" Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?

Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy (...) written since her death. (shrink)

4. Giving Voice: Beauvoir's Legacy in Two Perspectives.

In this paper I attempt to further the case, made in recent years by Eva Gothlin, that readers interested in a philosophical return to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex have good reason to heed Beauvoir's appropriation of central concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time. I speculate about why readers have been hesitant to acknowledge Heidegger's influence on Beauvoir and show that her infrequent though, I argue, important use of the Heideggarian neologism Mitsein in The Second Sex makes inadequate sense (...) apart from an appreciation of the fundamental role played by her appropriation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in that book. I suggest a way to square Beauvoir's Hegelian claim that human beings are fundamentally at odds with one another with her Heideggerian view that we are also all ontologically with one another. Finally, I sketch out a way of interpreting Beauvoir's employment of certain concepts from Hegel and Heidegger in the service of understanding, hence beginning to overcome, women's oppression. (shrink)

The link is to an expanded, English version of this essay.

Despite the advances wrought in recent years by recuperative readings of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's views on motherhood and mothering remain under‐appropriated when it comes to both feminist metaphysics and feminist political priorities. In our radically anti‐essentialist era, we are inclined take for granted that gender is a social construct, potentially oppressive when it's understood as a biological given but potentially liberating when its fundamental arbitrariness and infinite malleability are appreciated. Though Beauvoir is in no way a gender (...) essentialist, in the current theoretical atmosphere her insistence on the importance of physiology is more critical than ever. Under conditions in which women are told everywhere they turn that they are to gauge their worth as human beings according to the way their bodies look and work (with special emphasis on thinness and fertility), Beauvoir's reasons for emphasizing the fraught nature of pregnancy and motherhood can help us understand our continuing confusion over what it means to be a woman. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex_ is the most important work of feminist philosophy ever published and one of the great texts of the Twentieth century. Renowned for introducing the theory of woman as the ‘Other’ it is a widely-studied text that continues to exert profound influence on feminist thought. _The Routledge Guidebook to De Beauvoir and The Second Sex_ introduces and assesses: De Beauvoir’s life and the background of The Second Sex The ideas and arguments of The Second Sex (...) De Beauvoir’s continuing importance to feminist theory and philosophy This book is essential reading for all students of feminism, gender studies, philosophy, and literary studies and ideal for anyone reading de Beauvoir’s classic work for the first time. (shrink)