Event date
11 June 2025
Event time
15:30 – 17:00
Oxford week
TT 7
Venue
Faculty of Law – Seminar Room F
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published 1949, at the end of a turbulent decade in France. In July 1943 Marie-Louise Giraud was the last woman to be put to death by guillotine—by the Vichy government, for performing abortions. In 1944, French women gained the right to vote; in 1945 they first voted. On 27 October 1946 the constitution of the Fourth French Republic was approved—including a new declaration of rights. And in 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris. When Simone de Beauvoir introduced The Second Sex, she described it as an attempt “to take stock of the current state” of women in France after “an era of muddled controversy”.
Although it has become a commonplace in feminist theory to criticize or dismiss this work as insufficiently intersectional, whether it is depends on what we take its aims and scope to be. These, I argue, are better understood in view of its historical situation. Beauvoir’s moral and political philosophy assigns an absolute value to each human being. But she was not triumphalist about rights: in The Second Sex we read “Even when rights are recognized in the abstract,” she writes, “a long habit prevents them finding concrete expression in customs.” Bringing The Second Sex into dialogue with Montesquieu’s distinction between law and custom in The Spirit of the Laws, this presentation will draw on my paper ‘Femininity, love, and alienation’ to outline the customs Beauvoir believed perpetuated injustice for women and the value theory by which she condemned them.”
Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. She is the author of several books and articles on twentieth-century French philosophy, especially the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019) has been translated into eleven languages. In 2021 she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her current project, a philosophy commentary on The Second Sex.
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