Simone de Beauvoir, 1908-1986

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Simone de Beauvoir’s death from two French newspapers. Rob,ert Maggiori (from Liberation, 15 April 1986) In 1929 two young people, like many others before and after them, must have rushed across to the rue de Grenelle to […]

Masters, Slaves and Others

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Women and the High Priests of Reason

Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]

Women’s Studies Conference; RP Dayschool on Hegel, Marx; Derrida in Prison and Dialectic; A New Journal of Philosophy of Education

the worker tries to gain mastery over the labour process). The contradictions arising directly from this type of work are arguably near-maximal for free labour: labour allows negligible mastery of skills; the efficacy of labour is felt to be external to the labour process and is located in the spheres of circulation and exchange. It […]

Feminism: History and Morality

Feminism: History and Morality Jean Grimshaw Janet Radcliffe Richards’ book The Sceptical Feminist (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, £12 hb) is an attempt to extricate feminism from what she sees as ideological commitments that are not essential to it, and serve merely to confuse feminists themselves, and alienate potential supporters. The image of the feminist […]

Women and philosophy

Women and philosophy Michele Le Doeuf £ Let us avoid getting caught up in a mere lament about the fact that ‘woman’, in addition to being, from time immemorial, alienated, beaten and deprived of political, sexual and social rights and legal identity, last and least of all saw herself forbidden any access to philosophy: as […]

Sexism, Capitalism and the Family

Sexism, Gapitalism ” the ramil, I~_ __ Bosalind Delmar (This paper was written for the Womens Liberation Conference, London, November 1972) The relation between sexism and capitalism is often expressed as an opposition: is it a sexist society or a capitalist society? Are we interested in feminism-or socialism? We see socialist women denouncing feminism as […]

Generations of feminism

6being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, […]

Feminism without nostalgia

17The title of the recent Radical Philosophy conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, implied that two things which should be joined – theory and politics – have come apart; indeed have been ripped apart rather violently and now need stitching back together. Is it, then, the case that two processes which were, […]

Dictating research: Feminist philosophy and the RAE; The case of economics

News Dictating researchFeminist philosophy and the RAEIn an essentially contested subject such as philosophy, it makes little sense for a small Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel to make judgements across the whole breadth of the discipline, however well-intentioned that panel might be. As I work between the ʻcontinentalʼ and ʻanalyticalʼ traditions – in the field […]

Feminists and pragmatists: A radical future?

influential in, and informed by the work of John Dewey, William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, and latetwentieth-century feminisms. Pragmatists and presentday feminists, she contends, have good reasons to unite around a history of commonalities that promise mutual philosophical enrichment. Taking exception to Westʼs unquestioning adherence to a ʻvenerable tradition of tracing influence “through the […]

Mind, reality and politics

Mind, reality and politics Andrew collier this list a few pages without getting controversial. Some of the facts about human nature have clear implications for legislation. For instance, the fact that our physiology is such that the present level of motor pollution in the UK leads to nearly thirty deaths a day implies that, other […]

What’s material about materialist feminism?: A Marxist Feminist critique

What’s material about materialist feminism? A Marxist Feminist critique Martha E. Gimenez In the heady days of the Womenʼs Liberation Movement, it was possible to identify four main currents within feminist thought: Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes […]

Feminism against ‘the feminine’

Whilst the distinction between French and AngloAmerican feminism was always rather dubious (failing to be accurate, consistent or inclusive at the level of either national origin, language of choice or theoretical commitment; seeming to parcel feminist theory – or at least the feminist theory that mattered – out into two Western blocks from which the […]