Simone de Beauvoir
Introduction
Simone de
Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. While
she did not consider herself a philosopher, Beauvoir had a significant
influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. She wrote extensively on the theory of
subjectivity and identity and Existentialism. She
opined relationship must not be institutionalized. This met with the
disapproval of many of her friends and relatives.
Life sketch
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie
Bertrand de Beauvoir,
commonly known as Simone
de Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908. She was the eldest
daughter of a respected bourgeois family.
De Beauvoir was educated in private institutions and under
the religious discretion of her mother. De Beauvoir declared herself an atheist
while she was still an adolescent, later arguing that religion was only a
method of avoiding truth. She committed herself early to a life of learning,
studying, and writing. When de Beauvoir was 21 years old she went to live with
her grandmother, and began to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Writings
Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, an
autobiography, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She
is best known for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed
analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
Background
1.
Personal conditions:
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the
elder daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once
aspired to be an actor, and Françoise (née) Brasseur, a wealthy
banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. The family struggled to maintain their
bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I,
and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent
school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child, at one point
intending to become a nun (priest) until she experienced a crisis of faith at
age 14, after which she remained an atheist for the rest of her life.
2.
Impact of Sartre’s philosophy:
In 1929 de Beauvoir passed her aggregation in philosophy
with a thesis on Leibniz. This same year, she met a group of students including
Paul Nizan, Andre Hermaid, and Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the key figures in
the philosophy of Existentialism. Sartre and de Beauvoir began their
lifelong partnership, becoming best friends and intellectual equals. The pair
ranked as the top two students of their graduating class. The influence of the
two philosophers on each other's work is remarkable. Their relationship would
become famous for the unique commitment they made to each other which involved
the freedom to love other people and the practice of complete openness and
honesty between them. They would never marry, although it was spoken of at one
point, for de Beauvoir in particular felt strongly that their relationship must
not be institutionalized. This met with the disapproval of many of her friends
and relatives.
Beauvoir refuted a few thoughts of Hegel especially the ones
dealing with immanence. Immanence refers
to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence in which the divine is seen to be manifested in or
encompassing the material world. It is often contrasted with theories of Transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be
outside the material world. It is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world
permeates the mundane.
Second wave feminism:
French philosopher Simone
de Beauvoir provided
a Marxist solution and an existentialist view on many of the
questions of feminism with the publication of Le DeuxièmeSexe (The
Second Sex) in 1949. The book expressed
feminists' sense of injustice. Second-wave feminism is a feminist
movement beginning in the early 1960s and continuing to the present; as such,
it coexists with third-wave feminism. Second wave
feminism is largely concerned with issues of equality other than suffrage, such
as ending discrimination.
Second-wave feminists see women's
cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked and encourage women
to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and as
reflecting sexist power structures.
The feminist activist and author Carol
Hanisch coined the slogan "The Personal is Political",
which became synonymous with the second wave.
Political philosophy of Beauvoir:
1.
Advocacy
of feminism through ‘The Second Sex’:
“One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman”
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Revolutionary and incendiary, The Second Sex is one of the
earliest attempts to confront human history from a feminist perspective.In The
Second Sex, her most famous work, de Beauvoir sketches a kind of existential
history of a woman’s life: a story of how a woman’s attitude towards her body
and bodily functions changes over the years, and of how society influences this
attitude. Here de Beauvoir raises the core
question of female embodiment: Are the supposed disadvantages of the female
body actual disadvantages which exist objectively in all societies, or are they
merely judged to be disadvantages by our society? She answers this question by
exploring case studies of the various stages of female life. In these case
studies the female body is presented as both positive and negative, and women
as both oppressed and free. A woman’s body is the site of this ambiguity, for
she can use it as a vehicle for her freedom and feel oppressed by it. There is
no essential truth of the matter: it depends upon the extent to which a woman
sees herself as a free subject rather than as the object of society’s gaze.
It won de Beauvoir many admirers and just as many
detractors. Today, many regard this massive and meticulously researched
masterwork as not only as pillar of
feminist thought but of twentieth-century philosophy in general.
v
What is a woman?
In her book, Simone de Beauvoir begins by
explaining how she has wanted to write a book about women. The problem she
faces during this story is what the definition of women is, do women really
exists, and what is a woman. She explores the different aspects of life as a
woman.
Sartre
observed that whatever we perceive, including other people, is rendered as an
‘object’ to our gaze and is defined by us. De Beauvoir takes
up this idea and applies it to men’s perception of women. The very concept
of ‘woman’, de Beauvoir argues, is a male concept: woman is always ‘other’
because the male is the ‘seer’: he is the subject and she the object – the meaning of what it is
to be a woman is given by men.
De Beauvoir
argues that it is not the biological condition of women per se that
constitutes a handicap: it is how a woman construes this condition which
renders it positive or negative. None of
the uniquely female experiences – the development of female sex organs,
menstruation, pregnancy, menopause – have a meaning in themselves; but in a
hostile or oppressive society they can come to take on the meaning of being a
burden and disadvantage, as women come to accept the meanings a patriarchal
society accords them.
De Beauvoir points out that
pre-adolescent boys and girls are really not very different: they “have the same interests and the same pleasures” (The
Second Sex, p295, Translation and Ed, H.M. Parshley, Vintage, 1997). If the
initial psychological differences between young boys and girls are relatively
trivial, what then causes them to become important? If one ‘becomes’ a woman, how does this
‘becoming’ happen?
v The Flesh and the Feminine:
Stages in a woman’s
life
As
a girl: De Beauvoir argues that as a
girl’s bodily development occurs, each new stage is experienced as traumatic and demarcates her more and
more sharply from the opposite sex. As the girl’s body matures, society
reacts in an increasingly hostile and threatening manner. De Beauvoir talks
about the process of ‘becoming flesh’, which is the process whereby one comes
to experience oneself as a sexual, bodily being exposed to another’s gaze. This
does not have to be a bad thing; but unfortunately, young girls are often
forced to become flesh against their will: “The young girl feels that her
body is getting away from her… on the street men follow her with their eyes and
comment on her anatomy. She would like to be invisible; it frightens her to
become flesh and to show flesh” (p333).
A
Growing Girl: There are many more such events
in a growing girl’s life which reinforce the belief that it is bad luck to be
born with a female body. The female body is such a nuisance, a pain, an
embarrassment, a problem to deal with, ugly, awkward, and so on. Even if a girl
tries to forget that she has a female body, society will soon remind her. De Beauvoir gives several examples of this: the mother who
frequently criticizes her daughter ’s body and posture, thus making her feel
self-conscious; the ‘man on the street’ who makes a sexual comment about a
young girl’s body, making her feel ashamed; and a girl’s embarrassment as male
relatives make jokes about her menstruation.
Situations
in which young women can be comfortable: However, de Beauvoir also gives positive examples of having a female body. She shows us that there are situations in which young women can be comfortable in their
bodies – indeed, not only comfortable, but joyous and proud. Consider a girl
who enjoys walking in the fields and woods, feeling a profound connection to
nature. She has a great sense of happiness and freedom in her body which she
doesn’t feel in a social environment. In nature there are no males to gaze upon
her; there are no mothers to criticize her. She no longer sees herself through
others’ eyes, and thus is finally free to define her body for herself.
Sexual intercourse: But she cannot
escape to the natural world forever. As part of belonging to a patriarchal
society she must eventually undergo a
further traumatic event – initiation into sexual intercourse. Intercourse
is physically more traumatic for girls because it involves penetration and
usually some corresponding pain. Culturally it is more traumatic because girls
are kept in a greater state of ignorance than boys, and are often ill-prepared
for what is to come. Culturally too, there are certain techniques of sexual
intercourse which predominate, which may not be ideal for female enjoyment and
orgasm (for instance, man on top). De Beauvoir points out that girls’
sexual education tends to be mainly of the ‘romantic’ sort, which emphasizes
the courtship period and the pleasure of gentle caresses, but never the
penetration. Thus when sex finally happens, it seems a world away from the
romantic fantasies a girl has grown up with. De Beauvoir dryly observes that
for the shocked young woman “love assumes the aspect of a surgical operation”
(p404).
Ultimately, is it the
biological penetration itself which causes the distress, or is it the
culturally-engineered ignorance of young women? De Beauvoir thinks the
biological facts need not be traumatic: the distress is due to a lack of generosity in the man’s sexual
behavior, combined with the woman’s fear of being objectified before an
aggressive sexual gaze. She suggests that the way to a more positive sexual
experience for both genders is through each partner acting in ‘erotic generosity’ towards the other,
rather than in selfish sensuality.
Experience
of Pregnancy: The experiences of pregnancy are more positive, yet
still an ambiguous one for women: it can be both an unfair invasion of her body
and at the same time a wonderful enrichment. As a woman’s pregnancy
develops, society tends to consider her less
sexually attractive, as no longer sexually available. This means that she
temporarily escapes man’s sexual gaze. This is a positive development for a
woman, de Beauvoir argues, because “now she is no longer in service as a sexual
object, but she is the incarnation of her species, she represents the promise of
life, of eternity” (p518).
The aging woman: What about as a woman gets older? The aging woman is described by de Beauvoir as “intent on struggling against a misfortune
that was mysteriously disfiguring and deforming her” (p595). This is a very
negative description of the aging process. It evokes the tone of a cosmetics
advert which pressures women to buy their products to struggle against time.
Nevertheless, de Beauvoir’s description is an honest one. We know from her
autobiographical writings that she really struggled to come to terms with her
aging body: she liked clothes, was considered attractive, and felt upset when
she thought she was losing her looks. Yet as a philosopher she was able to step
back and see that this attitude was due to an inordinate value placed by
society on such ephemeral assets. She had accepted society’s definition of her
worth as her own definition.
She does admit that as a woman
persists through the oncoming of age, she may find herself in a more positive
stage of life: “She can also permit herself defiance of fashion and of ‘what
people will say’; she is freed from social obligations, dieting, and the care
of her beauty” (p595). So although old age has many negative aspects, it can
provide a kind of escape from society’s pressure. The desire to conform is
lifted, and freedom increases. De Beauvoir’s point is that freedom needs
space to move. In the case of female embodiment, there is often no room for
women to really ‘see their bodies through their own gaze’, since the male gaze permeates
everywhere.
v Free Space
The intertwinedness of body and mind helps explain women’s
oppression. Women do not choose to think about their bodies and bodily
processes negatively; rather they are forced to do so as a result of being
embedded in a hostile patriarchal society. On this view the body is not just
the thing we can prod and poke, it is shaped by a plethora of perceptions: if
we feel bad about it, it becomes a ‘bad thing’; if we feel good about it, it
becomes a ‘good thing’. But the way we think about it is not a matter of free
choice unless we live in a society which gives space for that freedom. What
feminist philosophers like de Beauvoir aim to do is to open up a space for that
freedom to flourish.
v Transcendence:
Simone de Beauvoir’s own account of how ‘civilization as a
whole [has produced] this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which
is described as feminine’ goes along these lines: from early times, men have
appropriated those activities which allowed "transcendence", and they
have allocated women to activities which did not allow it. Among early humans:
men controlled tools, and hunting and risked their lives (in hunting and war)
whilst women were tied to reproduction and the maintenance of children. Her
argument is that this happened ‘naturally’ – based on biological
characteristics – but became fixed; and of course once trapped in a role which
in itself prevented ‘transcendence’ women were destined to stay in this role
for centuries.
She therefore
compares women’s experience with that of children: their world is ‘given’, and
they are not able to imagine another one.Broadening out beyond the question of
male-female relationships, de Beauvoir analyses different stances taken by men
in regard to the possibility of transcendence: she says that sometimes men can
exist in a state of ‘infantilism’, allowing themselves to become ‘sub-men’ e.g.
in a lynch-mob. Others are (too) ‘serious’ i.e. they accept their role and
don’t question it – their enthusiasms are ‘things detached from themselves’.
Another kind of person is (too) ‘passionate’ – they “take the object of their
enthusiasms to have an absolute value” ignoring the ultimately subjective
nature of their passions. In doing this they may trample on the subjectivity of
others. A fully free person recognises each person’s subjectivity – “Only the freedom of others can keep each
one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity”. “To will oneself free is also to will
others free.”
2.
Existentialism
A 20th
century philosophical movement emphasizing the uniqueness of each human
existence in freely making its self-defining choices.
Generally for
existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices,
as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives
us. We don’t only create our own values, we create ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir, although an avowed life-long
existentialist posits limits to this central existentialist idea of
self-creation and self-definition, qualifying the absolute freedom Jean-Paul
Sartre posited in Being and Nothingness.
By contrast de Beauvoir presents an ambiguous picture of human freedom, in
which women struggle against the apparent disadvantages of the female body.
Beauvoir on existentialism:
1.
The importance of this
to de Beauvoir, in her examination of the relationship of woman to man, is that
this relationship is traditionally one of dependence; and this also ‘easy’ in
the sense that it avoids the risks associated with economic and personal
freedom. It is also (some would add!) understandable, given the pressures that
a male-dominated society exerts over women. When women do strive to liberate
themselves, men will either try to make them get ‘back into the home’ or will
grant them ‘equality in difference.’
2.
Simone de Beauvoir’s
involvement with existentialism began in 1929 when she met Jean Paul Sartre at
the Sorbonne — indeed; aside from Sartre she is the one writer who accepted the
existentialist label with the most enthusiasm. Much of her early work was
focused on ethical matters — her second book, for example, was The Ethics of Ambiguity.
3.
In this work, de
Beauvoir attempted to create a system of existentialist ethics that were
founded upon the Satrean notion of radical human freedom that was on the one
hand open to all the possibilities the future held, and on the other hand was
committed to taking responsibility for all of one’s chosen actions. For de
Beauvoir, part of the problem with this is the fact that human life is
characterized by an ambiguity created by the combination of both an inner and
an outer life.
4.
A person’s inner life
is based upon their consciousness and their awareness of their own freedom. A
person’s outer life, on the other hand, is based upon their being material
objects — objects which are limited in their freedom by other objects (which
includes both people and society). De Beauvoir further emphasized the rejection
of things like how a person identifies themselves with some fixed set of
qualities or values, arguing instead that being open to the future entails
being open to change, even changes in values.
5.
De Beauvoir’s feminism was based explicitly on
existentialist concepts and terminology.
In her famous work The Second Sex,
she traced the historical pattern of male oppression of women through
historical, literary, and even mythical sources. Her conclusion was that the
current repression experienced by women was largely due to the idea that
maleness was the norm while femaleness is somehow “other” and “different.”
6.
Existentialist themes
are prominent in this work because de Beauvoir argued that part of the problem
which women faced was that the male-dominated society created definitions of
what it means to be a man or a woman, acting as though there were some fixed
male and female natures. This attitude became self-regenerating because women
were taught to accept their own marginalization, thus leading to feelings of
self-alienation which are unique to women. This, in turn, allowed their
oppression to progress in a manner fundamentally different from that
experienced by other groups in society.
7.
True to her
existentialist principles, de Beauvoir argued that women should reject this
process of being made (in
the image of traditional expectation) but should instead become (in the sense of finding
their own path in life). She also argued that while legal rights and economic
independence were necessary for women, they also weren’t sufficient conditions
for real freedom — ultimately, women have to take matters into their own hands.
Simone
de Beauvoir brightly brings up the reasoning that women are not just meant for
doing one thing (being in the house). They are not just meant to be used for
one thing because they have many talents. "But the significance of the
verb to be must be rightly
understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it
really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the
whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation
affords them fewer possibilities". Men still try to fight off that they
are the stronger species and women are just "a menace to their morality
and their interests".
Even
though women have been fought for their freedom rights, their rights to be
equals, their rights to be considered a human being and given respect, are
still going to be branded with the status of being "the other"
Conclusion
1. The theory of Subjectivity and Identity:
While de Beauvoir's comprehensive
work raises many interesting issues, what concerns in this context is her
development of a theory of subjectivity
and identity. Her famous statement, that one is not born but rather becomes
a woman, can be read in this way as arguing that there is no ontological subjectivity
which is the exclusive domain or men or women. Instead, subjectivity can be
granted or withheld by the society in which potential knowing subjects come to
existential consciousness. The result, according to de Beauvoir, of women's
lack of existential subjectivity...
Separation
of Women from Femininity:
One of de Beauvoir's most important contributions to 20th century feminist thought is the separation of "woman" (as a biological entity) from
"femininity" (as a social construction). In her attempt to frame the
debate as such in this she is not entirely successful, since in her section on
biology she paints a very discouraging picture of women's alienation from their
bodies; though she views female biology as an obstacle to be surmounted instead
of a fixed destiny, the fact remains that women's bodies are constituted as
such. Still, this sense of possibilities and the body as a
"situation" rather than a "thing" represents as positive a
view as can be imagined within a paradigm that depends on transcendence of the
physical self. De Beauvoir also argues that biology cannot be understood
outside of its social, economic, and psychological context, and that biology
alone is insufficient to explain why women are constituted as the Other. She
concludes that: "Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious
instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world
are modified through the action of others than herself." (734)
2.
De
Beauvoir rejects psychoanalysis as
an explanatory framework for a number of reasons. First, she refuses to accept
the notion of sexuality as a given, and argues that the psychoanalytic paradigm
gives short shrift to female sexual subjectivity, casting it only as a passive,
pre-determined. More importantly, she proposes that the psychoanalytic model
imposes a normative determinism on women's sexual development, removing all
possibility of conscious action. In the traditional psychonanalytic model which
de Beauvoir cites, women are consistently alienated objects buffeted by the
winds of contradictory and male-centred sexual desires, who can achieve no more
than an ersatz morality which is an adherence to externally determined
standards, not a result of a conscious attempt at transcendence and moral
action.
3.
Rejects
historical materialism:
Though de Beauvoir attempts to build a
historical model of women's subjugation, she
rejects much of the historical materialism of theorists such as Engels. In
her view, economic subjugation is insufficient to account for the existential
Othering of women, and lacks theoretical complexity as an explanatory
perspective. She states: "We must not believe, certainly, that a change in
woman's economic condition alone is enough to transform her…" (734)
Despite this rejection, she notes, in line with Marx, that it was "through
labor that woman has conquered her dignity as a human being..."(144) and
that "this [economic] factor has been and remains the basic factor in her
evolution…" (734) Still, "until it has brought about the moral, social,
cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires, the new woman
cannot appear."(734)
4.
Historical
ethnography:
Having largely discarded the theoretical
streams of biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism, de Beauvoir turns
her attention to historical ethnography
as seen through an existentialist lens. This is, in my opinion, the weakest
part of her argument. In effect, she creates a tautology and falls into the
same theoretical trap that she previously critiques. She argues that men's
activities within the context of prehistory both repeat and transcend life
through invention and creation. Though she ostensibly rejects biology as an
explanation for women's Otherization, she nevertheless locates existential
immanence in early women's biological capacity to reproduce, stating that
women's creative activities would have merely been regarded as reproducing
life, rather than creating something new. She neither explains why women's
childbearing capacity would only be seen as functional reiteration, nor what
evidence exists that women did not themselves create, invent, or shape their
physical world in the same way that men did. De Beauvoir's existentialist cast
raises significant problems if we are to consider what role self-consciousness
would have played in pre-modern humans. Of what significance would
transcendence have been to people who were not using a post-Enlightenment
conception of the individual, for example? Though she uses history as a
theoretical tool, sheahistoricizes human behavior and existential capacities.
5.
Nature-culture binary
De Beauvoir is theoretically indebted to the work of Levi-Strauss (of which Nancy Hartsock is critical), with its attendant problems, and situates
women firmly in the familiar nature-culture
binary. Women represent the
chaotic ambivalence of nature, both idolized fertility and reviled uncontrolled
sexuality, both life-bringer and destroyer. As de Beauvoir writes, "She is
all that man desires and all that he does not attain." (229) Women
represent the immanence of the flesh, both maternal and sexual. Women are
symbolically All, which is to say nothing. Anticipating the work of the French
feminists, de Beauvoir notes that women's mystery is derived in large part from
the absence of language in which to understand them; metaphorically they exist
in the realm of the pre-symbolic. As Other, women exist only in the way in
which the One/Subject chooses to think of himself. In other words, women exist
only as they are conceived of by men; they have no existence in their own
right.
Also anticipating the work of postcolonial feminists, de
Beauvoir draws parallels between women and colonized Others, noting that Others
are situated within an unequal power dynamic: "[R]ich America, and the
male, are on the master side and… Mystery belongs to the slave…The myth of
woman is a luxury."(289) Again, the Other is held by the Subject to
represent that which is chaotic and unknowable; to project undesirable
qualities on to the Other is a luxury enjoyed by the epistemologically
privileged. (Hill Collins, Hartsock, hooks, Harding)
De Beauvoir's model clearly privileges the epistemological
position of the male. While it is perhaps unfair, given her historical context,
to critique de Beauvoir for not thinking outside a Western binary model of
male-female, particularly one which posits femaleness as a deficit and maleness
as an epistemological standard, I feel this is a relevant point to be made from
a theoretical standpoint. De Beauvoir's grounding in European existentialism,
based in Cartesian dualism and in post-Enlightenment liberal notions of private
property, does not account for other possible ways of seeing the world in terms
of the relationship between self, other, and community. In assuming that all
societies, for example, give primacy to private property in the same way, and
moreover as the exclusive province of men, de Beauvoir creates an artificial
social hierarchy that deems patrilineal, property-based societies to be the
most existentially developed.
Another significant problem with de Beauvoir's theory is her use of
evidence. For much of the book, she relies heavily on the literature and
cultural products of the ancients to support her work. First, one can only
imagine what conclusions could be drawn from examining the products of our
cultural imagination out of their context. Second,
In the next section, de Beauvoir develops her famous truism about becoming a woman by tracing a
general history of women's existential evolution from childhood to independent
womanhood. Though she rejects psychoanalysis for the most part, apparently
scorning the notion of penis envy, she still seems to be theoretically indebted
to Freud for the basis of her speculations on childhood subjectivity. Of little
boys, she writes: "Because he has an alter ego [a penis] in whom he sees himself, the little boy can boldly
assume an attitude of subjectivity; the very object into which he projects
himself becomes a symbol of autonomy, of transcendence, of power…" Of
girls, de Beauvoir writes, "[She] cannot incarnate herself in any part of
herself." (306) Thus, because of girls' physical "opaqueness" to
themselves, they are unable to externalize their subjectivity sufficiently to
develop existential autonomy. Here, it appears that de Beauvoir has either
understood Freud too literally to realize that she has adopted much of his
framework for childhood psychosexual development, or that she has anticipated
the work of both the French feminists (particularly Luce Irigaray) and the
neo-Freudians such as Nancy Chodorow. Subjectivity, for de Beauvoir, seems to
begin located firmly in physical characteristics of boys and girls, even though
she ostensibly rejects this notion outright. The boy, since he has a penis,
projects his Self outward, in the idealized form of cognitive autonomy
privileged by post-Enlightenment epistemologists, while the girl, since she has
genitals that are "opaque", "hidden" and thus immanent. De
Beauvoir argues that once children move beyond interest in excretory functions
and their attendant meanings, it is social rewards attached to being male or
female (physically and socially) that determine subjectivity.
Epistemologically,
de Beauvoir anticipates the paradigm of "women's
ways of knowing" of which Code is
so critical. Again, she works with the nature-culture, female-male binary to argue that women's epistemological grounding is
fundamentally different from men's by virtue of their biology and experience.
This division between thinking/abstracting and living/experiencing is
responsible, states de Beauvoir, for differences in male and female
epistemologies and cognitive processes.
De Beauvoir's work is useful, not because of its theoretical
framework, but rather for its singular significance as the first major 20th century work of liberal feminist thought.
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