SOURCE: "Women and Choice—A New Look at Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex," in Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 173-8.

In the following essay, Ascher examines Beauvoir's views concerning freedom, morality, and women's oppression as delineated in The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity.

How does the individual responsibility and choice that we assume for each woman dovetail with our belief that failure, disease, and psychological crippling are caused by oppression? In recent years, the women's movement has tended to accept the liberal connection between caring and an assumption of determinism. Because of this, we focus on the oppression side of the issue when we reach out to help a battered wife or someone who has just been raped. As if our sympathy might be blown away, we shout, "you're blaming the victim" at anyone...