Simone de Beauvoir

In this essay, the author

• Analyzes how simone de beauvoir's writings attempted to deal on paper with the vast emotions conjured by her life experiences, particularly women she knew who were "assassinated by bourgeois morality."
• Explains that simone de beauvoir was born in paris, france on january 9, 1908. she was raised by a catholic mother from verdun.
• Analyzes how beauvoir and her best friend, zaza, would talk about the greatness of bringing nine children into the world and of creating books.
• Narrates how beauvoir pulled away from the traditional values with which francoise de beauvoi hoped to infuse in her. she and her sister rebelled.
• Analyzes how beauvoir's loss of faith created a serious lack of communication with her mother.
• Explains that beauvoir was convinced that she was in love with her cousin jacques champigneulles, who introduced her to books by such french authors as andre gide, alain-fournier, henry de montherlant, jean cocteau, paul claudel, and paul valery
• Analyzes how beauvoir's memoirs, fiction, essays, interviews, and prefaces record events, attitudes, customs and ideas that define approximately seven decades of the twentieth century.
• Narrates how beauvoir met jean-paul sartre through rene maheu in a study group, and found the partner she dreamed of when she was fifteen.
• Analyzes how de beauvoir provides readers with a highly logical exercise in examining some generally accepted statements by scientists and theoreticians such as charles darwin, sigmund freud, and friedrich engels.
• Opines that de beauvoir agrees that the human race shares its biological differences between male and female with other species, but that membership in a species is irrelevant in human terms, because humans create societies with set human values and impose customs, restrictive as well as supportive, on their members.
• Analyzes how de beauvoir rejects the psychoanalysts' view of women as alienated from their biological and psychological destiny and frustrated in a vain attempt to be men.
• Analyzes how the invention of tools brought about a change enabling man to settle and to liberate himself from the uncertainties of his environment.
• Explains that de beauvoir's theory rests on two important concepts: otherness and the related ideas of transcendence and immanence.
• Explains that man invented tools and created society's fabric, while women remained restricted a cycle of repetitious duties of childbearing and nurturing, and mostly household chores.
• Explains that men are favored from a biological standpoint, because their sexual life is fully integrated with their existence, while women are alienated because of their enslavement to reproduction, which, according to de beauvoir, is unwillingly accepted.
• Explains that postmenopausal women form a "third sex," not male but also no longer female. nothing but gainful employment will guarantee their freedom.
• Analyzes de beauvoir's influence on feminist thought. early american feminists blindly subscribed to her contention that economic independence and integration into the productive labor force could not fail to bring full equality to both sexes.
• Analyzes how simone never wanted to become a mother after seeing the hardships she had to endure, yet she felt the need to be one.
• Explains that simone de beauvoir has lived through many tough times, but she's been able to cope with them, whether it be by stress or on paper.
• Cites magill, frank, ed. cyclopedia of world authors. englewood cliffs, nj, 1983.