I have been aware of my shortcomings and my limits, but I have made the best of them.
04:17When I was tormented by what was happening in the world, it was the world I wanted to change,
04:22not my place in it.
04:24End quote.
04:25On April 14, 1986, Simone de Beauvoir died in a Paris hospital.
04:31Sartre had died six years earlier.
04:34Upon her death, her fellow feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, both praised
04:40her influence, with Steinem proclaiming that, quote, if any single human being can be credited
04:45with inspiring the current international women's movement, it's Simone de Beauvoir.
04:56Women who changed the world.
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