Google Doodle honours visionary behind 'The Second Sex'
Simone de Beauvoir was born 106 years ago and died in 1986.
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She’d be 106 today and she’d be only slightly amazed by the change in the lives of women.
French author and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, which would inspire the second wave of feminism in the 1960s.
Among her many trenchant observations in her writing: “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
Encouraged by her father, de Beauvoir used her intelligence and diligence to capture a coveted spot in the elite École Normale, passing her entrance exams in the top echelon.
The only student with better marks was the private-school tutored Jean-Paul Sartre. He would bring her into his circle of existential philosophers, and the two would remain lovers for life, despite each other’s many affairs.
De Beauvoir, who died in 1986, turned down Sartre’s marriage proposal in 1931, preferring to remain independent.
She was dismissed from teaching in 1943 for “corrupting” a female student with her progressive ideas.
One of her most famous quotes embodies those ideas: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
The Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal is dedicated to studying issues of feminism and social justice.
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