Dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood define the nature of mother love. Recent developments in motherhood studies, and the work of a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, have challenged the tenets of these ideologies by daring to speak the “unspeakable”: that mother love is often and for all mothers, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions termed maternal ambivalence. In this essay, relying on recorded personal narratives by Bosnian women who are raising children (...) born of wartime rape, as well as recent studies on empowered motherhood, my aim is to show that maternal love, like love in any other close relationship, encompasses and assimilates healthy ambivalence, and can inform maternal care in a constructive and positive manner. I argue that the acknowledgment of healthy maternal ambivalence as an integral aspect of mother love involves honoring the mother's subjectivity and validates her personhood, and as such it opens up the possibility of redefining mother love in terms that are empowering to mothers. (shrink)

Dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood define the nature of mother love. Recent developments in motherhood studies, and the work of a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, have challenged the tenets of these ideologies by daring to speak the “unspeakable”: that mother love is often and for all mothers, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions termed maternal ambivalence. In this essay, relying on recorded personal narratives by Bosnian women who are raising children (...) born of wartime rape, as well as recent studies on empowered motherhood, my aim is to show that maternal love, like love in any other close relationship, encompasses and assimilates healthy ambivalence, and can inform maternal care in a constructive and positive manner. I argue that the acknowledgment of healthy maternal ambivalence as an integral aspect of mother love involves honoring the mother's subjectivity and validates her personhood, and as such it opens up the possibility of redefining mother love in terms that are empowering to mothers. (shrink)

This chapter introduces Beauvoir's conception of motherhood in The Second Sex. Beauvoir sets out to demystify motherhood by presenting women's experiences of pregnancy and mothering in all their difficulty, complexity, and ambivalence. However, Beauvoir works with a contrast between transcendence and immanence which inclines her to interpret pregnancy and maternity in terms of immanence (i.e. unfreedom). This chapter identifies alternative lines of thought in Beauvoir's work which portray maternity more positively: as disclosing our fundamental ambiguity, the bodily roots of free (...) human agency, and the constitutive role of relationships with others in human existence. (shrink)

Despite the increase in marine science curriculum in secondary schools, marine science is not generally required curricula and has been largely deemphasized or ignored in relation to earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics. I call for the integration and implementation of marine science more fully in secondary science education through authentic inquiry practices that foster the development of an erotic relationship with the ocean. Such a relationship can provide an opportunity to develop ocean literacy if that means people who engage (...) can actively participate in making more informed choices and advocate for affected parties and the ocean. I show how Simone de Beauvoir's erotic ethic influences the philosophy of the eroticism of the ocean, which is integral in the investigation and promotion of erotic generosities in science education, and using this theory to develop some educational implications for marine science within science education. Ultimately, I argue that the development and nurturing of an erotic ethic in the science education classroom is a valuable way to promote moral and ethical thinking such that students can afford nature, and more specifically in this article, the ocean, equivalent moral considerations in our community and science education. (shrink)

Despite her reputation as the ‘Mother’ of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir is not usually heralded as a mother-friendly feminist. In The Second Sex, the passages dedicated to the female body—and especially the pregnant female body—have been dismissed as unfortunate expressions of internalized patriarchy or personal idiosyncrasy. By comparing Beauvoir’s later analysis of old age to aspects of the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood, this essay suggests that Beauvoir’s later work Old Age offers a rich untapped resource for understanding (...) her thinking on maternity. (shrink)

Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers neglected passages of Le Duexi_me Sexe in her quest to follow Simone de Beauvoir's line of thinking. She finds the masterpiece to be grounded in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

This paper breaks ranks with those philosophers and feminists who either ignore de Beauvoir or find her passé. It argues that de Beauvoir is fundamentally a philosopher; that one of her crucial contributions to philosophy was to identify the erotic as a philosophical category; and that we best understand de Beauvoir's place in the feminist and philosophical fields if we read her as a phenomenologist who reworks Husserl's theory of intentionality and who, in this reworking, steps out of Sartre's shadow (...) to develop an ethic of erotic generosity. This argument depends on reading de Beauvoir's texts with an ear for her two voices. It develops the idea that de Beauvoir's muted voice, in speaking of the erotic, the gift and generosity, offers us a coherent and fruitful way of thinking through the questions of embodiment, the flesh, the other and the “we”. (shrink)

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

Beginning with the premise that there is a fundamental biological inequality in the sexes, the author presents her classic blueprint for social revolution. Reissue. 25,000 first printing.

Simone de Beauvoir published a number of philosophical essays and novels before writing The Second Sex. The most important of these was The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which she argues that one’s freedom is always intertwined with that of others. The Bonds of Freedom examines de Beauvoir’s ideas on ethics, demonstrating her importance in contemporary philosophy.

The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

This work provides a full-scale analysis of the philosophical foundations and structure of The Second Sex. Lundgren-Gothlin reveals how Beauvoir developed her phenomenological philosophy by means of Hegelianism and Marxism.

When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as "mad" or "bad." Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state in which women constantly renegotiate the needs mother and child, the self and the other. Applying care ethics philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone (...) de Beauvoir to real-world experiences of motherhood, Sarah LaChance Adams throws the inherent tensions of motherhood into sharp relief, drawing a more nuanced portrait of the mother and child relationship than previously conceived. The maternal example is particularly instructive for ethical theory, highlighting the dynamics of human interdependence while also affirming separate interests. LaChance Adams particularly focuses on maternal ambivalence and its morally productive role in reinforcing the divergence between oneself and others, helping to recognize the particularities of situation, and negotiating the difference between one's own needs and the desires of others. She ultimately argues maternal filicide is a social problem requiring a collective solution that ethical philosophy and philosophies of care can inform. (shrink)

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and (...) Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity. (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that (...) continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)