Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (Paris, 1908 – Paris, 1986) was a French philosopher, writer and feminist activist associated with existentialism. She did not regard herself as a philosopher in the strict sense, yet her essays and novels made her one of the most influential intellectual voices of the twentieth century. Her name is above all linked to The Second Sex, a study of women's oppression that became a foundational text of contemporary feminism. She also wrote novels, biographies and, above all, memoirs, which remain her most enduring contribution to literature.

She was born into a bourgeois Parisian family with Catholic roots. Her mother was devout, and her father, who had hoped for a son, told her she had the brain of a man. After the First World War the family lost much of its standing, and young Simone watched her parents' marriage deteriorate. As a teenager she abandoned her faith and declared herself an atheist, convinced that religion served to subjugate people. She studied literature and philosophy and in 1929, at just twenty-one, placed second in the agrégation in philosophy, behind Sartre, with whom she formed a lifelong bond. They never married or lived under the same roof; they allowed themselves other 'contingent' loves while keeping their own partnership at its centre. She taught in Marseille, Rouen and Paris. In 1943 she was suspended from teaching after a complaint involving former students, and she was reinstated after the liberation of Paris. Her novel She Came to Stay appeared in 1943, and The Mandarins in 1954, the book that won the Prix Goncourt. Her memoirs began in 1958 with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

In The Second Sex (1949) she argued that a woman is not born with a fixed destiny but is made within a social and cultural situation that defines her as the Other in relation to man, the reference point. Working within existentialism, she rejected the idea that biology or nature justifies women's subordination, and held that freedom carries responsibility for one's own projects. Her reflections on ambiguity and on an ethics of freedom, developed also in her essays on action, were less a set of recipes than an attempt to describe how situations are lived. Her influence reaches the feminism of the second half of the twentieth century, later gender theory and existentialist thought.