The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was born to a middle-class family in Paris. Her father Georges was a lawyer who encouraged her intellectual and artistic interests, while her mother Françoise was a conservative Catholic. Despite her mother’s efforts to encourage Simone to embrace religion, Simone became an atheist at an early age. After finishing a master’s thesis in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir taught at a lycée (high school) and later supported herself as a full-time writer.

Beauvoir never identified as a philosopher. She was a prolific writer in both non-fiction and fiction. Her works include the novels All Men Are Mortal (1946) and The Mandarins (1954) and the philosophical work Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944). Never marrying, she had an open relationship with her partner, the famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), and adopted a daughter, Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir.

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a philosopher, historian, and early theorist of the Communist movement. He co-wrote many books and essays with Karl Marx, most notably The Communist Manifesto (1848). Like Marx, Engels promoted the idea of historical materialism, which argues that history is driven by the conflict between economic classes.

Beauvoir engages with Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884).