Who is today’s Google Doodle? 10 facts about Simone de Beauvoir

You might not recognise the slightly stern face staring back at you from Google’s search page today, but you probably should. Here are ten facts about Simone de Beauvoir — possibly one of the most important feminist writers of all time.

1. Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on 9th January 1908 in Paris, making today her 106th birthday — hence, Google Doodle.

2. She grew up Catholic and originally planned to become a nun — before suffering a ‘crisis of faith’ at the age of 14 and as a result giving up religion in favour of life-long atheism.

3. She is noted as a starting point of ‘second wave feminism’ — that which brought to light inequalities in sexuality, work, family and safety, amongst other issues, and fought for changes in marital rape law and the development of women’s shelters.

4. de Beauvoir is most famous for her seminal 1949 work The Second Sex, one of the first philosophy books written from a feminist perspective. The Second Sex focuses on the theory that women throughout history have been placed as ‘other’ to men — in relation to them, rather than as ‘selves’ in their own right.

5. The Second Sex was subsequently placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books, due to its “explicit passages on the functions of the female body and descriptions of lesbian sex.”

6. The book has also caused controversy in feminist and philosophical circles, with its notion that in order to avoid being seen as the ‘Other’ women should reject female stereotypes and embrace male behaviours. French critic Antoinette Fouque said: “If being a feminist is to want to be a ‘man like any other’, as Beauvoir did, then I am definitely not a feminist.”

7. de Beauvoir had a lifelong friendship (and sexual relationship) with fellow thinker Jean Paul Sartre — they are buried in the same grave in Paris’s Montparnasse.

8. It is alleged that de Beauvoir and Sartre developed a ‘system’ in which she would seduce her female students before passing them over to him for sexual purposes. As a result of their sexual practices, de Beauvoir’s license to teach in France was revoked in 1943.

9. In 2008 French leftwing newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur celebrated her 100th birthday by publishing on its cover a photograph of her naked bottom, taken in 1952, alongside the caption “Simone de Beauvoir, la scandaleuse.”

10. 2010 was the first time The Second Sex was published entirely in English for the first time.

Image courtesy of Abode of Chaos and Fugue on Flickr.

Originally published at https://www.thenationalstudent.com.