 As is evident from this analysis of pregnancy, feminist theories of selfhood frequently combine philosophical analysis with social critique and the testimony of lived experience. The latter has an especially long history within phenomenology, where feminist philosophers have been describing women’s experiences for the past century. Because phenomenology as a whole strongly emphasizes the body and first-person experience, it fits methodologically with many of the goals of feminism. Specifically, phenomenological theories of embodiment emphasize the agential nature of the lived body, resisting traditional conceptions from philosophy that make the body the mere instrument of the mind. At the same time, feminist phenomenologists resist the abstract nature of traditional phenomenological methods. For feminist phenomenology, different selves are differently positioned in ways that matter, and cannot be abstracted from their social roles into a transcendental domain of inquiry. This stands in opposition with classical phenomenology, which tended to promulgate a universalized notion of the ego that elided differences between bodies. Early women phenomenologists, such as Edith Stein and Gerda Walther, frequently analyze how traditionally feminine-coded values such as empathy and community play a part in women’s everyday lives and moral development (Stein 1996; Walther 1923). Most influentially, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the human condition is ambiguous: experience involves “immanence”, or embeddedness within one’s historico-cultural and interpersonal situation, and “transcendence”, or radical freedom with respect to one’s choices and future. While all humans shared this condition according to Beauvoir, she claims that women have been overwhelmingly associated with immanence, and thus have not been encouraged to claim their own freedom (Beauvoir 1949 [2011]). This means that their selves are generally overdetermined by their situations and contexts—what biology and others claim them to be. For Beauvoir, women should reassert their transcendence through productive projects. Beauvoir thus puts an existentialist spin on both phenomenology’s emphasis on situation and some feminists’ reclamation of autonomy. For Beauvoir, “woman” is a category imposed by society; women’s selves, then, are also in large part imposed on them by society, and women would do well to fashion their own selfhood through claiming their freedom. Yet this freedom is always co-determined in situation with others.