Simone de Beauvoir rejected and avoided categorisation throughout her life, particularly regarding her identity and her writing, choosing to express alignment with a label only if it furthered her philosophical thinking on the lived experience of freedom. Specifically, it was through her writing that Beauvoir sought to inspire revolution. Yet, at different points throughout her second autobiography, The Prime of Life, she writes of feeling unable to act even while aware of the responsibility required in realising freedom. She reflects on her own inaction against the capacity of her friends, Colette Audry and Simone Labourdin, to participate in support of a general strike against the rise of fascism:

In this disclosure, Beauvoir shows what I see as her greatest strength – her capacity to reflect on her life and political position to rethink and remake it. She does not shy away from the cost of her mistakes, if indeed she agrees they occurred; rather, she demonstrates her ability to embrace ambiguity despite the struggle it so often entails. Here, Beauvoir credits her experience of the war period as igniting a commitment to put action over ideas and is no longer satisfied to keep ‘situation in life at arm's length’ (PL 342). She saw her writing as the creative means through which she might exercise political action, which later evolved into more public engagements (such as interviews with television and radio, and participation in political marches). This new mode of embodied political action pulled her into more visible and vulnerable situations, confirming her early philosophical idea (first expressed in Pyrrhus and Cineas) that ambiguity is central to the development and evolution of an ethical life, and at the same time, foundational to rich but unavoidably tumultuous emotional experience.