Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman

The author shows how Simone de Beauvoir became the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the 20th century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, the book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex, and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life.