Hello, you're very welcome to Longree. It's a Jacobin podcast where we look in

depth at political topics and thinkers. My name's Daniel Finn, and the features editor

here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show. When Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986,

French TV news described her as a symbol of women's liberation.

But they couldn't resist bracketing her name with that of Jean-Paul Satt,

her lifelong partner. Almost four decades later, Beauvoir's reputation

as a pioneering feminist thinker is well-established. The main challenge she faces

today is misunderstanding rather than neglect. I guess today for a conversation

about Beauvoir's work and legacy is Emma McNichol. She's a research fellow at

the Monash gender and family violence prevention centre. How has the discussion of

Simone de Beauvoir's work and ideas been affected by what we know or perhaps what

we think we know about her personal life? The Simone de Beauvoir is someone

with whom millions of people have always felt very familiar, someone that they've

felt acquainted with, and often maybe still someone whose life choices people

feel very free to comment on. She's probably first and foremost known as the

beautiful partner of the most important European philosopher of her time, Satt,

even though she herself was a super engaged and diligent philosopher. But that's

really been overlooked. The overlooking of her as a philosopher is not entirely

irreducible to sexism, by which I would think that the question of whether society

found it too difficult to embrace the reality that a woman was actually

philosophising. So there are significant implications regarding the fact that we

have over emphasised her life, over her work, in terms of how we understand her

...