Entry into production and reproductive freedom drive women’s political emancipation

Evidence

The convergence of these two factors—participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery—explains the evolution of woman’s condition. As Engels predicted, her social and political status necessarily had to change. The feminist movement begun in France by Condorcet and in England by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and followed up at the beginning of the century by the Saint-Simonians, never succeeded for lack of a concrete base. But now women’s claims would have ample weight. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Beauvoir here deploys Engels’ historical-materialist framework that runs through the chapter; connects to the broader Continental materialist-feminist lineage. — connects to: Major political upheavals, not gradual progress, reshaped women’s condition.; Reactionary thought explicitly naturalized women’s confinement to housework; Economic need, not ideology, drove women’s emancipation in Muslim societies — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1147 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Beauvoir says the earlier feminist movement ‘never succeeded for lack of a concrete base’ — worth tracing what she means by the absence of material conditions before industrialization.

Broader Connections

• Economic need, not ideology, drove women’s emancipation in Muslim societies #qualifies (0.75) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1147
• Schooling enables women to control fertility and pursue socioeconomic advancement #expands (0.72)
• Capitalist economic change, not feminism, drove women into the workforce #qualifies (0.72) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 303