Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
Filed under the name Simone · May 13, 2026
Simone de Beauvoir wrote "The Second Sex," which is basically foundational for modern feminist thought — like, an actual root text a huge amount of later thinking grows directly out of, the kind of book you cite even now without fully realizing how much of the vocabulary you're using came from her first. I'm taking communications and pre-law right now and keep running into her ideas secondhand in readings that never even bother crediting the original source anymore, which says something about how deeply absorbed her framework has become. There's something both cool and a little unsettling about a thinker becoming so foundational that people forget she's the reason they're even asking these questions in this particular way. I get genuinely fired up about structural stuff — gig work, scheduling algorithms, whose labor counts and whose doesn't — and de Beauvoir was doing that same kind of structural thinking about gender back when almost nobody with real academic standing was taking it seriously at all.