de Beauvoir
• On De Beauvoir

References for Theme: On De Beauvoir

• Veltman, Andrea
• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)

  (p.57) The writings of Beauvoir and Arendt provide a key resource for a feminist philosophical shift away from celebrating reproductive labor, for both thinkers develop typologies of human activities that illuminate the inability of reproductive labor to provide an evaluative measure or justification for human life. Whereas Arendt writes that labor cannot express human freedom or reveal the unique living essence of the person, Beauvoir argues similarly that a justification for living requires transcending the maintenance of life through self expressive creative activity or through the production of something durable. Despite working within divergent phenomenological frameworks, both develop the insight that...

• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)

  (p.62) Arendt never explicitly acknowledges that labor is deeply invested in the female body—borne out in childbearing, child-rearing, and daily caretaking performed by women—or that the purest form of labor, housework, has structured womanhood throughout history. Nor does she comment upon the fundamental injustice involved in women’s relegation to the lowliest category of human activity. This lack of comment may reflect Arendt’s desire to distance herself from women’s liberation movements, or perhaps her determination to separate social and economic issues from politics, on the presupposition that questions of economic justice destroy genuinely political dialogue. Regardless of why Arendt remains conspicuously silent...

• "Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on labor" (2010)