Below is a rare television video of de Beauvoir being interviewed by journalist, Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber.

de Beauvoir died of pneumonia in 1986 at the age of 78. (Her full name was Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir.) You can visit her tombstone in Montparnasse Cemetery, next to her companion and intellectual equal, Jean-Paul Sartre.

HER LEGACY

de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is considered a foundational work in the history of feminism. The work has had a profound influence, opening the way for second-wave feminism in the USA, Canada, Australia, and around the world. Future feminist authors all acknowledged their profound debt to de Beauvoir, visiting her in France and consulting with her at crucial moments. Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, said that she looked to de Beauvoir for philosophical and intellectual authority. (WIKI)

FROM MY BOOK (a short excerpt)

“Growing up in Canada, I took it for granted that Europe would be as enlightened as my home country with regard to gender parity and feminist activism. I was wrong. From the outside, France appeared to be an avant-garde society, but upon closer inspection I found it to be terribly traditional and conservative. The book that I had read when I was sixteen – Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking opus in modern feminist theory, The Second Sex, written in 1949 – had done nothing to modify the archaic vision of society there. Madame de Beauvoir was decades ahead of her time.”

IT BEGGARS BELIEF that in this 1975 video, de Beauvoir talks about the importance of a woman’s right to abortion (and mentions the name of Simone Veil, Minister of Health, who pushed through the abortion bill in France, also in 1975) while – leap forward 47 years – the US Supreme Court overturned Roe and ended the constitutional right to abortion. The word “regression” barely describes this bombshell.

So pour yourself a glass of wine (or coffee if it’s morning) and sit back and listen to this edifying conversation.