FRENCH CIVILIZATION

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: CONTRADICTIONS

Introduced by Anne Whitmarsh on 16 November 1998

From her own writings we know that for Beauvoir theory and practice did not always coincide. Seen as a figure of the radical left, she rejected for most of her life conventional political action.
She published what became the bible of feminism, The Second Sex, in 1949 but joined the feminist movement only in the 1970s. In her novels men are always given positive roles and
women mostly negative ones.
From material that has emerged in recent years, the notion of the intellectual couple Sartre and Beauvoir even-handedly discussing and criticising each other's ideas and writing must be revised. He had the ideas and she used her critical and analytical skills to help him set them out - and even wrote some of ‘his’ work herself. Beauvoir happily sacrificed her work to his needs.
In her memoirs she never hints that when in the late 1950s he moved on from Existentialism towards Marxism she was at odds
with his thinking and all his later work. She was nevertheless always at his side on platforms, at protest meetings and on official visits abroad as guests of honour, fostering the public perception of herself as his privileged companion forever. In fact his adopted daughter and his secretary had largely usurped her role.
Luckily her feminist activities allowed Beauvoir to move out of Sartre's shadow for the first time.
An animated and witty discussion followed, ranging over: Beauvoir's personal relationship with Sartre and Algren, and with
other women; Existentialism as a philosophy and as an ethic; The Second Sex as a tract on the status of women; and the ambivalent stance of Beauvoir and Sartre in occupied Paris.
Anne Whitmarsh