Abstract

"The Fractured Family" brings together an unusual and provocative combination of feminist literary criticism and social psychology, as well as traditional and non-traditional psychoanalytic thought. It tells the -story- of Simone de Beauvoir's 1953 feminist manifesto, "The Second Sex," which has functioned as a kind of unwilling mother to later feminist works. Suggesting that the feminist family has developed in a dysfunctional patriarchal environment, this book explores ways in which -real- mother-daughter relationship parallel those of feminist critical texts. In doing so, "The Fractured Family" proposes that Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" is perhaps the most significant feminist work of the contemporary era."