Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir placed second to Sartre in the philosophy agrégation of 1929, at twenty-one the youngest ever to pass, and was his companion, editor and intellectual equal for fifty years, on her own terms. The Second Sex of 1949, a thousand pages on woman as the Other, from biology and myth to marriage and old age, with the sentence that one is not born but becomes a woman, is the founding work of modern feminism, and was on the Vatican’s index within a year. She also wrote the novel The Mandarins, four volumes of memoir, and a study of old age.