“Why am I a feminist”: when Simone De Beauvoir explained her fight against patriarchy on TV

35 years ago, the French philosopher and writer died Simone de Beauvoir, which stood out in its fight for equal rights for women. Author of seven novels, among which stands out Mandarins, also wrote theater, memoirs and essays, being The second sex, from 1949, one of the most important. The text has returned to the center of the debate in recent years, after the growth of feminist movements around the world.

In a 1975 interview on Rare TV, De Beauvoir takes up the ideas of The second sex in a historic interview to which enominó Why am i a feminist with the French journalist Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, who sees the book as an “ideological reference” as important to feminists as The capital of Marx it is for the communists.

When Servan-Schreiber asks him about one of his most quoted sentences: “You were not born a woman, you are becoming”, the intellectual develops an answer which, even today – at 46 years old – is very current.

“Yes, this formula is the basis of all my theories…. Its meaning is very simple, that being a woman is not a natural fact. It is the result of a certain history. There is no biological or psychological destiny that defines a woman as such…. Girls are made to be women, ”he said.

Without denying the fact of biological difference, de Beauvoir debunks the idea that sexual differences are sufficient to justify hierarchies of social status and power based on sex. The second-class status of women, she argues, is the result of a “long historical process”; Even though institutions no longer intentionally deprive women of power, they still intend to retain the power that men have historically accumulated.

Watch the video of the interview:

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