Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir 
Born 1908, Paris, France
​Died 1986 (aged 78) Paris, France

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Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer and political activist who had a significant influence on feminist theory.

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Simone was educated in a prestigious Catholic convent school. She was deeply religious as a child - at one point she planned to become a nun. But she abandoned her faith in her early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of her life.

In ​her book The Second Sex (1949) she wrote "You are not born, but become a woman”. And with that, she articulated for the first time the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender.

Simone was academically brilliant. Her father announced "She thinks like a man!” After graduating, she entered an exam that ranked the  brightest students in France. Jean-Paul Sartre won first place in her year. She was awarded the second. At 21, she was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.

She and Jean-Paul Sartre entered into a lifelong partnership that was sexual but not exclusive. It didn't involve living together. They remained partners for fifty-one years, until his death in 1980. She chose never to marry or set up a joint household and she never had children. She advanced her education, engaged in political causes, wrote and taught, and had a variety of lovers. Her prominent open relationships at times overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. 

Simone's relationships with young women were controversial. In 1943, she was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation she'd seduced a 17-year-old lycée pupil, whose parents consequently laid charges against her. As a result, she had her license to teach revoked - though it was later reinstated.

The Mandarins (1954) won Simone France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The book is set after the end of World War II and follows the personal lives of philosophers and friends among Sartre's and Beauvoir's intimate circle.

She also published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which deals with aging. Her essay The Coming of Age (1970) is a meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about the age of 60.
Well, speak for yourself, Ms Beauvoir! 

She died of pneumonia in 1986 in Paris, aged 78. She’s buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.