SOURCE: "Simone de Beauvoir: From the Second World War to The Second Sex," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 39-51.

In the following essay, Houlding discusses the influence of the Nazi Occupation of France on Beauvoir's intellectual development and philosophical insights in The Second Sex. According to Houlding, "Through her exposure to the nature of women's everyday lives during the Occupation, Beauvoir first began to perceive the active construction of femininity."

In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir referred to the Second World War as a pivotal moment in her life, a time when her ways of interacting with the world underwent permanent transformations. Until 1939, Beauvoir had refused to believe that the trauma of war could come to interrupt the life she had so carefully constructed: "Je refusai furieusement d'y croire; une catastrophe aussi imbécile ne pouvait pas fondre sur moi." It was through the...