Is The Second Sex Beauvoirs Application of Sartrean Existentialism? Es

Is The Second Sex Beauvoirs Application of Sartrean Existentialism?ABSTRACT Simone de Beauvoirs 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoirs central theses that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that one is not born a woman, but becomes one. An analysis of Beauvoirs recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challenges this interpretation. In this diary, Beauvoir affirms her commitment to doing philosophy, defines the philosophical problem of the opposition of self and other, and explores the links between love and domination. In 1927, she thus lays the foundations of both Sartres phenomenology of interpersonal relationships and of her own thesis, in The Second Sex, that woman is the Other. Her descriptions of the experience of freedo m and choice point to the influence of Bergson, specifically his concepts of becoming and lan vital. Tracing Beauvoirs shift from her apolitical position of 1927 to the feminist mesh topology of The Second Sex points to the influence of the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose description of the lived experience of oppression of blacks in America, and whose challenge to Marxist reductionism, provide Beauvoir with a model, an analogy, for analyzing womans oppression. Simone de Beauvoirs 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as Beauvoirs application of the existential philosophy of her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, to the situation of women. Diane Raymond, in Existentialism and the Philoso... .... In The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, Miss. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 253-55.Fullbrook, Kate and Edward Fullbrook. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend. New York introductory Books.Kruks, Sonia. 1995. I dentity Politics and Dialectical Reason Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance. Hypatia A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 10 (2) 1-22.Myrdal, Gunnar, et.al. 1944. An American Dilemma The Negro Problem and new Democracy. New York Harper. Raymond, Diane. 1991. Existentialism and the Philosophical Tradition. Englewood Cliffs,Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943 1953. Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. Barnes. NY Simon & Schuster. New Jersey Prentice Hall. Simons, Margaret A. 1983. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir Guess Whats Missing from The Second Sex. Womens Studies International Forum 6 (5) 559-564.