Feminist Fighter And Boulder-pusher

The publication of The Second Sex and The Golden Notebook has established the importance of Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing in the history of women’s writing.Concerned with the frank female issues within both the works and the female identity of both the writers,scholars from both abroad and home often study these two works from the perspective of feminism.Some even parallel the two works as "the Bibles of the Women’s Movement".Although critics have paid attention to the two writers’ common concerns with female issues and their influences on the Feminist Movement for a long time,they ignore the differences between de Beauvoir’s and Lessing’s feminist views reflected in their respective works,which could well account for the two writers’ different attitudes towards the Feminist Movement.Considering this,this thesis probes into their different feminist thoughts of their common concerns with the existence of women,way-out for women and women’s writing,and attempts to offer a new orientation for the current studies on de Beauvoir and Lessing from a comparative perspective.Recent years have seen feminism developing from a form of fighting to cooperation between two sexes and stepping closer to the ultimate goal:the full realization of human value through seeking for the improvement of humanity as a whole.This present comparative study finds that de Beauvoir’s and Lessing’s different feminist views exactly characterize feminism in different periods and thus could epitomize the development of feminism since the 1960s,and that Lessing’s unique suggestions for women’s existence by taking into consideration the emancipation and development of all human beings just gives us insights into the prospect of feminism.