Simone de Beauvoir

Though she insisted on referring to herself as an author rather than a philosopher, Simone de Beavuoir, born on January 9, 1908, in Paris, France, is most famous for her 1949 treatise on the myths and realities of womanhood, The Second Sex. Raised in a bourgeois family, de Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne and became, at twenty-one, the youngest person to pass the agrégation—France’s highly competitive postgraduate examination—in philosophy; only Jean-Paul Sartre scored higher than her that year. Thus began a partnership and association that would become one of the most influential relationships in both de Beauvoir and Sartre’s lives. New scholarship has revealed how influential de Beauvoir was on the development of certain existentialist precepts found in Sartre’s work, such as the concept of mauvaise foi (bad faith); Sartre, too, was equally influential in the development of de Beauvoir’s writing, reading each of her manuscripts before they were published. Her first novel, She Came to Stay (1943), opens with a quote from Hegel and traces the complications of a love triangle; following the end of World War II and the occupation of Paris, de Beauvoir and Sartre founded the journal Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), named after a Charlie Chaplin film. Over the next four decades, de Beauvoir would publish numerous works, including the novel The Mandarins (1954), which won her the Prix Goncourt; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), the first in a series of memoirs; and The Second Sex, the monumental work that explores the question of woman as “other” and is credited with launching feminism’s second wave. She passed away on April 14, 1986, in Paris.

Photo by Moshe Milner, Creative Commons