École normale supérieure de jeunes filles de Sèvres

École normale supérieure de jeunes filles de Sèvres is mentioned as a setting for women students’ relationships and solidarity. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, students living together away from men developed close attachments that could express both a desire for autonomy and resistance to the social authority of men.

Setting and Mention

The school enters the discussion not through an institutional history or a description of its teaching, but as the setting for relationships among women students. Beauvoir refers to loves that flourished among students living together far from men, placing the school within her examination of women’s intimate bonds and social circumstances.

Student Relationships and Solidarity

Beauvoir describes these relationships as more than a simple division into masculine and feminine partners. Some students valued belonging to a women’s elite and sought to remain autonomous subjects. Their attachments could unite admiration for a friend with recognition of qualities they valued in themselves; the relationship offered a context in which women might cherish one another without submitting to a male partner’s authority.

Significance in the Argument

The school provides a concrete example in Beauvoir’s discussion of women’s relationships as varied and shaped by circumstance. Her account resists treating lesbian relationships as two definitive types, emphasizing instead that affection, identification, and the distribution of roles can shift between partners. In this passage, the students’ shared life away from men makes solidarity and autonomy visible, without making their relationships uniform or uncomplicated.