Early-life experience with men’s world shaped Beauvoir’s feminist analysis

Evidence

Mme de Beauvoir, intent on keeping up a facade of gentility, however shabby, sent her daughters to an elite convent school where Simone, for a while, ardently desired to become a nun, one of the few respectable vocations open to an ambitious girl. When she lost her faith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams that proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting classmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin and childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a taste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew. (Not many bookish virgins with a particle in their surname got drunk with the hookers and drug addicts at Le Styx.) Her mother hoped vainly that the worthless Jacques would propose. Her father, a ladies’ man, knew better: he told his temperamental, ill-dressed, pimply genius of a daughter that she would never marry. But by then Simone de Beauvoir had seen what a woman of almost any quality—highborn or low, pure or impure, contented with her lot or alienated—could expect from a man’s world. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 10

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the convention that later in the book Beauvoir argues women’s religious vocation and romantic love are both sublimated transcendent dreams. — connects to: Beauvoir grounded existential freedom within gendered historical situations — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 684; Personal experience is the ground of liberatory feminist theorizing — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 151; Feminism analyzes how women were inferiorized and connects sexism to other dominations — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 678
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Beauvoir grounded existential freedom within gendered historical situations — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 684; Personal experience is the ground of liberatory feminist theorizing — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 151; Feminism analyzes how women were inferiorized and connects sexism to other dominations — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 678