BEAUVOIR AND THE ORIGINS OF EXISTENTIALISM

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was born in Paris, where she was raised and spent most of her life. Her mother was a devout Catholic, whereas her father, who embraced the Third Republic's secularism, thought religion appropriate only for women and children. Beauvoir says it was this clash in fundamental parental values that made her an intellectual, concerned with the critical assessment of ideas. Since mothers had control over the earlier education of their children, Beauvoir's pre-university education was at convent schools, where she was a brilliant student but came to resist the intellectual and the moral narrowness of a Catholic education. The family's financial situation (middle-class but financially strained) made a teaching career a natural choice for the bright elder daughter. Moreover, Beauvoir's father's secularism, along with her own desire to escape from religious education, led her to enroll as an undergraduate at the Sorbonne, a state institution (although much of her work was initially done at institutes within the Sorbonne designed for Catholic students).

Although a university education was at this time no longer unusual for a woman, Beauvoir was intent on a specialization in the almost entirely masculine domain of philosophy.