Simone de Beauvoir

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Christina Howells 5 episodes
  Professor of French and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford
• Margaret Atack No other episodes
  Professor of French at the University of Leeds
• Ursula Tidd No other episodes
  Professor of Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of Manchester

Reading list

• Simone de Beauvoir
  Lisa Appiganesi (London, 2005)
• The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism
  Steven Crowell (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: New Interdisciplinary Essays
  Ruth Evans (ed.) (Manchester University Press, 1998) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader
  Elizabeth Fallaize (Routledge, 1998) Google Books →
• The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir
  Elizabeth Fallaize (Routledge, 1990) Google Books →
• The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir
  Emily R. Grosholz (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity
  Sonia Kruks (Oxford University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
  Toril Moi (Blackwell, 1994) Google Books →
• What is a Woman, and Other Essays
  Toril Moi (Oxford University Press, 2000) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir
  Ursula Tidd (Routledge Critical Thinker series, Routledge, 2004) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir
  Ursula Tidd (Reaktion Books 'critical lives' series, 2009) Google Books →
• Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony
  Ursula Tidd (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Simone Weil
  
  15 Nov, 2012 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Sartre
  
  7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures
• Christine de Pizan
  
  8 Jun, 2017 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Colette
  
  27 Jan, 2022 840 French and related literatures
• Camus
  
  3 Jan, 2008 840 French and related literatures
• Olympe de Gouges
  
  21 Apr, 2022 940 History of Europe
• Feminism
  
  7 Jan, 1999 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Germaine de Stael
  
  16 Nov, 2017 840 French and related literatures
• Mary Wollstonecraft
  
  31 Dec, 2009 320 Political science
• Kierkegaard
  
  20 Mar, 2008 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Existentialism
  
  28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy
• Montaigne
  
  25 Apr, 2013 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Mary Astell
  
  5 Nov, 2020 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• George Sand
  
  6 Feb, 2020 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Iris Murdoch
  
  21 Oct, 2021 100 Philosophy
• Bergson and Time
  
  9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics
• Madame Bovary
  
  12 Jul, 2007 840 French and related literatures
• Phenomenology
  
  22 Jan, 2015 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Harriet Martineau
  
  8 Dec, 2016 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts

---

Programme ID: b06j5ncn

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06j5ncn

Auto-category: 305.42 (Women’s studies)