DE BEAUVOIR RESPONSE

De Beauvoir Response



De Beauvoir Response

Introduction

The Parisian feminist, activist, and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir issued a formal manifesto of women's liberation. Her philosophy of total gender equity undergirds the feminist activism of the mid to late 20th century. From childhood, which she described in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a dutiful young girl, 1958), she rejected her mother's strict Catholic dogma and believed that women were the equals of males, a concept she gained from reading the speeches of the Quaker suffragist Lucretia Mott. After Beauvoir's father lost his fortune during World War I, she and ...