Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir grew up in a Catholic bourgeois family in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre; they became partners for life, but never married or lived together, and agreed that each could have other relationships.

She taught philosophy at schools and became one of the central figures of existentialism. Her book “The Second Sex” (1949) analysed how women are made into the “other” in a world defined by men. Its sentence “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” became a founding text of modern feminism. Her novel “The Mandarins” won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.

Beauvoir had relationships with men, such as the American writer Nelson Algren, and with women, some of them her former students. In 1943 she was suspended from teaching after the mother of a student complained; later a former student accused Beauvoir and Sartre of having exploited her. These aspects of her life are still discussed critically today. She did not describe herself as bisexual, but her letters show her love for women.

From the 1970s she campaigned for the right to abortion. She died in Paris in 1986, aged 78, and was buried beside Sartre.