What Did Beauvior Mean?

1. What Did Beauvior Mean? • I. What kind of a feminist was Beauvoir? • A. Beauvoir herself only gave public support to feminism for the last 16years of her life. • B. She was ‘an important influence on the so- called sexual revolution of sixties, participated in the second wave of feminism in the seventies, and lived to see the “sex wars” debate in feminist theory in the Us in the eighties’.

2. What Did Beauvior Mean? • C. But Toril Moi mentions two rather contradictory sides to Beauvior as feminist: ‘writing The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claimed, turned her into a feminist,’ and, by contrast, ‘until she was well over 60, Beauvoir did not think of herself as a feminist at all’.

3. What Did Beauvior Mean? • II. What had/has Beauvoir to offer to struggles for liberation, then and now? • A. Beauvoir has been read as one of ‘yesterday’s heroines’ by Elizabeth Wilson. • B. Beauvoir also writes novels; the novels offer accounts of women struggling for greater freedom—often a freedom of the mind or the imagination.

4. What Did Beauvior Mean? • III. How has Beauvoir been read? • A. Beauvoir’s emergence as woman intellectual, and her exploration and theorizing of how one could lives as a ‘free woman in a patriarchal culture, have of course to be read within their specific context. • B. Many have read and been influenced by Beauvoir but, at least until recently, she has remained a prophet largely without honor in her own country.

5. What Did Beauvior Mean? • IV. What might we want to see Beauvoir as having kept faith with? • A. Beauvoir’s work asks: ‘Are there women really? One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should.’ • B. These contradictory issues raised by Beauvoir’s life and work are still central to the liberation of woman.

6. What Did Beauvior Mean? • Source: Ferrier, Carole. “What Did Beauvior Mean?” Hecate 26 (2000): 197-210.