CRMEP Public Lectures, Autumn 2026, 4: Stella Sandford, ‘'Beauvoir, Biology and Dialectics’

The first chapter of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, ‘Les données de la biologie’, has dismayed many of her feminist readers, since it apparently argues that the female is ‘enslaved’ to the species via her reproductive role and that her femaleness is a natural impediment to her self-assertion as a free human being. How can we explain this apparent lapse into an uncritical repetition of exactly the kind of ideological ‘ramblings’ that she elsewhere criticises? In this lecture I offer an interpretation of Beauvoir’s comments on biology in The Second Sex in the context of two sets of literature: some French works on human (and specifically female) reproductive biology, 1860–1942, and the work of the anglophone Dialectics of Biology Group, and feminist biologists associated with it, mostly from 1980s. It will be argued that the fundamental error in Beauvoir’s discussion of biology is the presumption of a misplaced and ultimately metaphysical dialectic of individual and species. Drawing on the dialectical biology tradition, I will suggest instead that the pertinent dialectic for a feminist discussion of human biology is that between organism and society. How can we think critically about the dialectical relation between the concepts and ‘facts’ of human reproductive biology and the social?