Simone de Beauvoir was a French novelist who played an important role in the development of existentialism and feminism in the 20th century. An important goal of hers was to combat the repression created by traditional, patriarchal religion and theism. A number of her novels were explicitly about existentialist themes, for example the attempt to find meaning and purpose in an absurd world.
Simone de Beauvoir’s involvement with existentialism began in 1929 when she met Jean Paul Sartre at the Sorbonne — indeed, aside from Sartre she is the one writer who accepted the existentialist label with the most enthusiasm. Much of her early work was focused on ethical matters — her second book, for example, was The Ethics of Ambiguity.
In this work, de Beauvoir attempted to create a system of existentialist ethics that were founded upon the Satrean notion of radical human freedom that was on the one hand open to all the possibilities the the future held, and on the other hand was committed to taking responsibility for all of one’s chosen actions. For de Beauvoir, part of the problem with this is the fact that human life is characterized by an ambiguity created by the combination of both an inner and an outer life.
A person’s inner life is based upon their consciousness and their awareness of their own freedom. A person’s outer life, on the other hand, is based upon their being material objects — objects which are limited in their freedom by other objects (which includes both people and society). De Beauvoir further emphasized the rejection of things like how a person identifies themselves with some fixed set of qualities or values, arguing instead that being open to the future entails being open to change, even changes in values.
De Beauvoir is also known as an early feminist, although her feminism was based explicitly on existentialist concepts and terminology. In her famous work The Second Sex, she traced the historical pattern of male oppression of women through historical, literary, and even mythical sources. Her conclusion was that the current repression experienced by women was largely due to the idea that maleness was the norm while femaleness is somehow “other” and “different.”
Existentialist themes are prominent in this work because de Beauvoir argued that part of the problem which women faced was that the male-dominated society created definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman, acting as though there were some fixed male and female natures. This attitude became self-regenerating because women were taught to accept their own marginalization, thus leading to feelings of self-alienation which are unique to women. This, in turn, allowed their oppression to progress in a manner fundamentally different from that experienced by other groups in society.
True to her existentialist principles, de Beauvoir argued that women should reject this process of being made (in the image of traditional expectation) but should instead become (in the sense of finding their own path in life). She also argued that while legal rights and economic independence were necessary for women, they also weren’t sufficient conditions for real freedom — ultimately, women have to take matters into their own hands.
