Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher and writer whose landmark work The Second Sex (1949) provided the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of women's oppression, coining the foundational feminist insight that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." A lifelong intellectual and romantic partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, she also wrote acclaimed novels including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins (Prix Goncourt, 1954). Her work remains the philosophical cornerstone of second-wave feminism and existentialist thought.