原文: a Thinker in a Man's World

She always kept a stiff upper lip, even in the face of death. When her life partner of more than 50 years lay in his "small box", she soberly concluded: "Even if I am buried next to you, there will be no transition between your ashes and my remains."

Death separated Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre instead of uniting them, and yet they were the couple of the century. When she died on April 14, 1986, almost six years to the day after Sartre's death, the protest movement of 1968 finally came to an end. The funeral procession in Paris was the last rally of the revolution. Waiters from the Brasserie La Coupole formed an honor guard along the street, their white napkins thrown over their left arms, to pay their last respects to a woman who had long been their loyal and prominent guest in Montparnasse, traditionally a Paris neighborhood of intellectuals and artists.

One hundred years after her birth on Jan. 9, 1908, French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir remains a pioneer for generations of women and an author who practiced emancipation in her life and whose books established the theoretical underpinnings of modern feminism. Beauvoir's cult classic, "The Second Sex," as well as her multi-volume memoirs, decisively shaped the debate over the relationship between men and women.

A number of new books and biographies are attempting to take a new look at Simone de Beauvoir, to discover something new and surprising in her works, and especially to recognize the clarity, integrity, sense of justice and boldness of her visions.

It is not just her books but also her life that have made Beauvoir the most important female intellectual of modern times. She was a thinker in her own right, and not just an appendage of Sartre.

Born into a middle-class family and educated at good schools, from the beginning Beauvoir refused to buy into the notion -- considered a matter of course in the bourgeois society of the day -- that beauty and intelligence are incompatible.

A girl was meant to marry and have children. If a family lacked the means to provide a daughter with a respectable dowry, and if a girl was not sufficiently attractive to seduce a man of means, she had to fend for herself.

In "The Second Sex," which was published in two volumes in 1949 and was considered so scandalous that it became an overnight success (22,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks), Beauvoir examined the question of what it means for half of humanity to be defined, debased, praised and generally dominated by the other, often less intelligent and usually more emotionally deficient half.

In her memoirs Beauvoir, who had to remove herself from her milieu to assume her place in history, wrote that she felt "betrayed." But the radical avant-gardist that she was -- worshiped and despised, a true loner, by no means merely a companion or a medium for the more celebrated Sartre -- opened the eyes of generations of women the world over.

译文: 波伏娃：男权世界里的思想者

她在困难面前总是显得坚定沉着，即使面对死亡。就算她一生的伴侣50多年一直呆在属于他的“小盒子”中，她也只是冷静地说：“哪怕我被葬于你的身旁，你的骨灰与我的之间也不会有所联系。”

    虽然死亡将波伏娃和萨特永久地分离而不再相守，但他们仍旧是一个世纪的伴侣。当她于1986年4月14日去世之后，也就是萨特去世后的6年，法国1968年学潮运动也终告一段落。在巴黎为她的送葬队伍要算学潮运动的最后的集会了。圆顶咖啡馆的服务生在街道两旁组成了仪仗队，他们将白色的手帕抛向左臂上方，向这个在他们蒙帕纳斯区（巴黎知识分子与艺术家频繁出没的地方）长期以来的尊贵客人致以最后的敬意。

    法国作家，思想家，西蒙.波伏娃在其诞生一百年后仍旧是数代女性的先驱者，终其一生要求女性的解放，所著之书也为当代女性主义奠定了理论基石。波伏娃的《第二性》和多卷回忆录都是被顶礼膜拜的经典作品， 它们也毫无疑问地引起了日后人们关于男性与女性之间的不休辩论。

    许多的新书与传记作品都试图从不同的角度看待波伏娃， 从她的作品中发现一些新鲜与不为人知的东西，尤其是去感受她简洁的文字，正直的思想，对正义的维护与大胆的见解。

除其作品之外，波伏娃的个人生活也使她成为近现代最重要的女性知识分子。她争取自己应有权利，不依附于萨特而存在。

出生于中产阶级家庭并拥有良好的教育背景，波伏娃从一开始起就拒绝接受在当时中产阶级社会中广为流行的观点，即，美貌与智慧是相互矛盾的。

一个女孩是应该结婚生子的。如果一个家庭无法为女儿提供可观的嫁妆，而那个女孩也不能够以自身的美貌赢得有钱人的青睐的话，她就得照料自己。