Walking in Simone de Beauvoir’s Footsteps

What the Existentialist Author Can Teach Us About Body Positivity

Most photographs of Simone de Beauvoir show her seated, typically in a café, often writing or enjoying a cigarette.

What’s less well known is that the twentieth-century philosopher and novelist, best known for her groundbreaking feminist book The Second Sex, was also an avid hiker.

Her walking habits, like those of other philosophers (think Thoreau or Nietzsche), are well worth discussing since they reveal an important part of how we can cultivate healthier relationships with our bodies.

Beauvoir began hiking in 1931, at the age of 23, when she received a position as a philosophy teacher at a high school in Marseille. The Prime of Life, the second volume of her memoirs, describes the excitement she experienced as she hiked long hours on her days off. She relished the feeling of physical exertion at the end of the day.

Beauvoir says:

“I had never practiced any sport, and therefore took all the more pleasure in driving my body the very limit of its endurance.”

When I read Beauvoir’s descriptions of her treks, I’m struck by how deeply she became attuned to her body and how attentive she was to her surroundings. She fell in love with the sights and sounds and smells of the landscapes she discovered…