Abstract
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was published seventy years ago at the outset of second-wave feminism and presented a celebrated philosophical and meticulous study of women in their contemporary and historic(al) situations from various angles, such as psychoanalytical, historical, literary, and biological. De Beauvoir analyzes the feminine myth as it appears in works of famous writers highlighting that each separate author contributes to the great collective myth of women. In works of thinkers she chooses to interpret, the woman appears as a privileged Other. Women, according to de Beauvoir, belonged to this category for centuries: “she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.” The Otherness is usually a hostile entity, as it is perceived by various social strata; De Beauvoir acknowledges a woman of letters and femme philosophe Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) as one of those wo/men who dared to protest against their harsh destiny and unjust position. Gouges is known not only for her book The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), but also as one of the first advocates who defended women’s human rights and victims of injustice, and for demanding the emancipation of slaves.
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Notes
- 1.
Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 248.
- 2.
Ibid. (original emphasis).
- 3.
Ibid., p. xx.
- 4.
This word wo/men is used in Elisabeth Schüssel Fiorenza’s The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2007).
- 5.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/gouges/. “Olympe de Gouges (1748—1793),” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (last accessed 05/08/2020). The adoption of Universal Declaration of Human Rights was introduced after World War II.
- 6.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27083/27083-h/27083-h.htm. “The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill (last accessed 05/08/2020). The UN 2030 Agenda encourages the engagement of men in elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls.
- 7.
Great Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W.H.D. Rouse, with an introduction by Matthew S. Santirocco and a new afterword by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. (Signet Classics, 2015), p. 295.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
In “Gender Justice,” Anca Gheaus discusses “the injustice involved in the gendered division of labor, which is one of the most important, yet philosophically disputed, gender issues in the developed world.” Anca Gheaus. “Gender Justice.” Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2011: 1.
- 11.
Madame de Staël, Early American Imprints. Second Series; No. 29847 (Boston: Published and Sold by W. Wells and T.B. Wait &, 1813), p. 151.
- 12.
J. S. Mill. “The Subjection of Women.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27083/27083-h/27083-h.htm (last accessed 11/4/2019).
- 13.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/ “The Sustainable Development Agenda.” (last accessed 02/26/2019).
- 14.
Julian Barling. Gender and Leadership. In The Science of Leadership: Lessons from Research for Organizational Leaders (Oxford University Press, Chapter 8, 2014), pp. 205–206.
- 15.
Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam. 2006. “What Lies Beyond the Glass Ceiling?” Human Resource Management International Digest 14 (3): 3. The Wall Street Journal coined the term “glass ceiling” in the 1980s.
- 16.
Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam. 2006. “What Lies Beyond the Glass Ceiling?” Human Resource Management International Digest 14 (3): 4.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Susan Vinnicombe, Ronald J. Burke, Stacy Blake-Beard, and Lynda L. Moore. Handbook of Research on Promoting Women’s Careers (Elgar Original Reference. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), p. 3.
- 20.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/100948; Article for Daily Express (“What my daughter must learn in the next nine years”), 1960, Margaret Thatcher (last accessed 11/14/2019).
- 21.
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2018_technical_notes.pdf; “Calculating the Human Development Indices—Graphical Presentation” (last accessed 11/17/2019). In most countries, the maximum years of schooling—eighteen—is equivalent for getting master’s degree; and the maximum for “mean years of schooling, fifteen, is the projected maximum of this indicator for 2025.
- 22.
https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/MDG/Post2015-SDG/UNDP-SDG-UNDG-Reference-Guide-UNCTs-2015.pdf. “Mainstreaming the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
- 23.
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld; “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (last accessed 02/26/2019).
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Michael A. Genovese (ed.) Women as National Leaders (Sage, 1993), p. 3.
- 27.
James MacGregor Burns. Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 4.
- 28.
Judy B. Rosener. “Ways Women Lead,” https://hbr.org/1990/11/ways-women-lead (last accessed 10/01/2019).
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
James MacGregor Burns. Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 4.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 36.
Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O’Donnell (eds.). Women’s Emancipation Writing at the Fin De Siècle (Routledge, 2019). See “Introduction.”
- 37.
James MacGregor Burns. Leadership, p. 50.
- 38.
Chandra T. Mohanty. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 39.
https://bulletin-archive.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2017/articulating-different-future; “Articulating a Different Future: An interview with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (last accessed 11/4/2019).
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union 2015, http://www.ipu.org/pdf/publications/wmnmap15_en.pdf; “Women in Politics: 2015” (last accessed 05/08/2015).
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
See Melanie Hughes. “Armed Conflict, International Linkages, and Women’s Parliamentary Representation in Developing Nations” http://www.pitt.edu/~hughesm/Hughes%202009.pdf, p. 175. (last accessed 05/10/2015).
- 44.
Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery. Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 7.
- 45.
Larisa Gorchakova. “Zheshiny v Rossijskom Obshestve” (English translation: “Women in Russian Society”), Alma mater: Vestnik Vysshej Shkoly. № 2, (2010): 79–80.
- 46.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104051; Radio Interview for London Broadcasting (LBC); Margaret Thatcher, 1979 (last accessed 11/06/2019).
- 47.
https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/barrier-bias/; “Barriers & Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership.” (last accessed 11/15/2019).
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (last accessed 11/4/2019).
- 52.
Reidar Maliks and Johan Karlsson Schaffer (eds.) Moral and Political Conceptions of Human Rights: Implications for Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 26.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 54.
https://bulletin-archive.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2017/articulating-different-future; “Articulating a Different Future: An interview with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (last accessed 11/4/2019).
- 55.
Ibid.
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Shabliy, E.V. (2020). Women’s Leadership and Political Opportunity Structures. In: Shabliy, E., Kurochkin, D., Ayee, G. (eds) Global Perspectives on Women’s Leadership and Gender (In)Equality . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41822-9_1
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