"Professors hurled the book across the room . . People sniggered at me in restaurants. The fact that I had written about female sexuality was absolutely scandalous at the time. Men kept drawing attention to the vulgarity of the book, essentially because they were furious at what the book was suggesting - equality between the sexes." In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex was published. Selling over two million copies in its first week in France, it became one of the most influential feminist texts of this century, bringing de Beauvoir international fame. The Second Sex held that "one is not born, but rather one becomes a woman. It is civilisation as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine." De Beauvoir devoted much of her later life to feminist causes, and in 1971 she signed the Manifeste des 343, a manifesto in which well known women admitted having had abortions, to secure a more liberal abortion law. In 1974 she was elected President of the League for the Rights of Women, to campaign for aid for battered wives, single parents and working women.
