ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in the mid 1940s, she did not call herself a feminist until 1965. This was because she rejected ‘first-wave’ feminist groups in France prior to the MLF as reformist and insufficiently radical in their political projects. In 1970, she was asked by activists to become involved in secondwave feminist campaigns, such as the fight for legalised abortion. The 1970s then became a period of feminist activism for Beauvoir. But how did she connect the feminist theory of The Second Sex with feminist praxis?
