Feminist Studies is deeply grateful to Jessica Benjamin who urged us to commemorate and celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. On her initiative, we published a call for papers on the subject; the result is the cluster of articles that opens this issue. The works of Michele Le Doeuff and Jo-Ann Fuchs were presented at "The Second Sex—Thirty Years Later," a conference held at New York University in September 1979. We thank the conference committee for encouraging these papers.

Mary Felstiner's "Seeing The Second Sex Through the Second Wave" provides an inspired and political reading of this uniquely valuable text, arguing for a movement between today's feminist questions, and those that initially shaped the book. Michèle LeDoeuff's "Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism" probes the existentialism upon which The Second Sex is founded, examining what a feminist methodology might have to encompass. Sandra Dijkstra contrasts the denatured politics of The Feminine Mystique with those of The Second Sex, illuminating the sea change involved in filtering the French classic into the heart of American reformist feminism. And Jo-Ann Fuchs's discussion of female eroticism in The Second Sex offers a close textual reading of the book to underline both the advances and the limitations of de Beauvoir's analysis. Taken together, the four articles signal the immense excitement The Second Sex continues to generate for the current generation of feminists, and the ongoing debt we owe to de Beauvoir. Our only repayment lies in the work-both theoretical and appliedwe perform in light of her achievements.

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Mary Lowenthal Felstiner
Seeing The Second Sex Through The Second Wave

Michèle Le Doeuff
Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism

Sandra Dijkstra
Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan:
The Politics of Omission

Jo-Ann P. Fuchs
Female Eroticism in The Second Sex

Gloria T. Hull
Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson:
A Personal and Literary Perspective

Carol Ascher
Evening Out

Beverly Dahlen
from A Reading

Betye Saar
Art

Sara Ruddick
Maternal Thinking

Mary Ann Clawson
Early Modern Fraternalism and the Patriarchal Family

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
"A Friendly Neighbor": Social Dimensions of Daily Work
in Northern Colonial New England Letters