Simone de Beauvoir (9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French feminist, political activist, philosopher, writer, intellectual, and social theorist. Beauvoir was known for her open relationship with the fellow Marxist intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre.
Biography[]
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France on 9 January 1908, and she became a materialist existentialist philosopher, left-wing activist, and feminist. Her best-known book about the oppression of women, The Second Sex (1949), insisted that womanhood was a social construct, with females "becoming women" rather thein being born as one. She mentored student movement feminists in social change in both the United States and France during the 1960s, but it was not until 1971 that she formally identified as a feminist. She signed a petition for legalized abortion with 343 other French women who openly declared that they had aborrtions. Beauvoir's private life was admired as much as her writings; she never married, nor lived with, nor bore the child of her long-term partner, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. She died in Paris in 1986 at the age of 78.