The Female Body and the Male Mind: Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir

Forty years ago Simone de Beauvoir sat in front of a blank sheet of paper at the Cafe des Deux Magots, on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, wanting to write about herself:

I realized that the first question to come up was: What has it meant to me to be a woman. At first I thought I could dispose of that pretty quickly. I had never had any feeling of inferiority, no one had ever said to me: “You think that way because you’re a woman”; my f...