Emma Schoolcraft
International and Political Affairs Major
Humanities Category
Bio
Emma Schoolcraft grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and graduated from Raytown Senior High School. She is an International and Political Affairs major with a Philosophy minor and spent two years studying International Affairs and Peace and Justice Studies at DePaul University before transferring to Missouri Southern State University. Emma has a special interest in gender studies and twentieth-century existentialism and plans to pursue a doctoral degree in Political Theory or Gender Studies while pursuing a career in academia.
Abstract
Although she is often referred to as the “mother” of the second-wave feminist movement, Simone de Beauvoir is popularly viewed as rejecting maternity and defining it under immanence, or a limitation on the freedom she found essential to a truly meaningful existence. While few would dispute Beauvoir’s contribution to the movement, many have interpreted her description of maternity in her magnum opus, The Second Sex, as an assumption that women should embrace the masculine model of subjectivity. This project argues that Beauvoir’s descriptions of the maternal body are an essential attempt at restaging traditional Western discourse surrounding maternity by presenting motherhood in all of its complexity. Using Beauvoir’s demystification of the maternal and her framework of transcendence and immanence, this project aims to situate motherhood more positively in existential thought.