Simone de Beauvoir. Mother of Us All

Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14th, 1986, at the age of 78. A writer and philosopher and woman of independence, she had been a kind of mother to millions of women of my generation-whose own mothers had spent the 40s and 50s being the housewives of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique. My own mother was born in Berlin in 1915, Simone de Beauvoir had been born in Paris 7 years earlier, in 1908. Yet it is hard to imagine them of the same generation, or even in the same room. My mother, newly immigrated to the United States, completed the rearing of three girls without having allowed herself any ambivalence about the prevailing superiority of my father and his gender. Simone de Beauvoir, still in her native city, published The Second Sex in 1949-ithe year my mother had her youngest daughter. Though my mother was a good-hearted liberal, she found newspapers difficult, frightening, alienating. To this day she remains a refugee in a baffling land, yet with trepidation she still worked to integrate our various middle-class neighborhoods, and, during the War in Vietnam, she got up her courage to march in protest against the country that had given her shelter. By contrast, Simone de Beauvoir gradu'ted from the Sorbonne into the center of French avant-garde intellectual life. Though she spent her carefree 20s and 30s celebrating an individualistic freedom (if society had rules, they were only made by people, and people could choose to break or change them), by the time of the Spanish Civil War she had begun to see that all our liberties are interconnected like the stones of an arch atid was catapulted by the day-by-day history she and others were making-if not in absolute freedom, then at least with a measure of choice and responsibility. All her writing-whether memoirs, journalism, philosophical essays, political tracts, or fiction-rests firmly on the conviction that people create history through their choices made in good or bad faith. Though The Second Sex has impressed most readers with its endless detailing of the varieties of female oppression, it is based on two grand philosophical premises: that there is no biological reason for patriarchy--One is not born but becomes a woman; and that, though society has made women unfree, to the extent that we understand our condition, each of us shares a measure of both complicity and choice. From 1945 on

Political science · Sociology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre