SOURCE: "Beauvoir's Two Senses of 'Body' in The Second Sex," in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 223-42.

In the following essay, Ward examines Beauvoir's views concerning the nature of the female body and gender roles. Rejecting the view that Beauvoir's feminism is guided by principles of biological determinism, Ward contends that Beauvoir "should be seen as developing a social-constructivist view of the body."

It was Beauvoir's dictum that one becomes but is not born a woman and her broad analysis of the reality behind that statement that charted the course for most contemporary currents in modern Western feminism and for which she has been hailed in the past as an emancipator. Yet in the wake of a gynocentric wave in feminist thinking, Beauvoir's work has increasingly come under scholarly scrutiny, with the result that Beauvoir, far from...