Emma McNicol is a research fellow at the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre.
Simone de Beauvoir’s reputation as a feminist pioneer is well-established, but the influence of Marxism on her thinking is too often overlooked. She wanted to build a socialist movement that would fight class and gender oppression at the same time.
The Second Sex is rightly celebrated as a classic work of feminist theory. But it’s often forgotten that Simone de Beauvoir saw it as a socialist text carefully anatomizing the relationship between gender and class oppression.