Women have been writing about philosophical issues since ancient times. However, until the late 20th-century philosophy was almost entirely dominated by men. Philosophers like Aristotle and Plato wrote about ethics and metaphysics. Female philosophers were not heard from because they were sidelined. Their philosophy was considered more as a political regime than a thought-provoking theory, however, one female philosopher and her works in the 40s inspired both the Liberation movement in the 1960s and second-wave feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher who wrote about existentialism. Her book The Second Sex was published in 1949 and dealt with the subject of gender identity. De Beauvoir argued that women were not just different from men because they were biologically female, but also because of the social roles they were expected to play. For example, she said that women did not just object to be looked at, but subjects who could think and act independently. She believed that women should break free from conventional feminine behavior and instead become active individuals, as well as rejecting ideas that women should imitate men. Like her lover, Sartre, she wrote about existentialism and believed that women can break free from norms and create their own identities rather than passively accepting social norms.
