NDPR Kathryn Sophia Belle Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of “The Second Sex”

0 views

Skip to first unread message

ndpr...@nd.edu

unread,

Sep 26, 2025, 3:41:44 PMSep 26

to philosophical...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.09.11 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Kathryn Sophia Belle, Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of “The Second Sex”, Oxford University Press, 2024, 376pp., $35.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780197660201.

Reviewed by Emily Anne Parker, Towson University

In Kathryn Sophia Belle’s deliberately bold Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of “The Second Sex”, the author asks, “did Beauvoir ever read the work of Black women?” (315). Belle finds that not only did Beauvoir not engage the ideas of Black women writers, the secondary literature on Beauvoir by white women writers has repeated this lack of engagement. Belle devastatingly retells the story of The Second Sex, not as the ex nihilo beginning of a second wave of feminist theory and activism, but as a misconceived intervention mid-way through several centuries of (Black) women’s writings on the inherent interconnectedness...