It implied, she would write, that “humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, however in relation to himself,” and by all of the qualities (Colette ’s strain of “virility”) she is presumed to lack. Colette is a ubiquitous presence in the Second Sex, which gives a new perspective to her boast, in a memoir of 1946, that “my strain of virility saved me from the hazard which threatens the writer, elevated to a contented and tender mother or father, of becoming a mediocre author . On the conclusion of their speak, she writes, “I could not help but comment to my distinguished audience that every question requested about Sartre concerned his work, while all those requested about Beauvoir involved her personal life.” Yet Sartre ’s work, and particularly the existentialist notion of an opposition between a sovereign self – a subject – and an objectified Other, gave Beauvoir the conceptual scaffold for The Second Sex, while her life as a girl (indeed, as Sartre ’s girl) impelled her to jot down it.

When she lost her faith as a teenager, her goals of a transcendent union (goals that proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting classmate named ZaZa and to a wealthy, indolent first cousin and childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a style for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she by no means outgrew. One of those secrets – the toughest, perhaps, for Beauvoir to avow – is that a free woman may refuse to be owned with out desirous to renounce, or with the ability to transcend, her yearning to be possessed.5 “As lengthy as the temptations of facility remain,” she wrote, by which she meant the temptations of romantic love, monetary security, and a way of function or status derived from a man, all of which Sartre had, at one time or another, supplied for her, a girl “needs to expend a larger moral effort than the male to decide on the trail of independence.” Colette, who would have smiled, and never kindly, on the phrase, “moral effort,” states the problem less cerebrally: “How to liberate my true hope? She had a way of inferiority, it could appear, only in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre. Her “twinship” with Sartre was an illusion.

She and Sartre ’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal had been lecturing collectively at Harvard. And probably the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie down slavishly beneath the male ’s imperial embrace, inert, impatient, shrewd, silly, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated. From a man’s mouth, the epithet “female” seems like an insult; but he, not ashamed of his animality, is proud to listen to: “He ’s a male! On a trip to America in 1947, she had met the novelist Nelson Algren, the most vital of her male others, and it was he who advised her to expand the essay on girls into a book. Her insights have breached the solitude of numerous readers all over the world who thought that the fears, transgressions, fantasies, and desires that fed their ambivalence about being feminine had been aberrant or unique. But by then Simone de Beauvoir had seen what a lady of virtually any high quality – highborn or low, pure or impure, contented with her lot or alienated – might count on from a man’s world. The needs to love and be beloved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence.

The black, the Jew, and the woman, she concluded, had been objectified as the other in ways that had been both overtly despotic and insidious, but with the same end result: their particularity as human beings was diminished to a lazy, abstract cliché (“the eternal feminine”; “the black soul”; “the Jewish character”) that served as a rationale for their subjugation. Many readers have additionally been alienated by Beauvoir’s visceral horror of fertility – the “curse” of reproduction – and her want, as they see it, to homogenize the human race. He categorized their union as an “essential” love that only loss of life might sunder, though in time, he mentioned, they would naturally both have “contingent” loves – freely enjoyed and fraternally confessed in a spirit of “authenticity.” (She typically recruited, and shared, his women, some of whom had been her college students, and her first novel, She Came to remain, in 1943, was based mostly on one among their ménages à trois.) “At each stage,” Beauvoir mirrored, years later, of the ache she had suffered and inflicted, “we failed to face the load of actuality, priding ourselves on what we known as our ‘radical freedom.’” But in addition they failed to fault themselves for the contingent casualties – the inessential others – who had been sacrificed to their experiment.