Beginning with Beauvoir: my philosophical coming-of-age

by Prune Fargetton | January 27, 2025

 

I became a feminist at fourteen, swept along by an unlikely combination: a nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right about our single-sex sex ed classes taught by stern Catholic teachers; a delicate objection my mother made to my father about Femen (“Yes, public disorder and bare breasts might not be constructive, but the conditions in their country…”); and Instagram infographics dutifully reposted by my former best friend (who would go on to validate the pessimistic theory linking social media activism to neoliberalism—she has long since abandoned the cause to pursue American venture capital, #girlboss indeed). Like any young French feminist-to-be hoping to hold her own at family dinners, I slipped The Second Sex onto my Christmas list.

 

I had never voluntarily read an essay before. My attempt was scattered and incomplete, quickly deterred by an impossibly dense opening section on biology. But what I did read—the introduction—hit me like lightning. How she uses the distinction between the One and the Other to define “woman” as history’s absolute alterity, comparing it to other forms of discrimination to isolate sexism as something entirely “other”, unprecedented in its scope and depth. I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, the carpet’s texture still vivid against my thighs, as the text’s truth washed over me with absolute clarity.

 

I suspect her name has crossed the Channel since the 1940s, but as a French person, I wonder how familiar Britons are with Simone de Beauvoir’s works. If you’ve heard of her, it’s probably through those words: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Yet when I first read the introduction of The Second Sex, I was surprised to find this famous feminist rallying cry nowhere in sight. It actually appears in Volume Two, which my mother hadn’t ordered for Christmas, unconvinced I’d make it through the first. Though I knew little of the reasoning behind this observation, the phrase was de Beauvoir’s, and having been so moved by her writing, I claimed it as my own. Those eight words not only shaped my understanding of feminism for years to come, but also guided my personal plans for the future—decisions I’m only now beginning to unravel, five years later.

 

The author of The Second Sex was both an existentialist philosopher and a novelist. She won the Prix Goncourt (think Booker Prize) for her novel The Mandarins, which follows a group of friends in post-war Paris as they navigate massive social upheaval and grapple with what it means to be an engaged intellectual. But my favourite is She Came to Stay, a tale of friendship and hatred between two women, of theatre and betrayal, suffused with cigarette smoke and the sticky leather seats of 1950s dance halls. De Beauvoir was also the companion of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Being and Nothingness. Mainstream media still insists on introducing her as “Sartre’s wife,” despite her remarkable literary and philosophical achievements—and the fact that they never actually married. I take a mischievous pleasure in leaving this detail last: it has always irritated me, and still does, for reasons I can admit (it’s unfair) and reasons I cannot (traces of lingering jealousy towards the profound intimacy he shared with her).

 

My infatuation was such that by 14, I found myself seriously entertaining the possibility that I might have been Simone de Beauvoir in a past life. I was ready to drop all of it, my atheistic rationalism and scepticism of New Age spiritualities, and embrace reincarnation (reincarnation, mind you, exclusively for her and me, us two against all mortals).

 

This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds; I wasn’t claiming I could achieve what she had done. I simply understood the introduction to The Second Sex as I had never understood anything before—everything felt clear, resonant, and deeply grounding. Though I considered myself a disciple at this point, I still hadn’t progressed beyond the introduction to Volume One. Perhaps I was afraid I might stop understanding her, or worse, I might realise that I wasn’t, alas, de Beauvoir after all. I kept this to myself, happily caught in this passionate mirage. Hardly a philosophical stance.

 

Alongside this illusory bond I was developing with my imagined version of the philosopher, her hair neatly arranged in a bun, I began observing the state of affairs between men and women in the world around me. I noticed the looks, the fears, the injustices, and decided to study this problem at university—this thing de Beauvoir had written about that hadn’t gone away.

 

One becomes, becomes, becomes, woman: I kept turning over this phrase I had never actually read. The key lay in that verb—becoming. Young as I was, I knew enough about social science to guess it meant shaped by, raised for, socialised into. Surely if we could understand how woman was constructed as woman, we could solve the problem? So I chose sociology, which conveniently pleased my parents, as it was taught at France’s most prestigious political science university, and they shared the hope that I might change my mind once there.

 

And indeed, once in the bright lecture halls of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris (barely a hundred metres from Place Sartre-Beauvoir), disappointment set in. Quantitative sociology bored me senseless; even qualitative sociology, with its real fieldwork and real people, was buried under barbarous terms like “semi-structured biographical interview protocol,” “directive or semi-directive” discussion, all in service of “micro-analytical discursive deconstruction.”

 

I hadn’t lost sight of why I was there. I waited eagerly for our single semester course on gender, which turned out to occupy a mere two paragraphs in the syllabus. I remember being fascinated by Françoise Héritier’s theory—that women’s original “exorbitant privilege of childbearing” creates an asymmetry that men try to correct by establishing their social dominance—only to feel deflated upon learning she was an anthropologist. Everything that interested me seemed to lead endlessly to other disciplines; gender sociology felt like one giant bibliography.

 

Now a philosophy student, I find myself rereading my first-year sociology notes with amusement, spotting moments of naivety: “sex/gender is now a militant concept, philosophically constructed.” By reducing de Beauvoir to a theorist of social constructivism, I had, like many others, missed the essence of her thought. I had chosen my field of study because I unquestioningly accepted a sociological reading of de Beauvoir’s work that seems to dominate contemporary feminist discourse—a reading that, in my view, leads nowhere.

 

Since then, I’ve read nearly everything she wrote, including, of course, The Second Sex. De Beauvoir remains my favourite writer; I still understand her, still draw from her texts, still admire her—though perhaps more critically now, more maturely. And at last, I see her for what she truly is: a philosopher. This was what had amazed me from the start: the concepts, the abstraction, all grounded in reality. It took me years to realise this—years that could have been saved if I had simply checked her Wikipedia page to see “philosopher” (unless it said “Sartre’s wife” first), or read just a few lines past “One is not born a woman,” to find “One can only be constituted as an Other through the mediation of others,” a line that leaves no doubt about the philosophical nature of her work.

 

To think about any form of domination without questioning the distinctions between One-Other, Subject-Object, without examining the nature of freedom itself, is to think superficially. The proof is that dynamics of domination emerge even between individuals of the same age, skin colour, gender, and salary. That said, it’s equally true that overly abstract universal thinking tends to miss its mark, as Sartre’s writing illustrates. He examined the metaphysical force of the gaze long before the theorisation of the “male gaze” in art criticism and film studies, later adopted by feminists. For Sartre, the Other’s gaze objectifies me while revealing my freedom.

 

I love Sartre’s explanation of shame through the example of the gaze: imagine spying on someone through a keyhole, and suddenly hearing footsteps on the stairs. It doesn’t matter whether someone is really coming or not, you start to blush, feel hot and ashamed. Sartre uses this experience as a metaphor for intersubjectivity, as a double-necessity of human experience. However, my tutorial on this passage left me frustrated. My tutor urged me to remember that it’s “just a metaphor,” as if I should disregard the keyhole example, which is really just a nice little introduction, after which one moves onto the serious stuff, the real ideas, the thought that is free, floating.

 

But where Sartre universalises these experiences of gaze and objectification, de Beauvoir insists on their gendered dimension. For her, the male gaze doesn’t simply deny women’s freedom: it shapes their bodies and their existence asymmetrically. While men are primarily subjects and, through the gaze of the Other, can discover themselves as objects, women are primarily objects. This objectification isn’t merely a passing or contingent experience: it permeates their daily lives, infiltrates their relationship with their own bodies, and conditions their choices, to the point of amending that inalienable and sacred freedom so dear to existentialist thought. In this, de Beauvoir doesn’t simply apply Sartre’s thinking: she transforms it.

 

What separates de Beauvoir from Sartre is that she gives more importance to the constrained situation. Crucially, for de Beauvoir, willing one’s own freedom also entails willing the freedom of others. Hence, by reducing women to objects, men deny themselves the possibility of “authentic” freedom, instead persisting with alienated social relationships. Women’s oppression isn’t just a social injustice. It constitutes a negation of human freedom itself and should be seen as such.

 

De Beauvoir’s humanist philosophy remains singularly relevant to contemporary debates about equality and justice, and feminism would benefit from highlighting the intersubjective roots of patriarchy and its associated ethics. It took me five years to recognise my mistakes, to finally grasp what had put me in that trance-like state at 14, to understand what rang so true and promising in that text. But nothing was wasted. Today, at last, I can say more than “the future is female,” and even—who would have thought—a bit more than “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”∎

 

Words by Prune Fargetton. Image courtesy of Sarah Stierch.