Introduction: Beauvoir and the ambiguity of “ambiguity” in ethics

Abstract

BACKGROUNDS AND BASICS During the 1950s, an era when feminism was at a particularly low ebb, American college students encountered translations of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity in courses on French existentialism. The popularity of these courses was due in no small part to the French existentialists' addition of sexuality to the philosophical agenda. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness was the centerpiece, and Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity was introduced to show how, contrary to Sartre's early view, existentialism might indeed provide a ground for ethics. The Second Sex , however, was presented as though it simply applied Sartre's philosophy to women's situations, a view later to be challenged by feminist scholarship, as many chapters in this Companion show in detail. Yet readers were astonished even then by perspectives The Second Sex offered on female sexuality. Raising ethical and political issues, Beauvoir's The Second Sex nicely complemented Alfred Kinsey's “scandalous” but coldly scientific report on sexual behavior in the human female, which appeared in the same year as the paperback edition of the English translation of Beauvoir's treatise on women.