The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness.   Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement.

 

This massive, classic tome is still a delight to read. Simone de Beauvoir is intelligent, scholarly, lucid, and witty; her thesis is simple: early western philosophers established the female sex as "the other" to rationalize and promote the development and growth of fledgling patriarchy. "'The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,' said Aristotle; 'we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.'" Referring to the earlier research of noted anthropologist Levi-Strauss on the development of the category of "other" - "as primordial as consciousness itself" in all known human cultures - Simone de Beauvoir analyses the depth, breadth, purpose, and result of the western notion of woman as not-man. The book is sub-divided into two sections, "Facts and Myths" and "Woman's Life Today," in which she examines and documents such subjects as "The Data of Biology," "History," "Myths," "The Formative Years," "Situation," "Justification," and, finally "Towards Liberation." Simone de Beauvoir - literary artist, philosopher, and founding mother of twentieth-century feminism - wrote The Second Sex "less by a wish to demand our rights than by an effort towards clarity and understanding." Forty-five years after the book's publication, it remains true to its intent.

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