Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher, writer and university teacher. In her new book How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) offers an introduction to Beauvoir’s thinking about authenticity and how experience and situation shape the people we become. For Beauvoir, as an existential philosopher, we first exi ... Show More
Sep 16
David L Hoffmann, "Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2026)
Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) examines the place of women in Soviet Russia from the 1917 Revolution through the post-World War II period, discussing how the Soviet construction of gender perpetuated inequality even as it dramatically e ... Show More
56m 11s
Sep 13
Leda M Perez, "Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America" (Temple UP, 2026)
How can we achieve lasting social and political equality for women? Dr. Leda Pérez tackles this thorny question in Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) by interrogating egalitarianism in Latin Amer ... Show More
53m 37s
Sep 12
Isabela Seong Leong Quintana, "Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles" (UNC Press, 2026)
Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican wo ... Show More
48m 23s
Oct 2015
Simone de Beauvoir
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immedi ... Show More
46 m
Jul 2019
Kate Kirkpatrick on the life and work of Simone de Beauvoir
In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Kate Kirkpatrick, author of a new biography of Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir, discusses the relationship between the life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir is often portrayed as applying Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism to th ... Show More
17m 8s
Nov 2021
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
Kick-starting second-wave feminism with her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was a key member of the Parisian circle of Existentialists alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Her philosophical influences include Descartes and Bergson, phen ... Show More
44m 51s
Feb 2024
Human Conditions: ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woma ... Show More
12m 41s