The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir was a renowned existentialist and one of the principal founders of second-wave feminism. Beauvoir examined women's subordinate role as the 'Other', patriarchally forced into immanence in her book, "The Second Sex," which some claim to be the culmination of her existential ethics. The book includes the famous line, "One is not born but becomes a woman," introducing what has come to be called the sex-gender distinction. Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" provided the vocabulary for analyzing the social constructions of femininity and the structure for critiquing those constructions, which was used as a liberating tool by attending to the ways in which patriarchal structures used sexual difference to deprive women of the intrinsic freedom of their "can do" bodies. Some say Beauvoir is farther reaching than Sartre despite often being overlooked in many comprehensive works about existentialist feminism.