Collection: Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher, novelist, and feminist theorist whose existentialist analysis of women’s condition in The Second Sex (1949) became a foundational text of twentieth-century feminism and gender theory. Associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist milieu of postwar Paris, she extended existentialist philosophy into ethics, politics, and the lived experience of the body, ageing, and oppression. Her work has been central to feminist art criticism and theory, and she remains one of the most widely read and debated philosophers of the modern period.