Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Feminism: A Defence

Abstract

In the first half of this book I set out to prove (a) that Simone de Beauvoir made, and was therefore capable of making, her own distinctive contribution to existentialism; (b) that she began to do so in the early 1940s; (c) that her most distinctive and characteristic contribution to existentialism was to have developed an existentialist ethics; and (d) that this ethics has interesting affinities with some of the views expressed by Merleau-Ponty during the mid-1940s, and that it diverges from just about everything that Sartre said to a degree that I called oceanic.