Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher, writer and activist, born in the 6th arrondissement of Paris on 9 January 1908 and died there on 14 April 1986. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and became a teacher, and her life and work were closely tied to the existentialist circle of postwar France, above all her lifelong partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre. She wrote novels, essays, memoirs and political writing, and she took public positions on social questions throughout her career. Her best-known work, The Second Sex, examined how women have been defined and limited by society, and it became a foundation of modern feminist thought. Her novels explored freedom, responsibility and the choices people make in difficult times, while her several volumes of autobiography gave a candid picture of an intellectual life in the twentieth century. She matters today as a clear and demanding thinker, who asked readers to consider how much of a life is given and how much is chosen.