Knowledge to Advance Society: Questions and Elusive Answers in The Second Sex Anonymous College

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex serves as a foundation for the second wave of feminism, and later, the third wave. De Beauvoir believed that a social struggle was needed to solve society's problems, not a women's movement. Second-wave feminism brought society’s issues to the table that include: family, the workplace, sexuality, reproductive rights, and actual legal inequalities. From de Beauvoir's point of view, the point of feminism was to transform society and women's place in it. When the third wave of feminism came around in the 1990’s, its main definition, an "individual movement" where its purpose includes redefining what it is to be a feminist, is nearly the exact opposite of her stance in The Second Sex. According to de Beauvoir, the implied definition of feminism should be for females to leave this “Other” category that males put them into; which does not follow this third wave movement of isolating themselves in this “Other” category. Although the definition of feminism has strayed from her ideas, de Beauvoir has a great impact on the advancement of equality of the genders in society by not necessarily giving out an instruction manual on how to eliminate this inequality, but rather stir up a debate on how we act...