Responds to
The Second Sex
Beauvoir returns to The Second Sex's analysis of people made Other, applying a comparable method and scope to the social construction and lived experience of old age.
The Coming of Age
Beauvoir's six-hundred-page 1970 study of old age — the companion volume to The Second Sex, arguing that Western societies treat their elderly as a scandal to be hidden and that this is a decision, not a fact.
- 1970
About Simone de Beauvoir
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeSimone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse (1970) is the companion volume to The Second Sex. Where the earlier book had asked how women are made into the definitive Other, this one asks the same question about the old. Six hundred pages long, structured in the same two-part shape as the 1949 book, it examines old age first in history, anthropology, medicine, and literature — how different societies have thought about the old — and then in lived experience: the aging body, retirement, sexuality, family, poverty, and the specific condition Western societies impose on people no longer measured by paid work. Beauvoir's central argument is that ageing is biological but that the isolation and poverty inflicted on the old are political and social choices, and that a society is judged by the value it gives lives it can no longer use.
The story, in more detail
Beauvoir wrote La Vieillesse between 1967 and 1970, during the same years she was writing All Said and Done and looking after her mother's last illness (which produced A Very Easy Death in 1964). Gallimard published it in Paris in the winter of 1970. Patrick O'Brian's English translation, The Coming of Age, appeared from G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York in 1972; a British edition followed from André Deutsch the same year. It is the last major book of philosophical argument Beauvoir published in her lifetime.
The book was written to be exactly parallel to The Second Sex, and it is structured the same way. Volume One (Old Age Seen from Without) covers biology, ethnology, and history: how ageing has been understood by science, how different societies have organised the position of the old (from nomadic peoples through the ancient world through medieval Europe through modern industrial capitalism), and how old age has been represented in literature and philosophy from the Greeks to the present. Volume Two (The Being-in-the-World) turns to lived experience: the discovery of one's own ageing, the relation to time, the relation to the body, work and retirement, and the specific political situation of the poor old in Western capitalist societies.
The book was less commercially successful than The Second Sex, and its Anglophone reception was thinner (the Patrick O'Brian translation has never been reprinted at the scale of the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier 2009 Second Sex). But it is Beauvoir's argument in one of its clearest forms, and its central claim — that the treatment of the old exposes what a society values in a life at all — has been picked up by every subsequent argument about elder care, retirement, and the political economy of long-lived populations.
The argument
Volume One (Old Age Seen from Without) has four sections: the biology of ageing; the ethnology of ageing (how nomadic, agrarian, feudal, capitalist, and colonised societies have positioned the old); the history of ageing in Western literature and thought from Homer to the twentieth century; and old age in modern society (industrial capitalism, retirement, the specific French welfare state Beauvoir was writing from).
Volume Two (The Being-in-the-World) turns from history and structure to lived experience. Chapters cover the discovery of one's own ageing, the ageing body, time, activity and passivity, sexuality in old age, the relation to family and to the past, the poor old in Western capitalist societies, and the political conclusion.
The conclusion argues that the isolation and poverty imposed on the old are the result of political and economic decisions rather than a natural fact — that a socialist society could take them differently — and that no just society can be built until the old are treated as human beings whose remaining time still deserves attention rather than as problems to be managed.
Themes and analysis
Present, but kept apart
In the introduction, Beauvoir argues that exclusion can survive beneath apparently respectful images of old age. Expecting older people to be serenely wise makes their anger, desire or dissatisfaction seem like failures to play an assigned role. Reverence and ridicule then become two ways of denying ordinary human complexity. The woman in the imagined park scene need not disappear for this distancing to occur: she can remain plainly visible while being denied the range of feelings and claims that younger people take for granted.
Making old age visible
The preamble explains why the study moves between public knowledge and lived experience. Biology, social position and a person's relation to time affect one another; studying these dimensions in isolation would miss those interactions. Beauvoir also warns that old age is not one uniform condition: differences of class, health and family make sweeping generalizations misleading. Read in that light, the study illustration suggests a task of connecting evidence, not collecting enough reports to replace individual voices. The book's method asks what each viewpoint leaves out when it stands alone.
Documented connections
Why we recommend it
Why it matters
It extends Beauvoir's analysis of socially produced otherness from gender to ageing without pretending that the two situations are identical.
Where it fits
Read it after The Second Sex or the ageing stories in The Woman Destroyed, which provide the clearest points of comparison.
What lingers
The book was written to be exactly parallel to The Second Sex, twenty-one years later, and its central claim — that a society is judged by the value it gives lives that are no longer measured by paid productivity — is the ground text of every subsequent argument about elder care, retirement, and the political economy of long-lived populations.
What this book explores
Bring it to book club
- The book was written to be exactly parallel to The Second Sex. Read the introductions of the two books side by side — where does the parallel work, and where does the situation of the old differ from the situation of women in ways Beauvoir's analytical method has to adjust for?
- Volume One covers biology, ethnology, history, and modern society. Which of the four sections has aged worst, and which section is the sharpest in 2026?
- Volume Two argues that the isolation of the old in Western capitalist societies is a political and economic decision, not a fact of nature. Reading the book fifty years later, has anything changed?
- Read A Very Easy Death (1964) beside the last chapter of The Coming of Age. What does the specific case give the general argument, and what does the general argument give the specific case?
Timeline
1949
Gallimard publishes The Second Sex, the book The Coming of Age will be written to be parallel to.
November 1963
Beauvoir's mother Françoise de Beauvoir dies of intestinal cancer in a Paris clinic; A Very Easy Death (1964) follows.
1967–1970
Beauvoir writes La Vieillesse.
Winter 1970
Gallimard publishes La Vieillesse in Paris.
1972
Patrick O'Brian's English translation, The Coming of Age, appears from G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York and from André Deutsch in London.
Modern editions
Éditions Gallimard reprint La Vieillesse in the Folio essais paperback series; W.W. Norton keeps the O'Brian translation in print in the United States.
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- Gallimard
- 1970
- Paperback
- W. W. Norton & Company
- 1996
- 9780393314434
- Patrick O'Brian
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Second Sex
Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.
Read our take
The Woman Destroyed
Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.
Read our takeThe Coming of Age: frequently asked questions
What is The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir about?
Beauvoir's 1970 study of old age is the companion volume to The Second Sex. Where the 1949 book had asked how women are made into the definitive Other, this one asks the same question about the old. Six hundred pages long, structured in the same two-part shape as the earlier book, it examines old age first in history, anthropology, medicine, and literature and then in lived experience — arguing that ageing is biological but that the isolation and poverty inflicted on the old are political and social choices.
When was The Coming of Age published?
Gallimard published La Vieillesse in Paris in the winter of 1970, twenty-one years after The Second Sex. Patrick O'Brian's English translation, The Coming of Age, appeared from G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York and from André Deutsch in London in 1972.
How does The Coming of Age relate to The Second Sex?
It is the companion volume, written twenty-one years later, applying the same analytical method — biology and history and ethnology in Volume One, lived experience in Volume Two — to a different situation of otherness. The Second Sex asked how one becomes a woman; The Coming of Age asks how one becomes an old person in a society that no longer measures them by paid work.
What is Beauvoir's central argument in The Coming of Age?
Ageing itself is biological. But the isolation, poverty, and political invisibility inflicted on the old in Western industrial-capitalist societies are the result of political and economic decisions rather than facts of nature. A society is judged, Beauvoir argues, by the value it gives lives that can no longer be used for paid productivity; by that measure, twentieth-century Western societies had failed the people they had condemned to retirement.
How is The Coming of Age structured?
Two volumes in the same shape as The Second Sex. Volume One (Old Age Seen from Without) covers biology, ethnology, history, and modern society. Volume Two (The Being-in-the-World) covers the discovery of one's own ageing, the ageing body, time, activity, sexuality, family, the specific situation of the poor old, and the political conclusion.
How is The Coming of Age related to A Very Easy Death?
Beauvoir's mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, died of intestinal cancer in a Paris clinic in November 1963. Beauvoir produced two books out of the experience: A Very Easy Death (Une mort très douce, 1964), a hundred-page memoir of the last month, and The Coming of Age six years later, the larger philosophical study of the condition her mother's death had made unavoidable. Reading them together shows Beauvoir moving from the specific case to the general argument.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Coming of Age, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1La Vieillesse — Gallimard sample, Introduction and Préambule
EssaysGallimard, Folio essais, 2020Used forThe public French sample supports the added readings of age stereotypes and the study's method. Page locators follow the 2020 Gallimard edition; the new English analysis does not quote an English translation.
2The Coming of Age — 1996 Norton edition
Official recordW. W. Norton & Company, 1996Used forPublisher record used to verify the 1996 Norton paperback edition, ISBN, pagination, and Patrick O'Brian translation credit.
3Simone de Beauvoir
WebsiteÉditions GallimardUsed forUsed to place The Coming of Age within Simone de Beauvoir's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
4Works catalogued under Simone de Beauvoir
ArchiveBibliothèque nationale de FranceUsed forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Simone de Beauvoir's career and the period in which The Coming of Age appeared.
5Simone de Beauvoir
EssaysStanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyUsed forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Simone de Beauvoir's wider catalogue.
6Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986)
Official recordBibliothèque nationale de FranceUsed forUsed to verify Simone de Beauvoir's bibliography and place The Coming of Age within the broader chronology of Simone de Beauvoir's career.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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