The Philosopher Queens

In other words, as Young powerfully argues, it is the social structure as a whole that we need to challenge, rather than seeking to blame any single person or policy.

Even if none of those individuals are guilty of committing wrongs against Sandy, nor do they actively intend to render Sandy homeless, the social structure they create through the sum of their actions nevertheless has a serious impact on her housing prospects.

When her daughter Morgan was born, Young brightly wrote to her friends, ‘another socialist feminist has come into the world!’

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

But in the mid-1950s she became convinced that she had been guilty, like many intellectuals, of keeping her cultural privilege to herself.

In this respect, Beauvoir is an excellent example of a dynamic that Virginia Woolf wryly observed in A Room of One’s Own: the consequences of being critical are not the same for women

Beauvoir argued that previously philosophers such as Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty failed to take into account experiences particular to the female body

An American Dilemma (1944), by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal

For much of the twentieth and even twenty-first century Sartre’s reputation as a philosopher overshadowed Beauvoir’s and she was falsely described as having ‘applied’ Sartre’s philosophy in her own works. The fact of the matter was that she publicly disagreed with him (and many others), forged her own version of existentialism, and eventually changed Sartre’s mind

Simone de Beauvoir had a prison metaphor, too. But it was not the human condition that she thought it described – it was the ‘feminine condition’.