La Vieillesse

Published at the dawn of the 1970s, La Vieillesse is one of Simone de Beauvoir’s major late essays and one of the most ambitious texts devoted to the condition of the elderly in contemporary society. After Le Deuxième Sexe, which analyzed the social construction of women’s condition, Beauvoir undertook here an investigation of comparable scope: understanding how a society manufactures the exclusion of an entire category of human beings, in a perspective faithful to her existentialist thought — old age is not merely a biological state, but a socially produced situation.

“When I say that I am working on an essay on old age, most often people exclaim: ‘What an idea! But you are not old! What a sad subject…’ This is precisely why I am writing this book: to break the conspiracy of silence. Toward the elderly, society is not only guilty, but criminal. Sheltering behind the myths of expansion and abundance, it treats old people as pariahs. To reconcile this barbarity with the humanist morality it professes, the ruling class takes the convenient position of not considering them as men; if their voice were heard, one would be forced to recognize that it is a human voice.”