| I argue that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is not only a work of phenomenological existentialism; it is also a work of feminist epistemology. Understanding and reading Beauvoir's text as an early work of standpoint theory, the feminist critique that all knowledge claims are limited and dependent upon the concrete situations of their creators, makes possible a more appropriately existential—both allowing and requiring the reader to formulate her own conclusions and proscriptions, feminist—recognizing the situatedness of knowledge and the inability to obtain a ‘view from nowhere,’ and coherent —consistent with Beauvoir's literary method and with the claims made in the introduction and conclusion, (arguably the only places where we hear Beauvoir's voice), reading of The Second Sex.; In the introduction to the text, Beauvoir tells us, her readers, that the voice of the text is never clearly her own. Instead she tells us that there are at least three types of voice present in the text: men's voices, women's voices, and the voices of the social sciences. “I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly feminine’ has been fashioned—why woman has been defined as the Other—and what have been the consequences from man's point of view. Then from woman's point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live…”; Reading the text this way the title of each chapter becomes the name of the voice and position it adopts: for example, one reads ‘(the data of) biology's’, ‘(of woman in) five authors',’ and ‘the married woman's,’ takes on the nature and origin of femininity. |
