There are some thinkers who are, from the very beginning, unambiguously identified as philosophers e. There are others whose philosophical place is forever contested e. Simone de Beauvoir is one of these belatedly acknowledged philosophers. That place is now uncontested.
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If we would have to make a list of must read books before you die, The Second Sex would definitely be on it. No, young readers, there is nothing sexual in it, although the author refers to sexuality the title refers to the female gender which was considered and let me say it is still considered a second class sex. I hope that most of you have heard about Simone de Beauvoir as she is a significant persona of the 20th century but even if you haven't you are very lucky because today you are going to learn about her! In order to understand this book it is essential to know the background and the beliefs of the writer. Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in , just 10 years before women were allowed to get elected in parliament in the UK and decades before women were allowed to vote in France in Along with being a female critical thinker de Beauvoir was also a female writer.
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The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? But first we must ask: what is a woman? But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest.
Beauvoir was then a thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual who had been enfranchised for only a year. Legal birth control would be denied to French women until , and legal abortion, until Not until the late s was there an elected female head of state anywhere in the world. Girls of my generation searching for examples of exceptional women outside the ranks of queens and courtesans, and of a few artists and saints, found precious few. While no one individual or her work is responsible for that seismic shift in laws and attitudes, the millions of young women who now confidently assume that their entitlement to work, pleasure, and autonomy is equal to that of their brothers owe a measure of their freedom to Beauvoir. The Second Sex was an act of Promethean audacity — a theft of Olympian fire — from which there was no turning back. Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in into a reactionary Catholic family with pretensions to nobility.
