Recently, a series of events from Li Tian's promotion of underwear terms "lying to win the workplace" to Yang Kasa's endorsement of Intel being boycotted by men have made the topic of women frequently appear on the hot search, and everyone has a warm online and offline discussion.
But the identity of "female" was a far heavier shackle for the female group more than a hundred years ago. At that time, women could not get higher education, could not participate in elections, and could not even divorce and contraception as they wished.
In the past hundred years, countless people have worked hard to fight back against stereotypes and prejudices, and women have gradually gained basic rights such as elections, divorce, and contraception.
Among them, there is a woman who has fully witnessed the upheaval of gender equality in the 20th century, she is not limited by the shackles of gender, to explore and tell those common human experiences, and the appearance of her works has caused a huge sensation and become a revolutionary event in the affirmative action movement.
She was Simone de Beauvoir.
The infamous Valkyrie goddess
Valkyrie is a goddess from the Norse mythological system, wearing a gold or silver helmet, wearing a tight robe, holding a glowing spear and shield, and riding a small white horse.
As a young man, Beauvoir wrote in her diary that her weak little girl had a powerful "goddess" of happiness living in her body, and she believed that she could one day become free and powerful.
However, Beauvoir was fiercely criticized and reproached in France at the time because of his private life and the sensitive content of his works.
Her "deviant" relationships with Sartre and other lovers, and bold discussions about lesbianism and motherhood, subjected Beauvoir a lot of insults, and she became one of the most notorious women of the time.
In fact, the events of the last century are also playing out in a similar form today:
There are a lot of well-known people on the list
Private life is rich and colorful
I've had several boyfriends
These accusations also appear frequently in today's discussions about women.
Beauvoir, who lived in the last century, did not become the target of public criticism, ridicule, resentment, humiliation, and did not become depressed.
The public opinion environment that Beauvoir faced, made more cruel because of her female identity, she became aware of such injustices and gradually awakened to the consciousness of feminism.
Beauvoir had witnessed her parents' completely unequal relationship, experienced sexual harassment by male clerks in bookstores, and her friend had been hospitalized with an infection during an illegal abortion...
These experiences allowed Beauvoir to see clearly what kind of dilemmas women face and what kind of mission they have. So she wrote the book The Second Sex, making no secret of her anger at the time at the stupid idea of the topic of "women."
Women are not born, but acquired.
This is a famous phrase from Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, which reveals the discipline and oppression of women in various cultures, and the book later became a banner that changed the fate of many women.
How to understand the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre
Beauvoir, who never married in her life, and she and Sartre, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, maintained an open relationship for more than 50 years, a highly pioneering partnership that people relished.
Beauvoir was also once a "love brain". When he and Sartre were in love in their youth, Beauvoir was sometimes full of nostalgia, sometimes suspicious of everything, emotional ups and downs became intense, and the strict study schedule was left behind.
But later, Beauvoir witnessed the disillusionment of his good friend Zaza's love fantasy of "wishing to win the heart of one person and not being separated from each other", and also saw that his friend was hospitalized because of illegal abortion, and from ancient times to the present, the situation between the sexes is a relationship of domination and subordination.
"People have never asked men to take love as their lifelong ideal like women", the whole society is telling women to enter a married life to achieve happiness, and women always take the man they love as the center of her life after falling in love, and lose themselves in love - if the inequality between the sexes in marriage is universal, then marriage is immoral, which triggered Beauvoir's thinking and discussion.
In the end, she chose to reject such a marriage.
Beauvoir and Sartre did not live apart all their lives, they had their own apartments, and they were only together when they needed to communicate.
At the beginning of her time together, Beauvoir and Sartre had said that Sartre was her incomparable best friend in thought. In her time, women's minds had not yet been taken seriously, and there were still obstacles to her attempt to develop her intellectually feminine side, but she was keenly aware that being with Sartre had a promotion and inspiration for her thoughts.
But instead of absorbing Sartre's ideas, Beauvoir gave Sartre a lot of help, and the two of them were more like intellectually encouraging each other. When people say" "Without Sartre, there would be no Beauvoir and the Second Sex", perhaps at the same time one can think about how much beauvoir influenced Sartre. After all, Sartre also needed Beauvoir.
In Paris in 1929, Sartre was 24 years old and Beauvoir was 21 years old, and the two of them had scored first and second in the highly competitive French National Philosophy Teacher Qualification Examination, respectively, and were about to start their careers as philosophy teachers.
At the age of 21, Beauvoir was a promising rising star in philosophy, becoming the youngest person ever to pass the French National Philosophy Teacher Examination at the age of 21.
Later in life, however, Beauvoir insisted, "I am not a philosopher... [I'm just] a literary writer, Sartre is a philosopher. ”
The world has never given Beauvoir too much recognition in philosophy, always thinking that Sartre can keep Beauvoir in the philosophical world, criticizing her lack of originality.
Over the past decade, however, many new materials and documents have been published, revealing that Beauvoir had some philosophical thoughts long before he met Sartre.
She had published her own articles under Sartre's byline; provided ideas and revised manuscripts for one of Sartre's most acclaimed masterpieces, Nausea; written and published many philosophical works to critique Sartre and even eventually changed his mind; and before she met Sartre, she had philosophical reflections on existential nihilism, but their conclusions on the subject were different. In fact, many people think that "Sartre-esque" thinking is not entirely Sartre's own originality.
In 1945, the year of the "Existential Offensive", Beauvoir was doing a live broadcast
And such a beauvoir is rarely told, or noticed, which is the situation that all female narratives face in history.
We only know half of her, but she doesn't stop there.
The Second Sex: A Philosophical Discussion of Women's Issues
Born into a conservative middle-class family, Beauvoir was expected to be a good wife and mother in the traditional sense, such as mothers, sisters, and close friends. But what she thinks about and the misfortune she sees in her eyes makes her want to break free from the shackles of time and gender.
She knew exactly what she wanted, and she told herself in her diary:
Don't be Miss de Beauvoir, be yourself. Don't chase the goals imposed on you by the outside world, don't blindly follow the established framework of society. What suits you is right, and that's it.
Beauvoir's closest childhood friend Zaza was trapped in the fate of a woman, unable to break the family's arrangement for herself, because she could not dominate her own life, and eventually died in pain.
The loss of Zaza was one of the most significant events in Beauvoir's life, "For at least 30 years after Zaza's death, Beauvoir felt that her freedom had been bought with Zaza's life. ”
September 1928, Zaza and Beauvoir
After the death of Beauvoir's father, she was most surprised by her mother's courage to face a new chapter in her life, and becoming a widow was a kind of liberation for her mother.
This is also invisibly telling Beauvoir that it is more important to pursue the equality that they should obtain as a woman and as a member of human beings.
In 1949, at the age of 41, Beauvoir released The Second Sex.
Parts of The Second Sex were first published in the magazine Modern Times founded by Beauvoir. Beauvoir's history of the different stages or possibilities of women's lives: childhood, becoming a girl, adolescence, sexual enlightenment, lesbianism, marriage, motherhood, social expectations, prostitutes, old age... The chapter "Women's Sexual Enlightenment" has aroused strong repercussions, which describes a vision of reciprocal sexuality between men and women.
The article's frank discussion of women's sexual enlightenment and sexual behavior stirred up thousands of waves in France at that time, causing Beauvoir to suffer many insults, and the famous novelist François Moriac commented that Beauvoir's writing was "simply to the limit of inferiority".
All sorts of infamy poured in from her: "Hunger and thirst, coldness, lasciviousness, female pornographer, lesbian, miscarriages, all sorts of infamys, even unmarried mothers." ”
But what "The Second Sex" really wants to show is a philosophical discussion of the oppression of women, and Beauvoir concludes in "The Second Sex" that in order to become a true "human being", many women must change their situation.
In June 1949, the first volume of Beauvoir's Second Sex was officially published, selling an astonishing number of copies in its first week. Beauvoir declared that "biology is not destiny," nor is marriage and procreation.
Since the 1970s, Beauvoir has increasingly used her influence to help others speak out. In 1979, Beauvoir became the director of publication for the magazine Feminist Question and later as honorary chairman of the Committee on Women and Culture, engaging in feminist activities and giving interviews until his death, when Beauvoir worked on an anti-sexist bill.
By the 1980s, The Second Sex had sold more than a million copies. The book was one of the few books at the time that women could turn to when they wanted to think about their place in the world. ”
Even today, in 2021, Beauvoir's actions can still be called brave and maverick, not to mention that she is in 19th-century France, where women are just having the opportunity to learn.
Beauvoir was also ranked first among the 15 most wearable writers in literary history for the reason that she wore a custom-made coat with a printed silk scarf, which looked better than anyone. At that time, it was also a walking fashion icon.
Li Yinhe described Beauvoir as a "feminist ideological hero" and a "feminist thought teacher and standard-bearer", and in the hearts of all of us, Beauvoir has always been a powerful woman.
In fact, all women have had self-doubt, hesitation and pain, and Beauvoir has also experienced. One of the central points of Second Sex is that no woman can live her own life "free from stereotypes and prejudices." Beauvoir itself struggled with prejudices and prejudices, and bravely fought back.
Beauvoir believed that every woman's experience was a process of becoming, not a book that fit together. And Beauvoir herself, in the process of growing up, constantly changes herself, changes others, and eventually "becomes Beauvoir".
We can all be our free selves, ourselves not defined by gender.
Biography of Beauvoir
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