Simone de Beauvoir

French writer and existentialist teacher who fashioned an impressive literary career as a novelist, philosopher, essayist and writer of memoirs. A prominent member of the young avant-garde Parisian intelligentsia in the '40s, she was the presiding celebrity of the Existentialist movement along with Jean Paul Sartre, her life companion in an open relationship. They never lived in the same residence, nor did they require sexual fidelity of each other but they did keep a close and steady relationship, seeing each other daily from the time they met at the Sorbonne in 1929 until Sartre died in 1980. She looked on marriage as an obscene, bourgeois institution that put women in an inferior position. In rejecting marriage, she also rejected children, noting that she had escaped most of women's bondages.