Simone de Beauvoir and the feminist revolution

In this free course you will study the ideas of philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). In doing so you will also briefly study the philosophy of Beauvoir’s lifelong partner, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The type of philosophy that links them is called ‘existentialism’. Beauvoir and Sartre are the foremost philosophers of French existentialism. You will read extracts of Beauvoir’s work and learn about the existential view of the human being as free and responsible for his or her actions. You will discover that Beauvoir argues that women are generally conceived of as ‘Other’, that is different from a supposed neutral human being.This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A113 Revolutions63and is part of a set of four OpenLearn courses, covering Revolutions of the Sixties64.Transcript

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Freedom and women: Simone de Beauvoir
• 1 Freedom and women: Simone de Beauvoir
• 1.1 Who was Simone de Beauvoir?
• 1.2 The Second Sex, the 1960s and the feminist revolution
• 1.3 What does it mean to be a woman?
• 2 Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
• 2 Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
• 2.1 Women as the ‘Other’
• 2.2 The Second Sex and existentialism
• 2.3 Comparison with ethnic minorities
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements