Research Paper On Simone De Beauvoir

Many women in todays society are strong and independent. No longer second to the men in their lives. Women can now hold political positions, careers that were at one point considered “men’s careers” and can even be the head of household in their homes. This as we know was not always the case and in fact has only began to change in the last decade or so. Women for as many years as we can search history have been known to be the housewives and mothers and only that. They held no positions in society and lived directly in the way they were told they would by the men in their lives. Why was that the case? Well the answer to that question would depend on who was asked. Simone de Beauvoir might tell you that women were suppressed because they allowed

Although she agrees then men have placed the ideals upon women of what they should and will be it is the women themselves who are at fault because they allowed these constraints. De Beauvoir challenged all women to make a change, she herself even tried to achieve this goal. De Beauvoirs “The Second Sex” notes that women are even less powerful then other minority groups. The Negroes, The Indo-Chinese and the proletarians in Russis have all formed a “we” mentality. They have a past, history, religion which holds them together and forms a community feeling which will help to organize them against their suppressor. Women however, live among and love those who suppress them. They can not form a plan to take out men. It is the men who they are faithful to not each other as women. It is the relationship between their suppressors (men) that make women a minority that no other minority class can compare

She declared that it wasn’t the fault of just men, or of just women, but the whole society that placed constraints on women. The difference between the way boys and girls were raised had a huge impact on the way they would effect society as they grew. Woolf theorized that women would only ever become powerful if they broke the contraints set on them by men. They needed freedom both finantially, creatively as well as privacy. A women she said would never be as successful as men because they aren’t afforded the same opportunitys. Women did not grow up with their own space. In her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” she discusses an imaginary sister of William Shakespeare. Jidith, (The fake sister) would have been just as great as William however, because she wasn’t given the time or space and privaxy that William had she would never have created greatness as he did but the main point is she could have! Women as we have learned throughout this course would often times write and publish under a mans name in order to express their art because women were not considered to be successful