Becoming Beauvoir

By Kate Kirkpatrick,

Book cover of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life

Book description

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one", Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex.…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Becoming Beauvoir as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve read a lot of biographies of Simone de Beauvoir.

But this is the one that best brought out her importance as a philosopher, the many ways in which her thought differed from Sartre’s and the ways in which this has been obscured by a posterity that just wants to see her as his sidekick.

One thing that this book did for me that others on Beauvoir didn’t was to reconcile me with the unpleasant aspects of her life and relationships – she was human, she was flawed, but so were her male peers! 

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," wrote Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 in her bestseller The Second Sex

To sum up this famous quotation, it's not because you are a woman that you should enjoy cooking or doing the dishes.

We always link Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre but Simone decided who she wanted to be before meeting Jean-Paul. This is what the British author Kate Kirkpatrick tells us in this new biography.

Believe me, there are never enough biographies about Simone de Beauvoir, the iconic French feminist. 

You think Simone de Beauvoir is old-fashioned? "Never…

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