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Philosophical Haiku

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

by Terence Green

Forced to be Other
Shaped to suit the ends of Man
Willingly enslaved(?).

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre formed the great double act or celebrity couple of existentialism. De Beauvoir was prolific as a novelist, essayist, biographer, critic and theorist, and was energetic as a political activist. She displayed her intellectual gifts from an early age, leading her proud father to boast, “Simone thinks like a man!”

De Beauvoir is perhaps best known for The Second Sex (1949), a work considered to be the pivotal feminist text of the twentieth century.

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