To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child —- at one point intending to become a nun -— until Simone de Beauvoir experienced a crisis of faith at age 14 after which Simone de Beauvoir remained an atheist for the rest of her life. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books.

"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation). She is best known for her novels including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. Beauvoir wrote novels essays biographies an autobiography monographs on philosophy politics and social issues.