Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949 and gave the feminist movement its intellectual foundation with a single sentence: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She lived as radically as she wrote — maintaining an open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre for fifty years, taking lovers of both sexes, and refusing marriage, motherhood, and every other convention her society demanded of women.

This episode traces Beauvoir from her bourgeois Catholic upbringing through her philosophical partnership with Sartre, the writing of The Second Sex, and the personal scandals that complicated her feminist legacy.

• Beauvoir's break from her conservative Catholic family and her intellectual partnership with Sartre
• The Second Sex and the argument that femininity is a social construction, not a biological destiny
• T ...