PCGUIA 10/PC Guia 10.iso/database/shared.dir/01393_Field_12.cap.txt

Text File | 1996-03-14 | 2KB | 100 lines

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The elder and
favored of two
girls, de Beauvoir
was born into a
bourgeois family.
She pursued a
glittering and
precocious career
as a philosopher
at the Sorbonne,
where she met
Jean-Paul Sartre
and at 21, she
became the
youngest quali-
fied philosopher
in France
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De Beauvoir was
devoted to Sartre
for over 50 years.
They saw each
other every day,
but never shared a
house and had
various other
relationships
though never
lasting ones.
Together, they
formulated the
philosophy of
existentialism,
and were also
involved in the
Resistance during
the second
world war
#
Rebellious but
happy as a child,
de Beauvoir always
denied that her
partnership with
Sartre had anything
in common with
a bourgeois
marriage. In The
Second Sex (1949),
which paved the
way for the
women's rights
movement of the
Sixties she wrote
that the principle
of marriage
was obscene
#
After the war,
de Beauvoir pro-
duced a number
of books, plays and
theoretical essays.
She became one of
France's best-
selling authors.
Among her works
was The Mandarins
(1954), about
Jean-Paul Sartre,
herself and the
writer Albert
Camus. They spent
many hours discus-
sing literature and
philosophy in cafes
on Paris' Left Bank
#
Feminists admire
de Beauvoir for her
achievement as a
thinker. Two of
the main trends in
twentieth century
thought, feminism
and existentialism,
meet in her work.
She united theory
and activism, for
example she wrote
and campaigned for
the right to
contraception, and
to legal abortion.
She was very much
ahead of her time
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