Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was probably best known as a

novelist, and a feminist thinker and writer, but she
was also an existentialist philosopher in her own
right and, like her lover Sartre, thought a lot about
the human struggle to be free. As a philosopher
trained in the analytic tradition, I have to admit, I
don’t know a whole lot about existentialism, so I’m
curious to discover on this week’s show with guest
Shannon Mussett how Beauvoir’s feminist thought
relates to her existentialist philosophy. 

Beauvoir’s most famous work was The Second

Sex from 1949, a hugely influential book which laid the groundwork for second-wave
feminism. Where first-wave feminism was concerned with women’s suffrage and
property rights, the second wave broadened these concerns to include sexuality, family,
the workplace, reproductive rights, and so on. All that started with Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex, where Beauvoir outlines the ways in which woman is perceived as “other”
in a patriarchal society, second to man, which is considered—and treated as—the “first”
or default sex.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Early British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-

1797) was a revolutionary thinker who sought to
become “the first of a new genus,” a new kind of
woman. Her life, though short and tumultuous, was
characterized by an Enlightenment-inspired passion
for reason unusual among women of her era.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most

famous work on these themes, was a remarkably
cutting-edge book in 1792, arguing, for example,
that girls and boys should be co-educated and that
women and men should share parental
responsibilities.

Wollstonecraft also presented abortion and infanticide as negative consequences of

moral double standards and women’s submission to sexual objectification and
exploitation by men: “Women becoming, consequently, weaker, in mind and body, than
they ought to be, were one of the grand ends of their being taken into account, that of
bearing and nursing children, have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a
mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection, that ennobles
instinct, either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in
everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom do so with
impunity.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, an English novelist, essayist and

critic, believed that the life of the mind was always
more fascinating than a person's external behaviors.
In her life and in her art, she sought to push beyond
existing boundaries in search of a deeper truth that
lay beneath the surface. Her famous work, “A Room
of One’s Own” centers on the idea that “a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to
write fiction.” Using this argument, Woolf suggests
that there are fewer works of literature by women
because of their lack of property and finances. A
woman requires financial independence in order to
produce creatively. Reminiscent of Wollstonecraft, Woolf asserts the need for women to
gain access to education to further their independence. Her famous fictional figure,
Judith Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s sister), plays on the notion that a woman with
Shakespeare’s talent could have existed, but her lack of education prevents society
from ever knowing of it. In addition, Woolf also stresses the need for a gynocentric
literature that embraces the woman’s perspective. She chronicles a list of accomplished
women authors, such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George
Eliot. In doing so, Woolf creates a canon of women’s literature that embraces the
woman’s voice in its truest form.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan combined activism and theory in her

feminism. She was the author of The Feminist
Mystique (1963) identifying the "problem that has no
name" and the question of the educated housewife:
"Is this all?" She was also the founder and first
president of the National Organization for
Women (NOW) and an ardent proponent of and
organizer for theEqual Rights Amendment. She
generally opposed feminists taking positions that would make it difficult for "mainstream"
women and men to identify with feminism.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) criticized the idea that women could only
find fulfilment through childrearing and homemaking. According to Friedan's obituary in
the The New York Times, The Feminine Mystique “ignited the contemporary women's
movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the
United States and countries around the world” and “is widely regarded as one of the
most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.” In the book, Friedan hypothesizes
that women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and
meaning in their lives through their husbands and children. Such a system causes
women to completely lose their identity in that of their family. Friedan specifically locates
this system among post-World War II middle-class suburban communities. At the same
time, America's post-war economic boom had led to the development of new
technologies that were supposed to make household work less difficult, but that often
had the result of making women's work less meaningful and valuable.

Gloria Steinem

Feminist and journalist, Gloria Steinem was a key

figure in the women's movement from 1969. She
founded Ms. magazine, starting in 1972. Her good
looks and quick, humorous responses made her the
media's favorite spokesperson for feminism, but she
was often attacked by the radical elements in the
women's movement for being too middle-class-
oriented. She was an outspoken advocate for
the Equal Rights Amendment and helped found the
National Women's Political Caucus

Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan is known for her feminist activism and
writing. She is a poet, a novelist, and has also
written non-fiction. Morgan organized the September
1968 protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic
City, the first major public action of contemporary
feminism. That year she co-founded W.I.T.C.H., a
radical feminist group employing guerrilla-theater
actions to call attention to sexism. Morgan designed
the universal logo of the women’s movement, the woman’s symbol centered with a
raised fist. She coined the word “herstory” and has been credited with originating
numerous famous feminist phrases, including “The personal is political,” and
“Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.”
With the royalties from her first anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Morgan
founded the first feminist foundation in the US, The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, which
provided seed money grants to hundreds of early women’s groups throughout the
1970s and 1980s. She led the women’s takeover of the leftist newspaper Rat in 1970,
memorably breaking with the “toxic sexism of the left” in the first women’s issue of the
paper, via her famous essay, “Goodbye to All That.” (During the 2008 presidential
primaries, Morgan wrote a fiery “Goodbye To All That #2” about the misogynistic
rhetoric on and treatment of Hillary Rodham Clinton; the article quickly became viral on
the Internet—as did her “Letters from Ground Zero”written after 9/11 and published at
the back of The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism.
Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist whose early

activism including working against the Vietnam War,
became a strong voice for the position that
pornography is a tool by which men control,
objectify, and subjugate women. With Catherine
MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin helped draft a
Minnesota ordinance that did not outlaw
pornography but allowed victims of rape and other
sexual crimes to sue pornographers for damage,
under the logic that the culture created by
pornography supported sexual violence against
women

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia, a feminist with a strong critique of

feminism, has proposed controversial theories about
the role of sadism and perversity in Western cultural
art, and the "darker forces" of sexuality that she claims
feminism ignores. Her more positive assessment of
pornography and decadence, relegation of feminism
to political egalitarianism, and assessment that
women are actually more powerful in culture than men are has put her at odds with
many feminists and non-feminists.

Dale Spender

Dale Spender, an Australian feminist writer, calls

herself a "fierce feminist."   Her 1982 feminist
classic, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done
to Them highlights key women who've published
their ideas, often to ridicule and abuse.  Her
2013  Mothers of the Novel continues her efforts to
raise up women of history, and analyze why it is that
we largely don't know them..  Most of her
publications have been about women and feminism,
especially bringing back to public attention women
who have become invisible though they made
contributions to literary or intellectual history. She’s
also written about feminism and about intellectual
property and its implications.

Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University

Professor of Sociology at the University of
Maryland and former President of the American
Sociological Association. Collins is a foundational
theorist of what is commonly
called intersectionality, a perspective on inequality
which argues that oppressions of race, class,
gender, and sexuality cannot be understood in
isolation from one another, but instead “intersect”
and help mutually reinforce and shape one
another. For example, Collins argues that the
gender inequality that Black women have
historically experienced is related to but
qualitatively different from the gender inequality experienced by White women. This is
not because of essential differences between Black and White women, but because
White women have historically been privileged racially while Black women have been
dominated through race and gender. Collins first presented this field-shaping
perspective in Black Feminist Thought in 1990. More recently, she has written Black
Sexual Politics, a book that more fully explores and theorizes the intersections of racial
and sexual oppression.

Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi is a journalist who

wroteBacklash:The Undeclared War against
Women, 1991, which argued that feminism and
women's rights were undermined by the media
and corporations -- just as the previous wave of
feminism lost ground to a previous version of
backlash, convincing women that feminism and
not inequality was the source of their frustration.

Faludi has rejected the claim advanced by critics

that there is a "rigid, monolithic feminist
orthodoxy", noting in response that she has
disagreed with Gloria Steinem about
pornography and Naomi Wolf about abortion.
Like Gloria Steinem, Faludi has criticized the obscurantism prevalent in academic
feminist theorizing, saying, "There's this sort of narrowing specialization and use of
coded, elitist language of deconstruction or New Historicism or whatever they're calling
it these days, which is to my mind impenetrable and not particularly useful." She has
also characterized "academic feminism's love affair with deconstructionism" as
"toothless", and warned that it "distract from constructive engagement with the problems
of the public world"

Judith Butler

Considered by many to be the most important

feminist theorist writing today, the philosopher
Judith Butler first came to prominence through her
provocative book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler
controversially critiques the idea that a universal
notion of “woman” should serve as the foundation
of feminist politics and thought. Instead, drawing on
the ideas of Foucault and the philosopher of
language, J. L. Austin, Butler argues that the
seeming reality or naturalness of gender, sex, and sexuality is actually a product of the
ways we act them out in conformity to cultural languages and norms. In addition to her
groundbreaking work on gender and sexual identity, Butler has also written on issues
central to moral and political philosophy. She teaches at the University of California–
Berkeley