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- The elder and
- favored of two
- girls, de Beauvoir
- was born into a
- bourgeois family.
- She pursued a
- glittering and
- precocious career
- as a philosopher
- at the Sorbonne,
- where she met
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- and at 21, she
- became the
- youngest quali-
- fied philosopher
- in France
- #
- De Beauvoir was
- devoted to Sartre
- for over 50 years.
- They saw each
- other every day,
- but never shared a
- house and had
- various other
- relationships
- though never
- lasting ones.
- Together, they
- formulated the
- philosophy of
- existentialism,
- and were also
- involved in the
- Resistance during
- the second
- world war
- #
- Rebellious but
- happy as a child,
- de Beauvoir always
- denied that her
- partnership with
- Sartre had anything
- in common with
- a bourgeois
- marriage. In The
- Second Sex (1949),
- which paved the
- way for the
- women's rights
- movement of the
- Sixties she wrote
- that the principle
- of marriage
- was obscene
- #
- After the war,
- de Beauvoir pro-
- duced a number
- of books, plays and
- theoretical essays.
- She became one of
- France's best-
- selling authors.
- Among her works
- was The Mandarins
- (1954), about
- Jean-Paul Sartre,
- herself and the
- writer Albert
- Camus. They spent
- many hours discus-
- sing literature and
- philosophy in cafes
- on Paris' Left Bank
- #
- Feminists admire
- de Beauvoir for her
- achievement as a
- thinker. Two of
- the main trends in
- twentieth century
- thought, feminism
- and existentialism,
- meet in her work.
- She united theory
- and activism, for
- example she wrote
- and campaigned for
- the right to
- contraception, and
- to legal abortion.
- She was very much
- ahead of her time
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