Imagine What It Was Like To Sit Down At Simone De Beauvoir's Desk

[rug]

Simone de Beauvoir in her studio, rue Schoelcher 12 bis, Montparnasse, Paris, March 1986.

By SUSAN STAMBERG
Originally published on May 16, 2017 6:21 am

Intellectual, philosophical, literary, rebellious, Simone de Beauvoir spoke a mile a minute, and wrote quickly, too — novels, essays, a play, four memoirs. She was an atheist, bisexual, pioneer feminist, and her longtime lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote the book on Existentialism. When she died in 1986 she was world-famous — and National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., is saluting her again.

De Beauvoir wanted to be a nun when she was little, but by her teenage years, she had decided to become a writer; it was what she wanted most in the world, she told a friend at the time.

Sarah Osborne Bender runs the library and research center at the museum. De Beauvoir wrote like a scribe, she says. Bender points out two small piles of graph paper — the kind French students use to discipline their handwriting. They are an early draft of de Beauvoir's best-known book, The Second Sex, a 1949 feminist treatise on what it means to be a woman.

"When she finally decided that she was going to write this, the ideas just poured from her," Bender says.

http://www.kunc.org/post/imagine-what-it-was-sit-down-simone-de-beauvoirs-desk

4:37 audio at link.