DECADES prior to the age of bra-burners and chairpersons, a French intellectual had knocked the received concept of womanhood off its pedestal with the publication of a single book of essays.

The Second Sex that came out in 1949 was ignored by the feminist tidal wave of the 1970s in the United States because it sat ill at ease with the image of the victimised woman that the militants were touting. Audacity and action, its author had maintained in her revolutionary thesis, are deemed exclusively masculine traits only because history and tradition wish it so. That position was discursively stated in the book, leaving the door wide open to women who wished to change the world, but only as determined individuals.

Clamorous victim worship was not the stuff Simone de Beauvoir was made off, nor did she advocate for that matter the belief that women should transform themselves into men in order to be liberated. Beauvoir was many steps ahead of the pre-war suffragettes in the sense that she advocated a second look at the concept of womanhood rather than fighting for the same rights as men.

“You are not born a woman, you become one” was a much reviled, and much misunderstood, message in The Second Sex as it raised questions over the concept of tenderness, affection, even maternity so inherent to femaleness. Beauvoir's ideas were never espoused for this reason not only by men but women also.

The women in Ayn Rand's three novels come close to the Beauvoir ideal but two of these books, We the Living (1936) and Fountainhead (1943) were written before The Second Sex, though Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957. However this model was never pursued and feminist literature, especially in the United States, skidded off, especially from the 1970s onwards, to a provocative, bestselling, moneymaking but intellectually barren nose-dive, as in Fear of Flying and an avalanche of other books that missed Beauvoir's point by the widest possible margin.

In her personal life Simone de Beauvoir would keep true to the promise she had made in her Diary of Youth (Cahiers de jeunesse) “I will set into motion a force, but I'll myself never take refuge in it.” Throughout her life she would be bitterly criticised by her detractors for what was perceived as her anfractuous writing and would even be ridiculed for her helmet-like hairdo and her hoarse voice, but she would live a passionate life to the end.
Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris on Jan 9, 1908. This year her home country paid her an apt tribute on what would have been her 100th birthday were she still alive, through lectures, symposia, readings, discussions, radio and TV programmes, articles in newspapers and magazines and a number of books on her life and works.

A great deal of this was devoted to how she changed the way society, and, most of all, women themselves, looked at womanhood. In the words of Juliette Rennes who teaches political science at the University of Lyon, “Simone de Beauvoir's founding gesture consists of explaining female nature by the situation of women and not explaining the situation of women by their nature.”

Inevitably as it were, and true to today's media-oriented context, a great deal of hype was also devoted to Beauvoir's personal life and her emotional attachments, especially to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she met at Sorbonne in 1929, and to the American writer Nelson Algren. A collection of her 300 letters to Algren was also published in book form. Algren who painted the lower depths of the American society died a broken and unacknowledged man in 1981 and no one seems to remember his work today. But two of his novels were turned into memorable Hollywood movies 'The Man with the Golden Arm' with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, and 'Walk on the Wild Side' with Laurence Harvey and a very debutante Jane Fonda.

Some of the newspapers and magazines vied with each other in the outsmarting game by bringing forth unknown or little-known details of Beauvoir's life. One of these merits mention here.

One spring afternoon way back in 1952, in the small apartment that Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir shared in a run-down Chicago neighbourhood, as she was busy arranging her hair in front of the tiny mirror over the washbasin, her feet daintily cambered over white, high-heeled sandals, her only accoutrement at that moment, a gust of wind swung the door open. Art Shay, Algren's photographer friend who happened to be present, instinctively clicked at the shutter of his Leica. “She saw the flash in the mirror but didn't turn around,” Shay who is 85 today still remembers; “Naughty boy!” is all she said.

Though Shay has lost the negative since, Parisian weekly le Nouvel Observateur used the black-and-white print to adorn its cover for the issue of Jan 3-9, 2008. Understandably, the spate of feminist hate-mail to the magazine hasn't stopped yet.

An intensely academic person, Simone de Beauvoir who had degrees in French literature, Greek, Latin, mathematics and philosophy, went on writing essays, novels, plays and autobiographical works practically until her dying day and, it is safe to assume, there would have been neither a Betty Friedan, nor a Kate Millet, Germaine Greer nor a Gloria Steinem without her.

With Sartre she was an ubiquitous presence in the Latin Quarter streets during the 1968 students' unrest, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s she took active part in the French intellectuals' movement against the Algerian and Vietnam wars.

The death of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1980 proved to be the last turning point in the life of this great intellectual icon of the 20th century. She would recount in moving details the final days of their half-century-long relationship in The Ceremony of Adieu and Dialogues with Jean-Paul Sartre both books published in 1981. Her own time would come five years later, at age 78, on April 14, 1986. Though her love affair with Nelson Algren had been over for many decades, his gold ring was still on her finger, according to her wish, as she was buried beside Sartre in the Montparnasse cemetery in the heart of Paris.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.