Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, political activist, and existentialist philosopher; however, she vocally denounced being labeled as an existentialist or philosopher and was not recognized alongside the great philosophers of the 21st century until years after her death in 1986. Simone de Beauvoir was born to a strict Roman Catholic mother and an individualistic “pagan” father; in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she credited her path to becoming an intellectual in large part to the resulting “disequillibirum [and] … endless disputation” which defined her upbringing. Her precocious intellect was encouraged by her father and, when her bourgeois family lost her dowry along with the majority of their fortune in the first World War, she chose …show more content…
They joined the ranks of Camus and Picasso as faces of modern art and philosophy, and when Le Deuxième Sexe was published in the late 1940s, de Beauvoir gained international fame. In it she clearly and methodically unpacked the social phenomenon of woman as “the other”, pointing out social inequities such as how masculine ideology uses sexual differences to maintain the male subject as the “human type”, and how in order for women to join this privileged class they must train and live like men. Le Deuxième Sexe argues that women deserve equality, but should be able to do so without denying the realities of sexual difference; in a single catchphrase, “‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’”. She goes on to use Hegel’s account of the master-slave dynamic, but instead uses the terms “Subject” and “Other”. The absolute self, or default, is the Subject, while the Other is inessential. De Beauvoir points out that the Subject uses itself as a standard to measure against, thus finding the Other weaker and inadequate, using these “inadequacies” to justify defining and treating them accordingly. She goes on to ask, “How can a human being in a woman’s situation attain fulfillment?” She points out that as Others, women do, in one sense, enjoy the freedom of a child-like state in which the weight of responsibility is diminished. This state is complicated and intertwined with the socio-economic difficulties of living independently (particularly in the 1940s), as well as the unique bond between men and women (which has since been criticized as a heteronormative mindset, but is also deemed the default assumption of the time). In conclusion, de Beauvoir states that woman must free herself from two shackles: the idea that she must become like man to be independent, and the feminization that society has thrust upon her from birth. In the first sense she embraces the physical and sexual experience of the