Key Political Thinkers

In Our Time: Simone de Beauvoir

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06j5ncn

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.

Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Thinker for Modern Times

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswps0

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher and writer whose work exploring what it is to be a woman shaped feminist thinking today. A pioneering intellectual, she used her existential ideas around freedom and responsibility to shape her life, literature and politics.
Rajan Datar discusses her life and work with writers Claudine Monteil and Lisa Appignanesi, and philosopher Tove Pettersen.

Second Wave Feminism – Kate  Millet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/70sfeminism/

The 1960s may have brought the pill and the sexual revolution but as the 1970s dawned equality of the sexes was still a long way off. Women could be paid less than a man for doing the same job, posts were advertised by gender and ‘sexual harassment’ was an unknown term. No wonder then that the 1970s saw the self-titled second wave feminists motivated to abolish sexism wherever they found it. This collection of television and radio programmes remembers some of the major feminist thinkers of those years and highlights the issues they addressed and attitudes they contested.