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Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9th 1908 to a bourgeois couple in Paris, France in the city district the 6th arrondissement. Her mother Francoise was a wealthy bankers daughter and a devout catholic while her father was a former aspiring actor, a pagan in ethical composition and now a successful lawyer in the upper districts of their city.
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Simone's sister, Helene is born.
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Precursor to her enrollment, Simone's family was struggling to maintain their wealth and status in Parisian society amidst the upheaval and fallout of World War 1. This economic strain resulted in Simone no longer having a dowry, and without this incentive to attract suitors, she decided to utilize her natural intellect and pursue her baccalaureate education as a means of assuring she could provide for herself, much to her fathers delight, which in turn shaped her baseline feminist views.
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Simone went on from her baccalaureate studies to study at the Sobronne Institution where she completed her coursework at an exceptional rate and also worked alongside the minds of Jean-Paul Sartre, Rene Maheu and Paul Nizan; earning as well in this period the certificate of "General Philosophy and Logic" as the youngest person to ever pass the exam at 21 and second in record of score only to Simone Weil. This success helped strengthen her perspective that women could achieve just as much as men.
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Post graduation and during the beginning of her career, Simone and Jean-Paul Sartre became romantically involved. The relationship was one that was atypical to the times and so developed atypically as well, being defined by the couple as a "soul partnership" that was sexually non-exclusive and they also lived apart. Following this burgeoning romance, Simone went on to teach classes at what would be considered a highschool level by American standards until her writing became her source of income.
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I believe this work upon both its process and completion resulted in Simone taking a far more open and hardline stance in her advocacy positions. Whereas before, her style of advocacy was very much in her leading by example and being a woman defying the standards of the time, as well as publishing her works, she in this novel took the next step into a far more vocal and forefront direct advocacy role, helping push forward to the cutting edge of the beginning of the suffrage movement and feminism
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Simone's book The Coming of Age is in some ways regarded as a spiritual successor and progression of The Second Sex. Her work in this novel articulated the process of growing old in western capitalist society and articulated beautifully the manner of struggle faced by much of the aging population through her perspectives and she advocated strongly for both more attention to be given and ceded to both the elderly and the oppressed.
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Simone passed away and was buried with her lifelong partner Jean-Paul Sartre, the man whom she regarded as a Soul-Partner and who's philosophy help lay a framework by which she predicated much of her own ethics and advocacy. Her works became regarded as pillars of the feminist literature and her advocacy helped pave the way for a new era of feminist expression and work towards equality. In both her practice, and her work, Simone was a force for change to make a better world.
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