As Woman's Hour celebrates 60 years on air, we look back to the 1940s and mark the significant events that had an impact on women.
"One is not born a woman, one becomes one" Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 'The Second Sex'. Her book was published in 1949 and was to become a classic text for the women's movement. But many have questioned the extent to which this philosophical tract had a practical impact on women's lives.
Over the last 60 years women have written about the ways in which they are constrained by society and their desire for freedom and social change, from Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' in the 1960s to Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' in 1970 to Naomi Woolf's 'The Beauty Myth' in 1990. But what impact did these texts have on women? And what legacy do they offer young women today?
Jane Little is joined by Germaine Greer and Natasha Walter to discuss de Beauvoir's classic and the extent to which the big feminist books of the last 60 years have changed women's lives.
