Favourite Frenchwomen II

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.


Not just a favourite Frenchwomen, but one of my favourite women of all time. A lifelong, role model since the day my grandmother introduced me to her at the age of twelve.

Witty, beautiful, incredibly elegant and smart beyond belief. Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, commonly known as Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986), French existentialist philosopher, intellectual, and social theorist, wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), a detailed analysis of women's oppression which made her one of the world’s first serious feminists. Simone laid the ethical foundations for treating woman as equals, a position now a far cry from many of today’s feminists, the intellectually-shallow, man-hating, inward-looking, separationists who hide behind their victim status and who have done so much to hold back women’s real interests



In The Second Sex, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their issues and consequently not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the higher hierarchical group to the lower hierarchical group. She also showed that this occurred with other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than the way which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.

Understanding of the true essence of The Second Sex, published in French, which prescribes a moral revolution, has frequently not been fully understood because of poor translation. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one.

Beauvoir argued that as women we have historically been considered deviant, and abnormal since the days of Eve. She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir said that this attitude limited women's success by maintaining the perception that we were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.

Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.

Simone is of course also remembered for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.