Simone de Beauvoir, French existentialist feminist, was born in Paris in 1908 and died in 1986, after a prolific career as a philosopher, essayist, novelist, and political activist. Her writings were, by her own accounts, heavily influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, her intellectual companion for half a century—a fact that led some critics to dismiss her as philosophically unoriginal. Even de Beauvoir, in a 1979 interview, said that she did not consider herself to be a philosopher. In her view, however, "a philosopher is someone like Spinoza, Hegel, or like Sartre, someone who builds a grand system" (quoted in Simons, 1986, p. 168), a definition that would exclude most contemporary professional philosophers. Furthermore, as several recent commentators have argued, de Beauvoir seems to have underestimated her influence on philosophy in general and on Sartre in particular. While she incorporated Sartre's ideas, such as his...