Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher, novelist and memoirist, and one of the founders of modern feminism. Her book The Second Sex (1949) argued that womanhood is not a natural destiny but a situation created by society, and it became the starting point for much of the women's movement of the later twentieth century. A leading figure of existentialism, and the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, she was long treated as his follower; scholars now read her as an original philosopher in her own right, whose ethics of freedom and whose analysis of oppression went beyond his.

Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908 in Paris, the elder of two daughters in a bourgeois family that had lost much of its money after the First World War. Her father, a lawyer with theatrical ambitions, encouraged her intellect, while her mother raised her as a devout Catholic. She was educated at a Catholic girls' school, the Cours Désir, where she formed an intense friendship with Élisabeth Lacoin, "Zaza", whose early death in 1929 marked her deeply. She lost her religious faith in her early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of her life. These years are the subject of her best-loved book, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958).

She studied mathematics, literature and philosophy, wrote a thesis on Leibniz, and in 1929, aged 21, passed the agrégation in philosophy, among the youngest candidates ever to do so, coming second only to Jean-Paul Sartre. The two began a relationship that lasted until his death. They never married or shared a home and agreed that each could have other lovers, an arrangement that she presented as a model of honest partnership but that also caused pain to others drawn into it.

Beauvoir taught philosophy at secondary schools in Marseille, Rouen and Paris from 1929. In 1943, during the German occupation of France in the Second World War, she was dismissed from her post after the mother of a pupil, Nathalie Sorokine, accused her of corrupting a minor; she was reinstated after the Liberation but did not return to teaching. Some of the young women with whom she and Sartre had relationships, including former pupils, later said they had been harmed by them, and this side of her life is now openly discussed by biographers.

Her first novel, She Came to Stay (1943), drew on a real triangle involving Sartre and a former pupil, Olga Kosakiewicz, to explore the threat that another consciousness poses to one's own. It was followed by The Blood of Others (1945), a novel of the Resistance, and the play Useless Mouths.

In two essays, Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Beauvoir tried to show that existentialism could ground an ethics, something Sartre promised but never completed. Human beings, she argued, are ambiguous: both free subjects and bodily objects, both separate individuals and dependent on others. There are no values given in advance, but this does not mean anything goes. My freedom has meaning only in a world where others are free too, so to will oneself free is also to will the freedom of others. Oppression, which denies people the chance to shape their own futures, is therefore the central moral evil. These works drew on Hegel's account of the struggle for recognition as well as on phenomenology, and placed far more weight than Sartre's early work on the social situations that limit freedom.

The Second Sex, published in two volumes in 1949, applied this approach to the condition of women. Its first volume surveys biology, psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, history and myth, and argues that none of them proves women naturally inferior; all have been used to cast woman as the Other, defined only in relation to man, who takes himself as the human norm. The second volume describes women's lived experience from childhood through marriage, motherhood and old age. Its most famous sentence, that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, expresses the idea that femininity is shaped by upbringing, economic dependence and expectation rather than by nature.

The book sold widely and caused a scandal for its frank treatment of sexuality and abortion; the Vatican placed it on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1956. Its first English translation, in 1953, was heavily cut, and a fuller version appeared only in 2009.

After the war Beauvoir helped found the journal Les Temps modernes with Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A long journey through the United States in 1947 produced a travel book and a transatlantic love affair with the Chicago novelist Nelson Algren; later she lived for several years with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. Her novel The Mandarins, a portrait of left-wing Parisian intellectuals after the Liberation, including a character based on Albert Camus, won France's leading literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1954.

She shared Sartre's political commitments, travelling with him to China, the Soviet Union and Cuba. During the war in Algeria she campaigned for Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman tortured and raped by French soldiers. Her memoirs, continued in The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance and All Said and Done, became a portrait of an era. A Very Easy Death (1964) described her mother's dying, and Old Age (1970) did for the elderly what The Second Sex had done for women, exposing how society discards them.

In the 1970s Beauvoir declared herself a feminist activist. In 1971 she wrote and signed the Manifesto of the 343, in which women including Beauvoir stated publicly that they had had illegal abortions; abortion was legalised in France in 1975. She helped found organisations for women's rights and edited a feminist column in Les Temps modernes. After Sartre's death she published Adieux (1981), an account of his last years. She died in Paris on 14 April 1986 and was buried beside him at the Montparnasse cemetery.

The Second Sex shaped the second wave of feminism in Europe and North America, influencing writers such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, and its distinction between biological sex and social role anticipated later theories of gender. Within continental philosophy, her ethics of ambiguity and her work on oppression, the body and ageing are now studied as major contributions, and she is recognised as one of the most important thinkers of twentieth-century France.