Simone De Beauvoir

Raised by a conservative father and devoutly Catholic mother in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir grew up with her parents’ sensibilities but proved a brilliant thinker early on: she read the classics from a young age, taught her younger sister throughout their childhood, and decided in her teenage years to give up on religion entirely. Her family’s financial collapse during World War One meant her father could not afford to pay a dowry, but this actually delighted de Beauvoir, who hoped to pursue a career as an intellectual rather than being locked into a marriage. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and placed second in the nation on the competitive agrégation exam in her subject, which she became the youngest person to pass. Jean-Paul Sartre came in first, and they struck up a friendship while studying for the exam. They became both actual and intellectual bedfellows, and remained so throughout their lives, although their relationship was famously open: throughout her life, de Beauvoir had various relationships with both men and women, including a number of prominent intellectuals. Sartre proposed marriage to her in 1931, but she refused. They both taught philosophy in schools throughout the 1930s, but they both lost their jobs in the early 1940s: de Beauvoir was fired by the Nazi-controlled government for her political beliefs, and Sartre was captured as a prisoner of war. She briefly returned to teaching but lost her job again, this time for allegedly seducing a female student, and went on to spend the rest of her life as a writer. She went on to publish eight books from 1943-1949, including three novels and her two most important works of nonfiction: The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949). To this day, she is still best remembered for The Second Sex. The book is widely credited with jumpstarting the following decades’ feminist movements in France. Many of her novels, like She Came to Stay (1943) and The Mandarins (1954, and the book for which she won the prestigious Prix Goncourt), were fictionalizations of her real experiences. Because of her literary success, the scandal of her and Sartre’s relationship, and the popularity of Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, she played a prominent role in the French public sphere for the rest of her life. During the 1950s and 1960s she continued writing prolifically, and in the 1970s she became a prominent member of the French women’s liberation movement (now better known as the second wave of feminism), playing an instrumental role in the fight to legalize abortion in France. She died of pneumonia in Paris in 1986.