Simone de Beauvoir

Key ideas

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir argued that human beings are both free and bound, subjects and objects, and that existentialism can give an ethics after all. My freedom requires the freedom of others: to will myself free is also to will that others be free.

The Second Sex applies existentialist ideas to the situation of women. Its most famous line holds that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman: the meaning of being a woman is shaped by society rather than fixed by biology. Woman, she argued, has been defined as 'the Other' in relation to man.

She placed more weight than Jean-Paul Sartre on how situation and oppression limit what freedom can do, a correction that runs through later discussions of existence precedes essence. She also wrote major books on old age and on death.

Life, briefly

De Beauvoir came second in France's highly competitive philosophy examination in 1929, the youngest person ever to pass it; Sartre came first. She taught philosophy at lycées before becoming a full-time writer.

Her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. Her multi-volume memoirs are among the best accounts of intellectual life in twentieth-century Paris.

Major works

• She Came to Stay (1943)
• The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
• The Second Sex (1949)
• The Mandarins (1954)
• Old Age (1970)

Schools of thought

Existentialism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir
• WikipediaSimone de Beauvoir