Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir was born in Paris to a bourgeois family in decline; her father was a lawyer, her mother devout, and the loss of the family fortune meant she would have to earn her living, which she counted as luck. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and in 1929, at twenty-one, became the youngest person ever to pass the agrégation, placed second to Sartre after the jury had reportedly hesitated at length. The two agreed on a 'necessary love' that left room for 'contingent loves', a pact that lasted fifty-one years.

She taught in lycées at Marseille and Rouen for twelve years, published her first novel, She Came to Stay, in 1943, an exploration of the consciousness of the Other in a triangle, and was dismissed by the ministry the same year. After the war she co-founded Les Temps modernes with Sartre and wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity, an attempt at the existentialist ethics Sartre never wrote: the free person must also will the freedom of others.

The Second Sex appeared in 1949, sold twenty thousand copies in a week and was placed on the Vatican's Index. Nearly a thousand pages long, it draws on biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, myth and literature to show how woman is made into the 'Other': man is subject and universal, woman the relative, defined second sex, shaped at every stage from childhood to old age into an object, and herself tempted to accept that 'immanence' in exchange for security. The way out is not to deny difference but to give women economic independence and projects of transcendence. In the 1960s the book became the founding text of the women's movement.

She wrote four volumes of autobiography recording her age; the novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt; Old Age examined the socially marginalised elderly as The Second Sex had examined women. In 1971 she signed the 'Manifesto of the 343' admitting to an abortion, helping to legalise abortion in France, and thereafter called herself a feminist and joined the movement. She had long affairs with the American writer Nelson Algren and the younger Claude Lanzmann. After Sartre's death she wrote Adieux; she died six years later and is buried with him.