Beauvoir, Simone de (1908—86) French feminist intellectual, equally well known for her philosophical works and her novels and autobiographical pieces. Her landmark text Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), translated as The Second Sex (1952), is one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century feminism. Its central thesis is that women are made rather than born. Beauvoir’s rejection of biological determinism continues to inform feminist theory today. Although she was widely acknowledged as a key intellectual of her time, feminist theorists have always been ambivalent in their reception of her work either because she herself did not identify with feminism or because of the suspicion that her work merely replicated precarity’s. Beauvoir’s starting point for The Second Sex is the assumption, which she then sets out to substantiate, that the inferior situation of women is due to historical, political, and social circumstances, and not any innate characteristic of women. In existentialism terms, this means that if women lack freedom, it is not because they are acting in bad faith: their situation condemns them to it. But, as Toril Moi argues in Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994), this also amounts to gendering both freedom and agency as masculine, which is obviously problematic for any strong feminist reading of Beauvoir. Compounding this is her classification of sexual desire, orgasm, pregnancy, breast-feeding, childbirth, and so on, as merely natural functions, i.e. as lacking the directed form of consciousness Sartre referred to as a project and deemed necessary to agency and freedom. However, Moi also argues we do not need to follow Beauvoir’s awkward positioning of these key ideals in order to extract other more potent theoretical ideas from her work. The specific that problem women face, according to Beauvoir, is that their pursuit of freedom takes place in circumstances that in her words compel them to assume the status of the Other. This contradiction in their existence is specific to women in a patriarchal society. It is played out in a number of ways, but perhaps most significantly in the woman’s relation to her body: it is her body that makes her a woman, but it is also this very fact that separates her from herself as a free, autonomous agent. Although she refuses the idea that biology is destiny, Beauvoir nonetheless treats the body as a kind of millstone around the necks of all women that prevents them from readily attaining a life of freedom. The needs of the species weigh heaviest on women in Beauvoir’s assessment. Moi reminds, though, that Beauvoir was writing in the 1940s when patriarchal double standards relating to women’s daily lives were at their peak, so her somewhat grim view of things perhaps holds true to the actual lived conditions of women’s lives then. Facing up to these double standards is what enables women (rather than men) to live authentic lives. As Moi argues, women who read Beauvoir in the 1950s when The Second Sex was practically the only book available that spoke about women’s oppression, found it courageous and inspiring. Friedan, Betty, among others, wrote at the time that reading The Second Sex changed her life. Beauvoir did not see herself primarily as a philosopher, even though she had trained in and excelled at philosophy. Rather, what she wanted to write was fiction, but her first efforts were not very successful. It was not until she adopted a more autobiographical approach that her work struck a resonant chord. She became one of the most important chroniclers of her generation with works such as L’Invitée (1943), translated as She Came to Stay (1984), and Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958), translated as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1987), which captured well the difficult situation of women in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth century. Throughout her life, Beauvoir was an active and ‘engaged’ (to use the term Sartre would make famous) intellectual. She was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, which since its founding has been one of the most important intellectual organs in France, providing a strong counter-hegemonic perspective. Further Reading: D. Bair Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (1990). M. Le Doeuff Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (1991). T. Moi Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994).