Simone de Beauvoir

Overview

Simone de Beauvoir was a philosopher, novelist, and Sartre's lifelong intellectual partner, though her own philosophical work stands independently of his. Her best-known claim, that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, argues that femininity as a set of expectations and restrictions is produced by society, not fixed by biology, and that women have historically been defined as the Other against a male norm treated as the default human. The Second Sex applies existentialist ideas about freedom and situation to the concrete condition of women across history, literature, biology, and myth. She also developed an existentialist ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity, addressing a gap Sartre never fully worked out: how freedom, once affirmed, is supposed to translate into concrete moral obligations to other people.

Where to start reading

• The Second Sex 1949

  A wide-ranging study of how women have been constructed as 'the Other' throughout history, biology, and culture, and a founding text of modern feminist philosophy.

• The Ethics of Ambiguity 1947

  An attempt to build a concrete existentialist ethics out of the fact of human freedom, addressing how one free person should act toward others.

Part of

• Existentialism

Sources

1. Simone de Beauvoir Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. Existentialism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy