Seventy-five years ago, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir opened her magnum opus, The Second Sex, with the question that most paralyzes us culturally and politically today: “What is a woman?”
As Emina Melonic remarks in her thoughtful essay on the moral weakness of The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s conviction that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” reads as though it “could have been said today.” Yet, as Ginevra Davis points out in an excellent American Affairs piece entitled “How Feminism Ends,” “Beauvoir’s woman is certainly female. She is raped, bleeds, and is brutally ‘deflowered’ on her wedding night. She is a rational mind, in a female body; a mind not born, but made, weak.”
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