Quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Being a woman is not simply a biological fact you are born with — it is something shaped by society, culture, and expectation over time. Identity is constructed through lived experience, not fixed at birth.

De Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, four years after the end of World War II. France was rebuilding under the Fourth Republic, and women had only recently won the right to vote in 1944, making questions of women's status and identity newly urgent.

French existentialist philosopher, writer, and feminist theorist whose 1949 work The Second Sex laid the groundwork for second-wave feminism by arguing that gender is a social construction. She was a lifelong intellectual partner of Jean-Paul Sartre.