Contribution of Simon de Beauvoir

Simon de Beauvoir was probably best known as novelist, and a feminist thinker and writer but she was also an existentialist philosopher. Her essays, novels and other works greatly influenced feminist existentialism and social theory. Throughout her life, de Beauvoir never claimed herself to be a  philosopher and critical thinker. However, through her major contributions to politics, ethics, feminism and existentialism, she has earned the respect of the masses and an established philosopher., social activist and an intellectual.
Beauvoir's most famous work was 'The Second Sex' from 1949, a hugely influential book which laid the groundwork for second-wave feminism was concerned with women's suffrage and property rights, the second wave broadens these concerns to include sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights and so on. All that started with Beauvoir outlines the ways in which woman is perceived as "other" in a patriarchal society, second to man, which is considered and treated as - the "first" or default sex. One of the most famous lines from this work is "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
De Beauvoir published her first novel 'She Came to Stay'. This novel was followed by many other including The Blood of Others, which explores the nature of individual responsibility, telling a love story between two young French students participating in the Resistance in World War II. She wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cine'as, a discussion of an existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity, it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. For 'The Mandarins' she won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.    

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