The heart of this chapter is based on three related academic papers, written by Ann Ferguson, Claudia Card and Marilyn Frye, taken from a special issue of Hypatia/Women's Studies International Forum (1985) on the contemporary relevance of The Second Sex to (lesbian) feminist politics. This special edition of Hypatia is edited by Margaret Simons, whose paper ‘Lesbian connections: Simone de Beauvoir and feminism’ (1992), I touched on in chapters 3 and 4. I will be drawing on Simons' text briefly again in this chapter, insofar as she employs Card's thesis to frame her account of de Beauvoir's life. The articles are united by a shared commitment to explore and develop a feminist and lesbian identity politics. Published in a major feminist academic journal in the middle of the 1980s, they may be seen as indicative of a particular kind of politics and theorising born of the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Their focus lies especially on the role of responsibility and choice in the construction of individual and collective identities and the relation of these to a radical politics of change.

More specifically, Ferguson's, Card's and Frye's analyses are concerned with the relation between individual choice, responsibility, agency and the role of ‘history’ in determining (or not) the ‘freedom’ of the individual (to choose, to take responsibility, to act).