Research Paper On Simone De Beauvoir

Ever since the emergence of civilizations, men and women have had completely different and unequal roles in society. For centuries, women have been oppressed by the theories of men- theories that declare women to be physically and intellectually inferior to them. As a result, the social expectations for both genders have stayed static for hundreds of years: men are expected to dominate the world, while women are expected to take care of the household. However, in the 18th century, an age of intellectual enlightenment where the development of new ideas was encouraged, women began to gain more access to education. As women gained more education, there were many women thinkers who began to question and argue against the role that society had given them. In contrast, male thinkers found new ways to reaffirm traditional ideas about the inferiority of women. Thus, in the opposing viewpoint, Women in the Age of the Enlightenment: Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, two philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, provide their own interpretations of this debate, offering completely different perspectives. In his work Émile, Rousseau reflects the views of many male thinkers of his time, as he argues that there are “natural biological differences” (592) between men and women that make women mothers and not intellectuals. In contrast, Mary Wollstonecraft, also known as “the founder of modern European feminism” (591), believes in the equality between men and women, but

She states that `to pose woman is to pose then absolute Other' (821). `The other' is referred to women who are classified as being different to men even though both share a human body. Women are also not seen as `a subject, a fellow human being.'(821). This is caused by men who believe a myth of females through experiences of which Beauvoir states as feelings and thoughts, rather then the reality of women themselves. Men see women as what they think they see because of the way they feel about women. Men have opinions in ways of physical or knowledge of women. These opinions created are myths which men believe to be the true women. These men usually belong in the western patriarchal society. Men hold myths against women and "placed women beneath men and held them to be the property of men" (Guerrero). Being "placed beneath men" can show that women are treated unequally in a patriarchal society where they are not respected. This is the woman in a patriarch world.

De France, Marie. The Lais of Marie De France. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith

He is connects the idea of atheism to existentialism. Believing god does not exist, then there is no higher power to determine a purpose for people. Simone de Beauvoir is a French existentialist. Her most famous work, the Second sex, talks about the historical treatment of women. The Second Sex is considered a major work promoting feminism. Albert Camus is a French philosophy known for his work, the Rebel. The Rebel mainly discusses rebellion and revolutions in society. The work Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus have done has influence societies around the world.

Louise Bourgeois is an artist provided the keys that opened the door for female artists in the twentieth century. She was born in Paris 1911, and immigrated to New York, New York in 1938 after she married Robert Goldwater a young American art historian (Getlein, 2012), where she lived until her death on May 31, 2010 (Layayo, 2015). The blood of being an artist has flown through her since her conception. She was born into a family that repaired seventeenth and eighteenth century tapestries (Layayo, 2015). Being an artist was her destiny, and her life provided her the tools she needed to achieve her purpose. While growing up in France she attended various schools of art schools that include Ecole du Louvre, Academie des Beaux-Arts, Academie Julian, and Atelver Fernand Leger (Louise Bourgeois, 2001). She continued her study and practice of art when she moved to Ney York in 1938 by becoming a part of the Art Student League (Louise Bourgeois, 2001). Students would stop by her apartment on Sunday to get their art criticized by her, and this

A contemporary French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911 in Paris, France as the third daughter of Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. During the weekdays, Louise and family would live in their St, Germain apartment in order to sell tapestries; but they also owned a villa, in which their repaired the tapestries. As a child, Louise would often help in drawing, sewing and painting in the workshop, and with that she attended many academies, unfortunately her mother contracted the spanish flu, leading to gaps in Louise’s education.

Beavoir expresses that women are oppressed for being a women. The famous statement of beavoir “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This statement is such a profound statement because it simply states that becoming the “Second Sex” is

Pierre Auguste Renoir was born to a working class family in Limoges, Haute-Vienne on February 28, 1841. He worked in a porcelain factor as a young boy which helped to develop his paint skills as he was selected to paint designs on fine china. In his early years, he visited the Louvre, and studied the master artists of France. Renoir, like Monet, studied art under the hand of Charles Gleyre in Paris in 1862. Renoir was married to Aline Victorine Charigot in 1890, and had three children. Two years after marrying Aline, Renoir developed arthritis, causing him to adapt his painting methods to the point of strapping a brush to his paralyzed fingers. He never stopped painting however. In 1919. Renoir revisited the Louvre, and saw his own paintings

Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex suggests that to resolve the tension between bad faith and authenticity, people must regard women as subjects and not objects. They must also collectively fight against the idea of womanhood in order to remain authentic to themselves.

The idea of feminism and women’s rights have been under attack for years. Women themselves have been under attack for their entire lives. Women always have to be doing things correctly or men attack their very being. Men have expected women to be submissive to them from the beginning of time, as life has always been a patriarchy. Feminism has always been buried under the dirt but in the last 50-100 years, it has been exhumed from the grave. In this time women have been fighting for rights, especially through literature. As Amanda J. Davis explains in her essay about feminism, “Authors deconstruct such concepts as home, safety, and shelter in their respective texts and reposition them in the context of social injustices born out of the volatile intersection of race, class, and gender oppression.” (Davis) There have been many women authors who have helped define feminism, one of the most famous being Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir taught herself philosophy and then began her own teaching career and authorship. Her novel Second Sex quickly became a beacon of the feminist movement in the 1950’s. She writes about the causes and effects of the oppression shown to women all around the world, especially in the United States. Simone de Beauvoir shows in The Second Sex that there are many sources of injustice toward women including biological, social and economic, and legal.

Simone De Beauvoir has five major points when she talks about feminism, immanence versus transcendence, nature versus nurture, production versus reproduction, and the eternal feminine. Immanence, according to Beauvoir, is a place where women are inferior and they are passive, static, and are immersed in themselves. Transcendence is more of a male theory, where the male is active, creative, productive, and powerful. She says that

In the chapter of her book The Second Sex entitled “the Woman in Love,” Simone de Beauvoir characterizes the romantic ideal of the relationship with a man as a woman’s purpose as a form of self-deception (translated here as “bad faith”). The self-deception de Beauvoir describes is based in the thesis of The Second Sex. This is the idea that women have been deceived into believing that they are second-class humans. Western culture, according to de Beauvoir, teaches us that women are missing some elusive element of the self that endows men with freedom- a concept essential to the existentialist definition of the conscious being. Therefore, a woman can never find fulfillment as a thinking person as

De Beauvoir argues that women are marginalized as the ‘other’ and that a girl is forced to follow societal standards of femininity. She has to present herself in a specific way because that is what is expected of her. She says that women let society define their role and passively follow it, and therefore we are not truly free. However, De Beauvoir, also argues that women are free to break from this role and define who they are.

De Beauvoir’s project could be summarizes how to define woman in every respect, she first points out the inadequacy of defining woman either by her biological operations or by some broad understanding of the “eternal feminine”.

“Society, being confined by man, decrees that woman is inferior” (Simone De Beauvoir). De Beauvoir is a very famous feminist theorist who was active during the twentieth century. She wrote many works on politics and social issues and is greatly known for her book “The Second Sex” which was used as a foundation for contemporary feminism. Simone believed that women were oppressed and therefore, made inferior, due to their socially assigned gender roles.