Simone de Beauvoir

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1 week ago

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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, Simone de

00:46Beauvoir 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, but 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.

02:10That 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.

02:24During this unhappy time, Beauvoir composed her first major novel, She Came to Stay, 1943,

02:33a study of the effects of love and jealousy.

02:36In the next four years, she published The Blood of Others, Pyrus et Sineas, Le Bouche in

02:42Utiles, 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

03:01a trait, is an artificial posture.

03:04Sartre 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.

03:40Hers 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

03:53was 63.

03:55In it, she describes herself as a person who has always been secure in an imperfect world.

04:01Quote,

04:01On 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,

04:43If any single human being can be credited with inspiring the current international women's

04:48movement, it's Simone de Beauvoir.

04:50Women who changed the world.

04:58Women who changed the world.

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