The Feminine Female

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in 1949, was in some ways a book before its time. It inaugurated the discussion of themes that were taken up actively only with the beginning of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement, towards the end of the 60s. Basic political rights for women, secured in most states by the 40s, had failed to achieve much more than the nominal recognition of the principle that gender and citizenship were categories that ought to have nothing to do with each other. It was the struggles of the 60s in the civil rights, student, and the third world movements for a liberation going beyond the formalities of official equality which gave the immediate impetus to the appearance of the new women's movement. At this point, with the need for theoretically rethinking the position of women still all too prone, as Stokely Carmichael notoriously attested The Second Sex really came into its own.' It supplied a brilliant analysis of the various limitations to which western women have been subjected through history, both in the actual conditions of their lives and in the ideologies through which these constraints are maintained

Political science · Sociology · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Psychology

• Representations of Bisexuality in Australian Film

  Janet Watson•Journal of Bisexuality•2008

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