Simone de Beauvoir (born 9 January 1908; died 14 April 1986), philosopher, feminist, novelist, autobiographer, social critic and French intellectual, remains a writer who escapes easy classification. Objectification, as a woman or as a writer, was something she always resisted. Widely revered in the feminist movement for having re-defined our understanding of women's oppression in Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] (1947), and setting a new agenda for second-wave feminism in the 1970's onwards, she did not initially identify with feminism. The Second Sex was undertaken as a philosophical exploration of what it meant to be a woman, not as a feminist polemic. Apart from the shocked reception to The Second Sex, B…
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