ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist thinker, who is best known for The Second Sex, the seven hundred plus page magnum opus she wrote in 1949 that has been recently retranslated in a new English language edition. Beauvoir never claimed to be a political activist or a philosopher, in spite of her extensive involvement in politics and her reworking of several central philosophical themes within existentialism, particularly freedom and ambiguity. Beauvoir was a prolific writer in several genres: essays, novels, a play, short stories, philosophy, political theory, and sociology. The thread that runs through all of Beauvoir's writing is her emphasis on the central ethical and political importance of freedom. The primary emphasis on freedom has led some scholars to mistakenly associate Beauvoir with liberal individualism. However, Beauvoir's writings systematically challenge liberal individualism, bourgeois fantasies of authority and dominance, and white superiority.
