Beauvoir and The Second Sex

Colette Audry pointed to a mystery in observing that during the 1930s Simone de Beauvoir had not been concerned with the “woman question” and that her friend must have encountered a “serious obstacle” that “made her change her mind” and write The Second Sex. Unfortunately, Beauvoir obscured the genesis of her most important work. Using evidence uncovered by her biographers about her relationship with Sartre, and digging more deeply into their posthumously published letters and diaries, this paper uncovers a series of events that together tell a likely story of Beauvoir’s feminist turning point.