The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir (Feminist Constructions)

In The Other Within, Fredrika Scarth builds upon the recent studies that have surfaced as part of the Simone de Beauvoir renaissance to offer a reading of The Second Sex as an ethical text. Scarth provides us with a unique and enlightening study of Beauvoir's writing on the female body, and in particular on maternity as an important piece of Beauvoir's writing. Unlike other feminist scholars who find in Beauovir's writing a horror and repudiation of mother hood, Scarth argues that Beauvoir's writing on maternity can open up new possibilities of embodied subjectivity and agency, and can found a truly ethical relationship with the other.