Simone de beauvoir biography of williams
•
Man, my friend, you willingly make fun of women's
writings because they can't help being autobiographical.
On whom then were you relying to
paint women for you . . .? On yourself?
(Colette , Break of Day)
"Dutiful daughter" of the French bourgeoisie, she dedicated her life and art to denouncing passionately the "splendid expectations" that had illuminated her childhood. When World War II burst over her, she inherited history in its most terrible form. From then on, her life and work as a writer, teacher, and intellectual bore witness to virtually every major turbulence of twentieth-century Europe: the Spanish Civil War, the Occupation and Resistance, the rise and defeat of Fascism, the bloody dismantling of French imperialism, the heyday and demise of the French intellectual Left, and the resurgence of French feminism. Her great literary output · five novels, a play, the monumental polemic Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, ), her essays, short stories, travel writing and
•
Simone de Beauvoir
1. Life and Works
Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, in Paris, France. Her parents, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise (née) Brasseur provided Beauvoir and her younger sister Hélène, often referred to by her nickname “Poupette,” with a traditional bourgeois, Catholic upbringing. Beauvoir spent much of her childhood rebelling against the values of her faith and bourgeois ideology. The disdain for the latter would continue throughout her adult life. In her childhood, Beauvoir vowed to never become a housewife or mother and admired her father’s intelligence. He introduced the young Beauvoir to great works of literature and encouraged her to write. She pursued this out of her own interest, writing stories and keeping diaries throughout her girlhood, and more formally in her educational training at the private Catholic school for girls, the Institut Adeline Désir. At school, she formed an intimate b
•
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone dem Beauvoir (born 9 January ; died 14 April ), philosopher, feminist, novelist, autobiographer, social critic and French intellectual, remains a writer who escapes easy classification. Objectification, as a woman or as a writer, was something she always resisted. Widely revered in the feminist movement for having re-defined our understanding of women's oppression in
Le Deuxième Sexe[
The Second Sex] (), and setting a new agenda for second-wave feminism in the 's onwards, she did not initially identify with feminism.
The Second Sexwas undertaken as a philosophical utforskning of what it meant to be a woman, not as a feminist polemic. Apart from the shocked reception to
The Second Sex, Beauvoir also became notorious for her manipulation of anställda relations and her…
Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to tillgång the LE on campu