Simone de Beauvoir, free woman

Simone de Beauvoir, raised by a deeply religious mother and educated at the radical Catholic Cours Desir, was hardly older than 14 when she renounced the God that had accompanied her childhood. “I was alone. One: for the first time I understood the terrible meaning of this word. This renunciation, accompanied by pain and guilt, is symbolic. And it anticipates all the rest: the renunciation of one’s environment, the withdrawal from the pressure of society and the family. (“In my environment, it was still considered improper for a young girl to get a higher education, and to acquire a profession meant a fall.”) At the age of 21, as the youngest lyceum teacher in France, Simone de Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre. “Real life” begins, and this life will bring unusually abundant fruits. Iconoclast teacher, award-winning novelist, brilliant memoirist, feminist… Joyfully subverting convention, she will shape her life according to her own standards, developing ideas in her books that continue to inspire her to this day.

Keys to Understanding

“A woman is not born, she is made”

This saying, defiant and somewhat mysterious, was first heard in 1949 in her book The Second Sex. Today, having gone around the world, it is reproduced on more than 80 thousand Internet sites. In this work, translated into more than 50 languages, Simone de Beauvoir subverts the conventions that have hung over women since the cradle. If women are not spoiled from childhood, it is because less hope is placed on them than on their brothers. They are told that they should like them, position themselves as an “object”, fulfill their destiny without mental throwing through marriage, “which practically subordinates them to a man to an even greater extent,” she resents, and also through motherhood. “Patriarchal civilization doomed woman to chastity; society more or less openly recognizes the right of a man to satisfy his sexual desires, while a woman is locked in marriage. But the peculiarities of the structure of the female body and female sexuality in no way justify her inferiority in relation to a man. Analyzing a thousand reasons that attribute superiority “not to the sex that gives birth, but to the one that kills”, Simone de Beauvoir encourages a woman not to allow herself to be locked in the “role of a female”, but to live as a conscious person. And become a free woman.

“Necessary love and occasional romances”

The commonality, rather intellectual than carnal, which connected her with Sartre for more than 50 years, is love “necessary”, but both will also have other, “accidental” novels, as they say. Simone de Beauvoir did not intend to wither in the security of a monogamous relationship. “Why, for example, always live under one roof, when the whole world is our common property?” she asks herself. Nothing, not even love, should be an obstacle to this desire to live a rich life, explore the world, give body and soul to the joys and sorrows of life, various impressions, meetings … even if sometimes you have to pay for it.

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• Nikolai Berdyaev, prophet of freedom

“Become an Existentialist”

Simone de Beauvoir, under the influence of Sartre, became one of the main figures of existential philosophy, valuing her freedom above all else. Man himself forms himself through his choice, his position, his existence. This freedom is at the same time his most beautiful gift and his heaviest burden. “If it turned out so natural for me to become an“ existentialist ”, it is because my whole past prepared me for this … Already at the age of 19 I was convinced that a person himself, and he alone, is obliged to give meaning to his life, and that he can do it.”

Simone de Beauvoir has always believed that a woman is not a victim of a mysterious fate, one should not assume that because of her ovaries she is condemned to live forever on her knees.