Simone de Beauvoir is regarded as the mother of modern feminism:

A new biography revisits her remarkable intellectual life – but is she in some respects outdated?

Simone de Beauvoir by Lisa Appignanesi.
182 pages. Haus Publishing, London. £9.99

There can be no doubt that Simone de Beauvoir was a major influence on generations of feminists. Her ground-breaking study The Second Sex, first published in 1949, was placed on the Vatican Index, and indeed banned in Ireland because it not only mentioned abortion: it advocated it as a form of liberation from what De Beauvoir called “the bondage of reproduction”. Yet in this scrupulously fair re-assessment of De Beauvoir by the Canadian writer and feminist, Lisa Appignanesi suggests that in some respects The Second Sex is now rather out of date. Radical as it was, it really took a rather masculine view of women – woman as “the other” – and perhaps in consequence, a more than usually negative view of maternity, which most women regard as rewarding rather than imprisoning. In another respect, too, I would suggest that The Second Sex is seriously outdated: biological science has overtaken its central assertion that “one is not born a woman – one becomes one”. There is good evidence now that for most women, one is born female. The claim that female behaviour is all “social conditioning” no longer stands up to scientific scrutiny.

But of course Simone de Beauvoir’s life and work is more than this single text: she has taken her place, and rightfully, on the whole, among the pantheon of great intellectuals and there will always be a market for assessments and reassessments of her reputation. As Lisa Appignanesi writes, De Beauvoir and Sartre seemed to a whole generation – to several generations – the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall of the intellectual world. There is a strong element of glamour in the vision of Sartre and De Beauvoir sitting in the Café Flore in those post-war years when existentialism first emerged – perhaps the first time, in mass culture, that a philosophy also became a lifestyle, with its own dress code (the black roll-neck sweater) and its own performance art (Juliette Greco in the smokey boite). To have been in Paris in 1946, when people were swooning with amazement during Sartre’s lectures, must have been extraordinary.

Like Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong partner (although Appignanesi claims that their sexual relations ceased in 1944 - and they both had many other lovers as well), Simone de Beauvoir was the child of the confident bourgeoisie: it is not unknown for radical Leftists to have been highly indulged, even spoiled, by adoring parents, imparting to them a lifelong sense of their own importance. Yet De Beauvoir’s parents also represented a template which was to affect her mindset for life: her submissive mother was Catholic, religious, and even mystical: her dominant father was “rational”, anti-religious, and nationalist. Because Simone aspired, from an early age, to “rational” intellectualism, it is as if she turned her back deliberately on both the feminine and the religious sensibility, as well as on the maternal experience. She set her face against both marriage and motherhood – she had two abortions – and never wavered from this resolution. “Marriage doubles social chores,” she told Sartre, when, in a moment of gallantry he offered to marry her (it would have made it easier for them to be together as teachers in the lycee system). Sartre was not given to making marriage proposals: he generally traded on that selfish, I-need-my-space excuse, which many bachelors have been known to employ.

But as life went on, the parental urge – which will never be entirely denied – manifested itself in elliptical ways for both of them. Sartre not only adopted a young woman, whom he made the executor of his will – to De Beauvoir’s vexation – but he became, in the end, Simone’s surrogate child, as she found herself taking responsibility for his health and care: and trying to protect him from predators. Old men can be vulnerable to manipulation, and at the end of his life Sartre was greatly dominated by a young Maoist, Benny Levy (something similar happened to Bertrand Russell, who fell under the spell of a young American radical).

This is a commendable re-examination of the De Beauvoir-Sartre story, with neat clarifications of their work, a thorough codification of De Beauvoir’s publications and helpful breakout blocks on those who influenced the existential pair, from Descartes to Merleau-Ponty. (It was actually a Catholic thinker, Gabriel Marcel, who coined the term ‘existentialism’, and he drew upon Husserl, the late Pope John Paul’s special academic subject.) In parts it, might have developed the wider personal narrative a little more – whatever became of Simone’s younger sister? – but it is essentially a study of the life in the context of the work. De Beauvoir was a rigorous thinker, and a clever intellectual who left an impressive record of her own life: but at heart she was too cold in her view of the female condition to represent the majority of women – and that comes over quite strikingly. ENDS.

The Tablet magazine: August 2005.