Modern Feminism in Simone de Beauvoir “Woman: Myth and Reality” from The Second Sex

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Modern Feminism
In her revolutionary magnum work, The Second Sex, Beauvoir made fundamental contributions to philosophy. Her reviewers panned her work, even though it was transformative. Because very little profound philosophy on women from a feminist perspective had been done when The "Women: Myth and Reality" was written, the Vatican placed it (along with her novel The Mandarins) on the Index of Prohibited Books. This is because very little profound philosophy on women from a feminist perspective had been done when it was written. Women had been oppressed for a long time, and their voices were rarely heard. Many books about women's subjugation were deemed unfit for publication by the literary elite. Historically and in the present era, systematic examinations of women's oppression were nearly unheard of, except for a few publications. The Women: Myth and Reality is a crucial text in philosophy, feminism, and women's studies because of the breadth of its research and the profundity of its central conclusions.
The Women: Myth and Reality is one of the most influential feminist writings of the twentieth century. It continues the centuries-long process of debunking female inferiority beliefs and rejecting biological explanations for women's secondary place. Simone de Beauvoir, a key figure in French intellectual life and a prize-winning author, brought her considerable understanding of philosophical, historical, and psychological theory to studying the modern woman's predicament (Coblentz et al. p.545). When De Beauvoir imagined a woman as an immanent "Other," unable to reach human freedom and generated opposition to a transcendent mail, who could choose liberty, she drew on existentialist and Marxist notions. The Second Sex examines various female experiences to demonstrate how culture constrains women, rejecting Freudian theories in favor of Marx's historical materialism. According to De Beauvoir, economic freedom, together with birth control, abortion, and child care, would allow women to select their destinies freely. She did not marry despite having a long-term relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and other female partnerships, and she did not marry. De Beauvoir did not identify as a feminist when she wrote The "Women: Myth and Reality," but the book significantly impacted American feminists. When asked about her beliefs in the 1970s, de Beauvoir claimed that she no longer felt that socialism would emancipate women. Instead, she saw feminism as a potentially revolutionary force that would benefit everyone.
The main argument of The Second Sex is that woman has been locked in a long-standing oppressive relationship with a man due to her degradation to being the man's "Other." Beauvoir believes that the self requires otherness to define itself as a subject in line with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy. The category of otherness is thus necessary for the self's formation as a self. The self-concept concerning the woman should be related to the individual's understanding of who they are in the hands of oppressors and how they are likely to see oppression in oppressors. The movement of self-understanding through alterity, on the other hand, is assumed to be reciprocal in that the self is frequently objectified by its other as much as the other is objectified by it (Lakey p. 330). Beauvoir observes that a woman is continually identified as the other by a man who assumes the position of the Self in her three-dimensional research into women's condition.
Beauvoir outlines the myths surrounding gender, such as the myth of the mother, the virgin, the motherland, nature, and so on, in her writings about female feminism. These myths aim to lock women into an unrealistic ideal by denying individuality and the situation of all kinds of women. Because the different forms of the myth of femininity appear inconsistent and duplicated, the ideal set by the Eternal Feminine creates an unachievable expectation. For example, history indicates that for every picture of the mother as a revered life guardian, there are just as many depictions of her as a despised death harbinger. The conflict that man feels about being born and having to die focuses on the mother, who holds both of them responsible. As a result, women are despised and adored, and individual moms are hopelessly entangled in the paradox (L...