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Born Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir on January 9, 1908 in Paris, France, she eventually studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure where, in 1929, she met Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1981 she wrote A Farewell to Sartre (La Cérémonie des adieux), a painful account of Sartre's last years.
Beauvoir has come to be seen as the mother of post-1968 feminism, with philosophical writings linked to, though independent of, Sartrian existentialism. She is best known for her work The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949) which contained detailed analysis of women's oppression.
Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986 and was buried alongside Jean-Paul Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris, France.
In The Second Sex, she ascribes women's oppression mainly to the essential sexual differences between men and women, and how they experience gender; how the eye of the other (l'autre) falls. However in the existentialist school of thought 'essence does not precede existence', hence '[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'
One of her most interesting arguments is that, throughout history, women have been considered the deviation, the abnormality. Even Mary Wollstonecraft considers men to be the ideal which women should aspire to be. Simone de Beauvoir says this has held back women. It has maintained the perception that women are a deviation from the normal, that they are outsiders attempting to emulate normality. She says that, for feminism to move forward, they need to break out of this assumption.
Although the work receives little attention, The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, 1947) is perhaps the single best point of entry into French existentialism. The simplicity of the work is a marvel in and of itself, as de Beauvoir reduces the gnashing of teeth that many associate with reading Sartre's overly-analytical Being and NothingnessBeing and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology ( 1943) is a philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is regarded as the beginning of existentialism. The original title, in French, was L'Etre et le Neant''. In 1952, after joining the ph to a few pages of light reading.
Other major works: She Came to Stay (L'Invitée, 1943); Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Memoires d'une jeune fille rangée, 1958).