Sartre was under sustained verbal attack in Paris… [de Beauvoir] believed she could defend [his] positions… by writing an essay in which she defined herself personally as a woman and philosophically as an existentialist. Her intention was to relate them both to Sartre’s system, which she had accepted unquestioningly as her own. . . .In order to defend what she believed were Sartre’s universal principles, she had to begin with the specific and the individual, which in this case was her role within his system. . . .One idea began “to emerge with some insistence” from her thinking. It brought her to “the very profound and astonishing realization” that she was different from Sartre “because he was a man and I was only a woman.”