ABSTRACT
The French writer and feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century thought. For most people, she is the author of The Second Sex (1949), the ‘bible’ of modern Western feminism. For others, she is a representative of the French post-war intelligentsia, associated with the philosophical movement of existentialism and with Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir has had a major impact on the development of modern thought in feminist philosophy, in literary studies and in the social sciences throughout the world. A powerful intellectual role model for women in the twenty-first century, Beauvoir was an exacting and critical thinker, who provided an ethics relating to the brand of post-war atheistic existentialism associated with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). This existentialist component of her work will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1. Since its publication in France in 1949, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has continued to shape debates and thinking about gender. Key feminist thinkers of recent decades, such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, have acknowledged their intellectual debt to her work, even as they developed their own work on gender in quite different directions.
