![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In her renowned introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir points out the fundamental asymmetry of the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” Masculinity is considered to be the “absolute human type,” the norm or standard of humanity. This idea resounds in de Beauvoir’s famous statement: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” Influenced by Sartrean existentialism, Marxism, Psychoanaysis and Hegel, she argued that the objectification of woman permeates human history and informs the whole of Western philosophical thought. In highlighting this subordination, the book explains ,1 in characteristic existentialist fashion how the “essence” of woman was in fact created - at economic, social, political, religious levels by historical developments representing the interests of men. ![]() Whereas man has been enabled to transcend and control his environment, always furthering the domain of his physical and intellectual conquests, woman has remained imprisoned within ” immanence” remaining a slave within the circle of duties imposed by her maternal and reproductive functions. Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated to the position of the “other”, that which is adjectival to the substantial subjectivity and the existential activity of man. ![]()
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