ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir born in Paris in 1908 into a repressive and increasingly impoverished family, de Beauvoir turned inward and toward study as an escape from family troubles. Throughout the 1930s, de Beauvoir taught at a lycee and worked with Sartre on the developing philosophy of existentialism. Adding to de Beauvoir's fame was her active participation in France's anti-colonial movement of the late 1940s through 1962, during which time France abandoned its colonies in Indochina and North Africa and granted independence to its sub-Saharan colonies. Increasingly withdrawing from public life, de Beauvoir nevertheless remained a profound inspiration to the world's activist feminists of the 1970s. Although deeply associated with Sartre until his death in 1980, de Beauvoir's intellectual achievements began to be taken more and more on their own merits.
