In recent years, the celebrated works of Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, once required readings in feminist philosophy courses, have come under rigorous attack by a new generation of feminist philosophers who ascribe to the position known as gynocentrism.¹ Gynocentric feminists challenge the basic philosophical assumptions Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex, assumptions that Beauvoir openly admits to have taken from Jean- Paul Sartre's early writings. As one critic observes, "The Second Sex suffers from its author's "rather uncritical... embrace [of] Sartre's brand of Existentialist philosophy"'? To be sure, the gynocentric feminists' attack on Beauvoir and her followers is ultimately an attack on Sartre's philosophy, particularly on his theory of embodiment which is predicated on his overall ontology of freedom. They fault Sartre for employing a male-centred model that glorifies male consciousness and activity. According to them, it is an inadequate model, which not only fails to account for women's unique embodied experience, but devalues it. Contending that traditional feminist writings are infected by the same male bias found in the existentialist phenomenology identified with Sartre, gynocentric feminists set out to reclaim women's experience by grounding feministtheory in an ontology of female embodiment, one that exalts the difference in women's reproductive biology. This chapter is an attempt to assess the positions that set apart the two generations of feminists, focusing specifically on the different ontologies that underlie them.