Beauvoir, Simone de

Beauvoir, Simone de (b. 9 Jan. 1908, d. 14 Apr. 1986). French philosopher Born in Paris, she was a materialist existentialist philosopher, left-wing activist, and, from the 1970s, feminist. Her best-known book, about the oppression of women, The Second Sex (1949) insisted that womanhood as we know it is a social construct; she wrote ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’. In the USA and in France, de Beauvoir was mentor to those who arrived at feminism via the 1960s student movements for social change, though she herself only formally identified with feminism in 1971, when she signed a petition for legalized abortion with 343 other French women who openly declared that they had had abortions. In 1972, she explained this change of heart: ‘we must fight for the situation of women, here and now, before our dreams of socialism come true’. De Beauvoir's private life came to be 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, although a biography appearing after her death depicted her as more dependent on him than outsiders had imagined.