Simone de Beauvoir’s was the first attempt to show how consciousness of one’s lower status, of one’s deviance from the norm, can affect women. Though earlier thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had made the case for women’s rights, Beauvoir went beyond advocacy: her deep study of the philosophy, psychology, and history of female alterity opened up entirely new channels of thought. With
The Second Sex, the modern feminist polemic was born.
