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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris …

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIRThe Second SexSimone de BEAUVOIR was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she becamethe youngest person ever to obtain the agr gation in philosophy at theSorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught in lyc es inMarseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of theexistentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les TempsModernes. The author of many books, including the novel TheMandarins (1957), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, Beauvoirwas one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have lived in Parisfor more than forty years and are both graduates of RutgersUniversity, New Jersey. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier were facultymembers at the Institut d tudes Politiques. They have beentranslating books and articles on social science, art, and feministliterature for many years and have jointly authored numerous books inEnglish and in French on subjects ranging from grammar to politics toAmerican VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2011Le deuxi me sexe copyright 1949 by ditions Gallimard, ParisTranslation copyright 2009 by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-ChevallierIntroduction copyright 2010 by Judith ThurmanAll rights reserv

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught in lycées in Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to 1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the

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Transcription of SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris …

1 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIRThe Second SexSimone de BEAUVOIR was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she becamethe youngest person ever to obtain the agr gation in philosophy at theSorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught in lyc es inMarseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of theexistentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les TempsModernes. The author of many books, including the novel TheMandarins (1957), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, Beauvoirwas one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have lived in Parisfor more than forty years and are both graduates of RutgersUniversity, New Jersey. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier were facultymembers at the Institut d tudes Politiques. They have beentranslating books and articles on social science, art, and feministliterature for many years and have jointly authored numerous books inEnglish and in French on subjects ranging from grammar to politics toAmerican VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2011Le deuxi me sexe copyright 1949 by ditions Gallimard, ParisTranslation copyright 2009 by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-ChevallierIntroduction copyright 2010 by Judith ThurmanAll rights reserved.

2 Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division ofRandom House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,Toronto. Originally published in France in two volumes as Le deuxi me sexe: Les faitset les mythes (Vol. 1) and L exp rience v cue (Vol. 11) by ditions Gallimard, 1949 by ditions Gallimard, Paris . This translation originally publishedin hardcover in slightly different form in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, The RandomHouse Group Ltd., London, in 2009, and subsequently published in hardcover in theUnited States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: BEAUVOIR , SIMONE de, 1908 1986.[Deuxi me sexe. English]The second sex / SIMONE de BEAUVOIR ; translated by Constance Borde andSheila Malovany Women. I. Borde, Constance.

3 II. Malovany-Chevallier, Sheila. III. dc222009023164eISBN: Jacques BostThere is a good principle that createdorder, light, and manand a bad principle that createdchaos, darkness, and woman. PYTHAGORASE verything that has been written by menabout women should be viewed with suspicion,because they are both judge and party. POULAIN DE LA BARRE5 ContentsCoverAbout the AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationIntroduction by Judith ThurmanTranslators NoteVOLUME I Facts and MythsIntroductionPART ONE | DESTINYC hapter 1 Biological DataChapter 2 The Psychoanalytical Point of ViewChapter 3 The Point of View of Historical MaterialismPART TWO | HISTORYC hapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 PART THREE | MYTHSC hapter 1 Chapter 2 I. Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust II. D. H. Lawrence or Phallic PrideIII. Claudel or the Handmaiden of the LordIV. Breton or Poetry V. Stendhal or Romancing the 3 VOLUME II Lived ExperienceIntroductionPART ONE | FORMATIVE YEARSC hapter 1 ChildhoodChapter 2 The GirlChapter 3 Sexual InitiationChapter 4 The LesbianPART TWO | SITUATIONC hapter 5 The Married WomanChapter 6 The MotherChapter 7 Social LifeChapter 8 Prostitutes and HetaerasChapter 9 From Maturity to Old AgeChapter 10 Woman s Situation and CharacterPART THREE | JUSTIFICATIONSC hapter 11 The NarcissistChapter 12 The Woman in LoveChapter 13 The MysticPART FOUR | TOWARD LIBERATIONC hapter 14 The Independent WomanConclusionSelected Sources7 IntroductionIn 1946, SIMONE de BEAUVOIR began to outline what she thoughtwould be an autobiographical essay explaining why, when she hadtried to define herself, the first sentence that came to mind was I am awoman.

4 That October, my maiden aunt, BEAUVOIR s contemporary,came to visit me in the hospital nursery. I was a day old, and shefound a little tag on my bassinet that announced, It s a Girl! In thenext bassinet was another newborn ( a lot punier, she recalled),whose little tag announced, I m a Boy! There we lay, innocent of adistinction between a female object and a male subject that wouldshape our destinies. It would also shape BEAUVOIR s great treatise onthe was then a thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual whohad been enfranchised for only a year. Legal birth control would bedenied to French women until 1967, and legal abortion, until until the late 1960s was there an elected female head of stateanywhere in the world. Girls of my generation searching for examplesof exceptional women outside the ranks of queens and courtesans,and of a few artists and saints, found precious few.

5 (The queens, asBeauvoir remarks, were neither male nor female: they weresovereigns. ) Opportunities for women have proliferated so broadlyin the past six decades, at least in the Western world, that the distancebetween 2010 and 1949, when The Second Sex was published inFrance, seems like an eternity (until, that is, one opens a newspaper the victims of misogyny and sexual abuse are still with us,everywhere). While no one individual or her work is responsible forthat seismic shift in laws and attitudes, the millions of young womenwho now confidently assume that their entitlement to work, pleasure,and autonomy is equal to that of their brothers owe a measure of theirfreedom to BEAUVOIR . The Second Sex was an act of Prometheanaudacity a theft of Olympian fire from which there was no turningback. It is not the last word on the problem of woman, which, BEAUVOIR wrote, has always been a problem of men, but it marks the8place in history where an enlightenment Bertrand de BEAUVOIR was born in1908 into a reactionary Catholic family with pretensions to had a Proustian childhood on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, inParis.

6 But after World War I, her father, Georges, lost most of hisfortune, and without dowries SIMONE and her sister, H l ne, had dimprospects for a marriage within their class. Their mother, Fran oise, abanker s daughter who had never lived without servants, did all thehousework and sewing for the family. Her pious martyrdom indeliblyimpressed SIMONE , who would improve upon Virginia Woolf sfamous advice and move to a room of her own in a hotel, with maidservice. Like Woolf, and a striking number of other great womenwriters,1 BEAUVOIR was childless. And like Colette, who wasn t (sherelegated her late- born , only daughter to the care of surrogates), sheregarded motherhood as a threat to her integrity. Colette is aubiquitous presence in The Second Sex, which gives a newperspective to her boast, in a memoir of 1946, that my strain ofvirility saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevatedto a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocreauthor.

7 Beneath the still young woman that I was, an old boy offorty saw to the well-being of a possibly precious part of myself. Mme de BEAUVOIR , intent on keeping up a facade of gentility,however shabby, sent her daughters to an elite convent school whereSimone, for a while, ardently desired to become a nun, one of the fewrespectable vocations open to an ambitious girl. When she lost herfaith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams thatproved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchantingclassmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin andchildhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her ataste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew. (Notmany bookish virgins with a particle in their surname got drunk withthe hookers and drug addicts at Le Styx.) Her mother hoped vainlythat the worthless Jacques would propose.

8 Her father, a ladies man,knew better: he told his temperamental, ill-dressed, pimply genius of adaughter that she would never marry. But by then SIMONE deBeauvoir had seen what a woman of almost any quality highborn or9low, pure or impure, contented with her lot or alienated could expectfrom a man s s singular brilliance was apparent from a young age toher teachers, and to herself. An insatiable curiosity and a prodigiouscapacity for synthetic reading and analysis (a more inspired grind maynever have existed) nourished her drive. One of her boyfriendsdubbed her Castor (the Beaver), a nickname that stuck. She had asense of inferiority, it would appear, only in relation to Jean-PaulSartre. They met in 1929, as university students (she a star at theSorbonne, he at the Ecole Normale Sup rieure), cramming, as a team,for France s most brutal and competitive postgraduate examination,the agr gation in philosophy.

9 (On their first study date, she explainedLeibniz to him.) Success would qualify her for a lifetime sinecureteaching at a lyc e, and liberate her from her family. When the resultswere posted, Sartre was first and BEAUVOIR second (she was the ninthwoman who had ever passed), and that, forever, was the order ofprecedence Adam before Eve in their creation myth as a though their ideal was of a love without domination, it waspart of the myth that Sartre was BEAUVOIR s first man. After Georgesde BEAUVOIR confronted them (they had been living together more orless openly), Sartre, the more bourgeois, proposed marriage, andBeauvoir told him not to be silly. She had emerged from her age ofawkwardness as a severe beauty with high cheekbones and a regalforehead who wore her dark hair plaited and rolled an old-fashionedduenna s coif rather piquantly at odds with her appetites and sexes attracted her, and Sartre was never the most compelling ofher lovers, but they recognized that each possessed somethinguniquely necessary to the other.

10 As he put it one afternoon, walking inthe Tuileries, You and I together are as one (on ne fait qu un). Hecategorized their union as an essential love that only death couldsunder, although in time, he said, they would naturally both have contingent loves freely enjoyed and fraternally confessed in aspirit of authenticity. (She often recruited, and shared, his girls,some of whom were her students, and her first novel, She Came toStay, in 1943, was based on one of their m nages trois.) At everylevel, BEAUVOIR reflected, years later, of the pain she had suffered andinflicted, we failed to face the weight of reality, priding ourselves onwhat we called our radical freedom. But they also failed to fault10themselves for the contingent casualties the inessential others whowere sacrificed to their experiment. And the burden of free love, BEAUVOIR would discover, was grossly unequal for a woman and for BEAUVOIR has proved to be an irresistible subject for biographers, itis, in part, because she and Sartre, as a pharaonic couple of incestuousdeities, reigned over twentieth-century French intellectual life in thedecades of its greatest ferment.


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