Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986

Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th-century French philosopher, writer, and political activist, a central figure of post-war French existentialism and a foundational thinker of modern feminist philosophy. Her 1949 work The Second Sex offered a sweeping philosophical analysis of women's situation, arguing that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; the book became a defining text of the second-wave feminist movement. The Ethics of Ambiguity developed an existentialist account of moral freedom and responsibility, while novels including The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, addressed the moral and political dilemmas of post-war intellectuals. She maintained a lifelong intellectual and personal partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre. Her influence on philosophy, literature, and political thought has continued to grow since her death.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was the most consequential French philosopher of the twentieth century. Born into a Catholic bourgeois Parisian family, she lost her religious faith as a teenager, studied philosophy at the Sorbonne where she met Sartre in 1929, and became one of the central figures of the postwar existentialist circle.

Beauvoir's philosophical work was long underestimated as derivative of Sartre's; the 1980s and 1990s recovery of her writings has restored her as a philosopher of the first rank. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) develops a more fully worked-out existentialist ethics than Sartre had produced, with sustained attention to how social structures condition the bad-faith options actually available to individual agents. The Second Sex (1949), her most influential work, applies the existential framework to the situation of women: women have been constituted as the inessential other through an asymmetry of recognition that no individualist account of freedom can adequately analyze.

Beauvoir's later work includes the autobiographical sequence beginning with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the philosophical study Old Age (1970), and her novels The Mandarins and She Came to Stay. Her lifelong partnership with Sartre — open, unmarried, philosophically engaged — produced an extraordinary intellectual collaboration. She was a founding figure of postwar feminism and one of the most influential single voices on women's situation in the twentieth century.