2017-01-09 Mon

Simone De Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, and political activist, a feminist and social theorist who was born on 9th January 1908.

Simone De Beauvoir was a staunch feminist and had a considerable influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. She published countless works of fiction and nonfiction during her lengthy career. Some of her most famous being 1949’s The Second Sex, which is considered a pioneering work of the modern feminism movement.

“The Second Sex”, now considered was one of the most important and earliest works on Feminism, is De Beauvoir’s nearly 1000-page critique of patriarchy and the second-rate status granted to women throughout history. It was received with such a great controversy that the Vatican placed the work on the church's list of forbidden texts. Some critics also branded the book as pornography.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in the United States and China and published essays and fictions. In the 1970s de Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She also supported various political causes like the support of Algeria's and Hungary’s struggles for independence during the 1950s and the student movement in France in the late 1960s, also condemning American foreign policy during the Vietnam War.

She was a power to reckon with! Today with so much gender and sex-related crimes on the rise, its women like her from whom we draw our strengths.

Belgium honoured Simone De Beauvoir on one of the stamps in the series of 80 stamps which remembered the great personalities of the 20th century. This artistic stamp 17 francs / 0.42 Euro, issued in 2001 portrays perfectly the modern and ahead-of-her-time personality of De Beauvoir.