Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong partner and intellectual collaborator. She taught philosophy until 1943 and then wrote full time, producing novels, essays and memoirs. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) set out an existentialist ethics of freedom, and The Second Sex (1949) analyzed how women have been defined as the 'Other' in relation to men. Her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. She took part in campaigns against the Algerian War and, from the 1970s, in the French women's liberation movement.

The Second Sex is widely regarded as a foundation of second-wave feminism and influenced writers such as Betty Friedan, as well as later gender theory. Philosophers increasingly study her as an original existentialist thinker rather than only as Sartre's partner. Admirers credit her with framing the distinction between sex and socially constructed gender. Critics include conservatives and religious thinkers who reject her views on marriage, motherhood and abortion, and some feminists who argue that she undervalued motherhood or generalized from the experience of educated Western women. Others have criticized her and Sartre's periods of sympathy for Soviet and Maoist regimes, as well as aspects of her personal relationships.