Simone de Beauvoir's monumental work Le Deuxième Sexe, published in Paris in 1949, analysed women's oppression through every dimension of their existence — including the clothing and bodily disciplines imposed on them from childhood. De Beauvoir argued that femininity was not natural but constructed, and that fashion, including the corset and its successors, was one of the instruments by which society enforced women's subordinate status. The book sold 22,000 copies in France in the first week and was subsequently translated into dozens of languages.

The Second Sex became the theoretical foundation of second-wave feminist literary criticism and poetry, providing the conceptual tools with which women poets analysed the relationship between their constrained bodies and their constrained speech. Adrienne Rich's later writings on 'the body' as a feminist poetic subject owe a direct debt to de Beauvoir. The book's arguments are explicitly present in the body-centred feminist poetry that emerged from the 1960s through the 1980s.