de Beauvoir, Simone
de Beauvoir, Simone (1908–86)A Parisian-born philosopher and novelist who graduated from the École Normale Supérieure. She is most celebrated for her two-volume The Second Sex (1949) which has been grossly translated and truncated in its English-language version. This was a wide ranging analysis of the subordination of women, examining biological, historical, and ethnographic aspects. ‘Woman is made not born’, she argued. Literature and belief systems revealed that women were always seen as the ‘other’ to man as subject. Women, she concluded, are seen as nature while man is seen as culture. Such claims rest sometimes on Eurocentric ideological assumptions disguised as universals. Many descriptions of women's existence were in effect vivid details from de Beauvoir's first-hand experience and observations of mid-century Paris and gave authenticity to her text. The book inspired thousands of women readers. She answered a...
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