MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

 

    Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a brilliant thinker, writer, Existentialist, partner of Jean Paul Sartre, and more.  Generally I am confining my blogs to people from the U.S. but today's New York Times Book Review included a review of a book about the Existentialists.  Biography.com opens with
"French writer Simone de Beauvoir laid the foundation for the modern feminist movement. Also an existentialist philosopher, she had a romance with Jean-Paul Sartre."  While only a fairly primitive website such as biography.com would be able to juxtapose two such disparate thoughts, the fact is Simone de Beauvoir was as respected and nearly treated with equal regard as the men with whom she collaborated.

   From Britannica -   "Simone de Beauvoir, in full Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir (born Jan. 9, 1908, Paris, France—died April 14, 1986, Paris), French writer and feminist, a member of the intellectual fellowship of philosopher-writers who have given a literary transcription to the themes ofExistentialism. She is known primarily for her treatise Le Deuxième Sexe,2 vol. (1949; The Second Sex), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the “eternal feminine.” This seminal work became a classic of feminist literature."

   "Schooled in private institutions, de Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne, where, in 1929, she passed her agrégation in philosophy and met Jean-Paul Sartre, beginning a lifelong association with him. She taught at a number of schools (1931–43) before turning to writing for her livelihood. In 1945 she and Sartre founded and began editing Le Temps modernes, a monthly review."

   "Her novels expound the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer’s commitment to the times. L’Invitée (1943; She Came To Stay) describes the subtle destruction of a couple’s relationship brought about by a young girl’s prolonged stay in their home; it also treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to “the other,” each individual conscience being fundamentally a predator to another. Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins), for which she won the Prix Goncourt. It is a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their “mandarin” (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including Pour une Morale de l’ambiguité (1947; The Ethics of Ambiguity); travel books on China (La Longue Marche: essai sur la Chine [1957]; The Long March) and the United States (L’Amérique au jour de jour [1948]; America Day by Day); and a number of essays, some of them book-length, the best known of which is The Second Sex. In 2009 a new English-language translation of The Second Sex was published, making the entire original text available to English-speaking readers for the first time; the earlier translation (1953) had been severely edited."

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

   "Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography. These include Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), La Force de l’âge (1960; The Prime of Life), La Force des choses (1963; Force of Circumstance), and Tout compte fait (1972; All Said and Done). This body of work, beyond its personal interest, constitutes a clear and telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s.

   "In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in Une Mort très douce (1964; A Very Easy Death), on her mother’s death in a hospital, and in La Vieillesse (1970; Old Age), a bitter reflection on society’s indifference to the elderly. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie des adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre’s last years. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, by Deirdre Bair, appeared in 1990. Carole Seymour-Jones’s A Dangerous Liaison(2008), a double biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre, explores the unorthodox long-term relationship between the two.

   "Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality."

 

Resources:
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.   http://www.iep.utm.edu/beauvoir/ 
Biography.com - http://www.biography.com/people/simone-de-beauvoir-9269063
Existential Primer - http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/beauvoir.shtml  
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/ 
Encyclopedia Britannica - http://www.britannica.com/biography/Simone-de-Beauvoir  
Goodreads - quotes - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5548.Simone_de_Beauvoir 
NY Times book review - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/books/review-in-sarah-bakewells-at-the-existentialist-cafe-nothingness-has-a-certain-something.html?_r=0 
Wikipedia entry on Simone De Beauvoir  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir  


List of publications (non-exhaustive)[edit]  Wikipedia:

L'Invitée (1943) (English – She Came to Stay) [novel]
Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) [nonfiction]
Le Sang des autres (1945) (English – The Blood of Others) [novel]
Who Shall Die? (1945)
Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946) (English – All Men Are Mortal) [novel]
Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947) (English – The Ethics of Ambiguity) [nonfiction]
Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) (English – The Second Sex) [nonfiction]
L'Amérique au jour le jour (1954) (English – America Day by Day)
Les Mandarins (1954) (English - The Mandarins) [novel]
Must We Burn Sade? (1955)
The Long March (1957) [nonfiction]
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
The Prime of Life (1960)
Force of Circumstance (1963)
A Very Easy Death (1964)
Les Belles Images (1966) [novel]
The Woman Destroyed (1967) [novel]
The Coming of Age (1970) [nonfiction]
All Said and Done (1972)
When Things of the Spirit Come First (1979) [novel]
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981)
Letters to Sartre (1990)
Journal de guerre, Sept 1939–Jan 1941 (1990); English - Wartime Diary (2009)
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (1998)
Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926–27 (2006)
Cahiers de jeunesse, 1926–1930 (2008)

FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH - SHIRLEY GRAHAM DUBOIS

   In 1971 I flew to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to live for a year at least, taking the chance of finding a job teaching after just earning my elementary teaching credential at UC Berkeley.  I can't forget the apprehension of my mother when I took that 36 hour journey.  Why did I want to live in one of the 16 poorest countries in the world?  In one word: Revolution.
   My sister had met the wonderful Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and another Zanzibari in Cuba in 1964.  Babu insisted I could find a job if I went to Tanzania.  What I found were the most profound experiences, events, and people that I would ever again encounter in my life. I was 24 years old and not very assertive. But I had to go. I had to see the place where all the revolutionary independence movement of Africa were headquartered, where African Americans were welcomed to set up businesses and live freely, where so many wonderful people came to support, or sometimes hinder, President Julius Nyerere's programs of Ujamaa, Uhuru, and INDEPENDENCE.

   One day while I was visiting Babu and his beautiful wife Ashura, a woman came to the door. I believe I must have been going out as I was not able to meet her.  It turned out to be the marvelous Shirley Graham DuBois, second wife of W.E.B. DuBois. (AND THAT IS PRONOUNCED DUBOYS - Dr. DuBois said he was not French.)  
   There are not enough words to describe the intelligence, accomplishment, talent, creativity, wide-ranging interests, brilliance, and more that compose the body and soul of Shirley Graham DuBois.  While still a college student at Oberlin University, DuBois wrote a 3-act, 16-scene opera that was performed in front of 10,000 and then 15,000 people in Cleveland.  She was the first African American woman to compose an opera for an all Black cast.  "Tom-Toms was a history of African America set against the music she composed."
   Shirley Graham DuBois was a fighter for equal rights from the very beginning of her life. She worked for the YWCA and was fired after defending two men who had been falsely accused.  She promptly went to work for the NAACP and organized branches throughout the country.
   She wrote award-winning autobiographies and novels:  Dr. George Washington Carver, 1944; What Someone Wanted, 2007; His Day is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. DuBois, 1971; There Was Once A Slave: The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass, 1947; Julius K. Nyerere: Teacher of Africa, 1975; Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World, 1971; Zulu Heart: A Novel, 1974; Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile, 1972, and more, including Paul Robeson, Anne Royall, Phillis Wheatley, Jean Baptiste du Sable, and Pocahontas.

Gerald Horne, her biographer, describes her thusly:  "During her event-filled life, this diminutive, light brown-skinned woman with a broad gray streak in her hair was variously a composer, playwright, drummer, biographer, editor, novelist, and political activist. However, the zenith of her life may have been the time she spent in the 1960s -- after the death of her spouse, W.E.B. DuBois -- as a pivotal advisor and official in the government of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana."  A description of this book about her states: "Gerald Horne draws a revealing portrait of this controversial figure who championed the civil rights movement in America, the liberation struggles in Africa and the socialist struggles in Maoist China.  Through careful analysis and use of personal correspondence, interviews, and previously unexamined documents, Horne explores her work as a Harlem Renaissance playwright, biographer, composer, teacher, novelist, Left political activist, advisor, and inspiration, who was a powerful historical actor."
 

Books that include Shirley Graham DuBois:
The East Is Black: Cold War China In the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier
Want to Start A Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle edited by Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharris, and Komozi Woodard
Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois by Gerald Horne.

Links:
DuBois, Shirley Graham [DuBoisopedia] - http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:du_bois_shirley_graham
Project Muse: Race Woman - https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780814744574 
Shirley Graham DuBois, composer, playwright, novelist, activist | African American Registry - http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/shirley-graham-dubois-composer-playwright-novelist-activist 
The Musical Life of Shirley Graham DuBois | Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University - https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/schlesinger-newsletter/musical-life-shirley-graham-du-bois 
DuBois, Shirley Graham, 1896 - 1977. Papers, 1865 - 1998 (inclusive), 1905-1975 (bulk): a Finding Aid - http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00211