by Simone de Beauvoir
In 1946, when Simone de Beauvoir began to write her landmark study of women, The Second Sex, legislation allowing French women to vote was little more than a year old. Birth control would be legally denied them until 1967. Next door, in Switzerland, women would not be enfranchised until 1971. Such repressive circumstances account for both the fierce, often wrathful urgency of Beauvoir s book and the vehement...
(more)