01/11/2025
She finished second in the most important philosophy exam in France—and the man who beat her asked her to spend the rest of her life with him.In 1929, Simone de Beauvoir took the agrégation—France's notoriously difficult exam for teaching philosophy. She was 21 years old, the youngest person ever to attempt it. She scored second in the entire country.The man who scored first was Jean-Paul Sartre. He was 24, and had already failed the exam once.When they met to discuss philosophy, Sartre told her she had the mind of a genius. She told him his thinking was incomplete without her challenges. Within weeks, he proposed—not marriage, but something more radical: a partnership of absolute intellectual and personal freedom.They agreed to what they called "essential love" with room for "contingent loves"—a completely open relationship where neither would own the other, neither would limit the other, and honesty about affairs was mandatory. For 1929, this wasn't just unconventional. It was scandalous.But Simone de Beauvoir didn't live for convention.While Sartre became famous as the face of existentialism, Beauvoir was doing the deeper work. She taught philosophy, wrote novels, traveled, and began asking questions no one else was asking: Why are women always defined in relation to men? Why is "man" the default human, while "woman" is the Other?In 1949, she published The Second S*x—a massive, two-volume philosophical investigation of women's oppression. It took her two years to write, and when it was released, it detonated.The book opened with a single devastating line: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."She argued that femininity isn't biological destiny—it's a social construction. Everything women are told they "naturally" are—passive, nurturing, emotional, domestic—is actually taught, enforced, and performed. Gender is something society makes you, not something you inherently are.The Catholic Church put it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Critics called it "pornographic" and "an insult to motherhood." Even some feminists rejected it as too radical.But millions of women read it and thought: She's right. This is exactly what I've felt but couldn't name.The Second S*x became the philosophical foundation of modern feminism. Betty Friedan credited it as her inspiration for The Feminine Mystique. Gloria Steinem called it life-changing. Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s built directly on Beauvoir's ideas.But Beauvoir didn't just theorize about freedom—she lived it, messily and honestly.She and Sartre never married, never lived together, but remained partners for 51 years. They had affairs—men and women both—and wrote about them. Sometimes they even shared lovers, which created ethical disasters she would later regret. Her relationship with a 17-year-old student in the 1940s was a genuine abuse of power, one she never fully reckoned with.She was brilliant, but not perfect. Revolutionary, but flawed.Still, she kept writing. She published The Mandarins in 1954, a novel about post-war intellectuals that won the Prix Goncourt—France's highest literary honor. She wrote memoirs chronicling her unconventional life with unflinching honesty. She traveled to China, Cuba, the USSR, and wrote about politics, aging, death, and what it means to be free.In the 1970s, she signed the "Manifesto of the 343"—a public declaration by French women admitting to illegal abortions, demanding reproductive rights. She was 63 years old and could have rested on her laurels. Instead, she risked prosecution to fight for the next generation.When Sartre died in 1980, Beauvoir was devastated. She wrote Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, a brutally honest account of his final years. Critics said it was too revealing, too harsh. She didn't care. Honesty mattered more than propriety.Six years later, on April 14, 1986, Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris. She was 78.She was buried next to Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery. Thousands attended her funeral—activists, writers, philosophers, ordinary women who had read The Second S*x and felt less alone.Her legacy isn't just The Second S*x, though that alone would be enough. It's the example she set: that women can be intellectuals, that relationships don't have to follow scripts, that you can reject society's plans and write your own life.She proved you don't have to choose between love and independence, between intellect and passion, between being a woman and being fully human.Simone de Beauvoir finished second in that exam in 1929. But in the decades that followed, she came first in something more important: showing women they didn't have to become what the world told them to be.They could become themselves.
