#15: Simone de Beauvoir
Some writers change the conversation so thoroughly that later generations forget how radical the original intervention really was. Simone de Beauvoir is one of those figures. Born in Paris in 1908, she became a major force in philosophy, literature, and feminist thought. Her most famous work, The Second $ex, examined how women had been shaped and defined through social structures that treated maleness as the default and womanhood as the secondary position.
