DE BEAUVOIR
IN PARIS IN
19481940s1948
Eleanor Roosevelt
Leading the charge
for human rights
Having held the title from 1933 to 1945,
Eleanor Roosevelt was the longest-
serving First Lady in U.S. history. What
she did with the office was impressive:
by crisscrossing the country to pro-
mote President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
agenda, and by producing a radio show
and newspaper column, she showed
that First Ladies could play an active
part in Executive Branch affairs. And
yet she left an even greater legacy after
her time in the White House ended.
When FDR died in 1945, his
successor, Harry S. Truman, appointed
the erstwhile FLOTUS to be America’s
first delegate to the newly created
United Nations. As chair of the U.N.
Commission on Human Rights,
she worked in the years after the
Holocaust to prevent future world
wars and spearheaded the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which
the General Assembly adopted on
Dec. 10, 1948. Its statement that “All
human beings are born free and equal
in dignity and rights” is still considered
a foundation of international human-
rights law. It’s no wonder she
called that work her “most important
task.” —Olivia B. Waxman
1949
Simone de Beauvoir
Foundational feminist
Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into an upper-
class Catholic family. While studying for the competitive
agrégation exam in philosophy, which she passed in 1929,
she met Jean-Paul Sartre, the great love of her life. In 1949,
she published The Second Sex and revolutionized feminist
thought. She won France’s highest literary prize in 1954 for
her novel The Mandarins and, in 1971, wrote the text of the
Manifesto of the 343, a French petition to legalize abortion.
At 16, I stumbled upon an image of de Beauvoir sitting
in Café de Flore in Paris with a stack of books. “She’s a fa-
mous author,” my mother told me. I went to the library and
borrowed The Second Sex, expecting an erotic book that
would answer my burning questions. The first few pages
were a disappointment. This wasn’t a book about love or
sex, nor a treatise on pleasure. But I kept going.
It was a revelation. De Beauvoir exposed a long-hidden
truth: that there is no female nature. She consulted biol-
ogy, history, mythology, literature, ethnology, medicine and
psycho analysis to question the roles assigned to women.
The book told me that I control my destiny. If there is no
fixed female essence, then we too are only what we do.
The Second Sex provided me with weapons to under-
stand, to defend, to respond and to persuade. It gave me
the desire to write, an exercise in reclaiming the self.
De Beauvoir knew: “Freedom is an inexhaustible source of
discovery, and every time we give it a chance to develop, we
enrich the world.” —Leïla Slimani, translated from French
by Gretchen SchmidSlimani is the author of The Perfect Nanny and AdèleROOSEVELT: © YOUSUF KARSH; DE BEAUVOIR: © GISÈLE FREUND; MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE, CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS; REPRO-PHOTO: GEORGES MEGUERDITCHIAN. ©IMEC, FONDS MCC, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/GISÈLE FREUND, ART RESOURCE, NY