The Second Sex

I ordered this book for a class, choosing the same edition as all students were expected to read. Unfortunately, what arrived was not only a completely different edition with different page numbers and commentaries, but it was a completely different translation.

Obviously de Beauvoir's book is essential reading, and this was the first time I thought I would read a long book on kindle for iphone, buying this before a book group discussion of The Second Sex. But as other reviewers (whom I should have looked at before!) have noted, you only get a fraction of the book. Pretty basic problem for the Kindle, and not as advertised.

An interesting journey with lots said about the author's seminars. This certainly covers the gambit of options available. My lover seemed to enjoy skimming it but agreed with me that some of it was a bit repetitious. I do agree that the critical key is that one must actually ENJOY sex because no matter how technically proficient one becomes, without the willingness to trust, enjoy and have fun with your partner, you will never fully appreciate how amazing sex can be!

The "most helpful favorable review" for this book simplistically states,

"I, a young white man, read Second Sex last week. Although it contained almost nothing that I had not read before, it did what was necessary to my head."

How is that a useful review? There is absolutely no utility in this or most the store.com reviews; reviews should be stratified by highest university degree earned or at least, field of study. This young man embodies every reason this book was written and every reason that it should continue to be read. The book contains "nothing that [he] had not read before," precisely because it was written, respected, and henceforth has influenced everything he has ever read.

This book combines a sociological message that has immediate and practical utility (unlike much of philosophy, unless you devote a lifetime to studying it).

This book is -- simply massive, coming in at 766 pages, and will leave you occasionally checking the dictionary.

It is divided into two parts -- in Part I, Beauvoir explain's women's biological differences from men, the psychoanalytic explanation of women's situation (psychoanalysis was popular then) and the materialist (e.g. Marxist) explanation of women's oppression. She dismisses each one as being inadequate to explain sexism. She then roots women's condition in the partial subordination of their bodies to "the species", e.g. the reproductive function of giving birth, which ties then to "immanance" whereas men are freer to be "transcendent existents." You must understand the meaning of these terms in existentialism, but they are fairly simple. This is a key point in the book that will be returned to again and again. Then she discusses various myths related to women, notably how men have cast women as a mediation between nature and himself. Nature does not satisfy us because we are too lonely when confronted with it, but other men are too threatening because they could dominate us. Thus we men need women who are both conscious beings, yet non-threatening. We have constructed myths around womanhood for this purpose. Beauvoir gives five examples of this based on authors that she has read -- she despises Montherlant, and only approves of Stendhal. If you have no read these authors (as I have not; some of them are now far more obscure than Beauvoir herself -- for instance, Montherlant's wikipedia page contains mention of Beauvoir's criticism and mentions that his books have been out of print for decades) you may not fully understand.

In Part 2, "Lived Experience", Beauvoir traces a woman's life story from girlhood, where she begins to be socialized into being a woman and learns to view herself as an object, and (this being France at time) experienced puberty and loss of virginity in shocking ignorance. She mentions that in most women there is a latent homosexuality. In "the married women" she treats marriage as effectively arranged (not freely chosen) where the woman loses her virginity on the wedding night, and stays home to raise children. In "The mother" she says that since women are taught to live through others, mothers try to dominate or compete with their children. In mid-life crisis, around 40, women, with half their years still ahead, suddenly find themselves with nothing to do. Finally she goes through various types -- socialites, narcissists, romantics, religious fanatics -- and explains how they are failed attempts by women to deal with their situation. At the end she discusses why even independent women are divided between their careers and their femininity and women geniuses are prevented because their energy is spent in overcoming sexism that they have none left for genius. There is a touching example of how T.E. Lawrence went through a tour of France by bicycle at eighteen, but a girl would not have been permitted to do so.

This book is a masterpiece, but besides being long and unwieldy, it suffers from a number of limitations. One, it was written in the mid-20th century, which was more of a conservative time then now, two it was written in France, which is a particular culture and even more conservative than England and America (or so Beauvoir seems to think), and three, it is a monograph written by Beauvoir, which means it heavily draws on books and articles and memories of hers in particular. Many of the literary and cultural references will not be understood by the modern reader, and as it is a work of sociology, many of the descriptions (such as the portrait of marriage) are obselete.

Like many left- wing books, The Second Sex at times seems like an extended lament, and it is far more detailed and nuanced in its criticisms of women's situation than in the solutions it offers. After reams and reams describing in great detail why even the independent woman is not equal to man, Beauvoir only falls back on platitudes such as that the root of the problem is in the situation and that new interpretations or the facts will liberate women; that with birth control, day care, economic equality, and a new attitude of brotherhood, everything she is talking about will "surely" fall away and all will be well. Perhaps it is time for a new Second Sex written from a more modern vantage point.

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986), was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist, who was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism. She wrote many books, such as The Mandarins ;She Came to Stay;The Woman Destroyed;The Ethics Of Ambiguity;Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter);The Prime of Life;Force of Circumstance);All Said and Done;Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre;Wartime Diary, etc.

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1949 book, “For a long time I have wanted to write a book on woman… Enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps we should say no more about it… however… the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem… first we must ask: what is a woman?... If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline to explain her through the ‘eternal feminine’… then we must face the question: what is a woman?.. [In the Book of Genesis] ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute---she is the Other.” (Pg. xv-xix)

She continues, “what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she---a free and autonomous being like all human creatures---nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They… doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego… How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered as a state of dependency? What circumstances limit women’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light… I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavoring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.” (Pg. xxxiii-xxxiv)

Book One (“Facts and Myths”) deals with biology, psychoanalysis, Marxism [“Historical Materialism”], history, myths and literature. Book Two (“Woman’s Life Today”) covers childhood; the young girl; sexual initiation; the lesbian; the married woman; the mother; social life; prostitutes; maturity to old age; the Narcissist; the woman in love; the mystic; before concluding with a chapter on “The Independent Woman.”

She suggests, “The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man’s weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarcerated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature. It is the advance from stone to bronze that enables him through his labor to gain mastery of the soil and to master himself.” (Pg. 84; Bk I, V)

She observes, “When they revered the Goddess Mother, it was because they feared Nature… then it became the conflict between family and State that defined woman’s status; the Christian’s attitude toward God, the world, and his own flesh was reflected in the situation to which he consigned her… it was the social regime founded on private property that entailed the guardianship of the married woman, and it is the technological evolution accomplished by men that has emancipated the women of today… Feminism itself was never an autonomous movement: it was in part an instrument in the hands of politicians, in part an epiphenomenon reflecting a deeper social drama.” (Pg, 144-145; Bk I, VIII)

She points out, “Man has succeeded in enslaving woman; but in the same degree he has deprived her of what made her possession desirable. With woman integrated in the family and in society, her magic is dissipated rather than transformed; reduced to the condition of servant, she is no longer that unconquered prey incarnating all the treasures of nature.” (Pg. 211; Bk I, IX)

She begins Book II with the book’s famous statement: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as the OTHER.” (Pg. 301, Bk II, XII)

Of the married woman, she comments, “Save during the brief flare of an amorous passion, two individuals cannot constitute a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both realize the day after their marriage…. Difference in sex often implies differences in age, education, situation, which allow of no real mutual understanding: intimates, the two are yet strangers.” (Pg. 513, Bk II, XVI)

She notes, “There is an extravagant fraudulence in the easy reconciliation made between the common attitude of contempt for women and the respect shown for mothers. It is outrageously paradoxical to deny woman all activity in public affairs, to shut her out of masculine careers, to assert her incapacity in all fields of effort, and then to entrust to her the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all: the molding of a human being… They are permitted to play with toys of flesh and blood.” (Pg. 584, Bk II, XVII)

She asserts, “It is understandable… that woman takes exception to masculine logic. Not only is it inapplicable to her experience, but in his hands, as she knows, masculine reasoning becomes an underhand form of force; men’s undebatable pronouncements are intended to confuse her… And so, annoyed, he will accuse her of being obstinate and illogical; but she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded.” (Pg. 680-681, Bk II, XXI)

She states, “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself---on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.” (Pg. 742-743, Bk II, XXIII)

She summarizes, “The free woman is just being born… It is not sure that her ‘ideational worlds’ will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance---this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto women’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.” (Pg. 795, Bk II, XXV)

Beauvoir was a true “pioneer”; modern American feminists are sometimes disappointed in her actual opinions [e.g., see her conversation with Betty Friedan in It Changed My Life; not to mention her lifelong deferential attitude toward Sartre]. However, if one bears in mind that book was published shortly after the Second World War, its revolutionary nature is astounding. It remains absolutely “must reading” not just for feminists (whether Second Wave, Third Wave, or beyond), but for anyone wanting to read a vast, comprehensive and well-argued analysis of the nature of women.

I am fully prepared to acknowledge the debt to de Beauvoir's ground-breaking tome owed by feminism in particular, women in general, and possibly the universe at large. But just because a thing is revelatory in its time doesn't mean it's inviolable, and a modern reader of The Second Sex might be forgiven for finding it unrelentingly repetitive and horribly outdated.

The first 40 pages of the volume are dedicated to biological science that probably seemed cutting edge in 1952 and is followed by a section on psychoanalysis that I can only assume seemed cutting edge in Vienna in 1892. From there we move into sections on social and cultural history which, while admittedly much more readable, give rise to some grave doubts about de Beauvoir's research. I personally don't think you can just drop the line "certain peoples imagine that there is a serpent in the vagina which would bite the husband just as the hymen is broken" into a paragraph without mentioning - or at least footnoting!- the name of these theoretical "peoples" or at least maybe the continent they might be located on. (A good many of the footnotes that are present come from the translator rather than the author herself, and are fantastically sexist in places - at one point he objects to women wearing denim jeans, just because.)

None of this keeps de Beauvoir's points about abortion or sexuality from being revolutionary, but they are couched between comments about cases of meningitis caused by housework or how the bodies of women who fear conception have a way of blocking pregnancy. (Imagine if Todd Aiken had cited de Beauvoir. The mind boggles.)

The Second Sex reads like what it is - de Beauvoir's working-out of what it means and what it has meant to be a woman. Such a self-study is a struggle and a journey, with stops and starts and switchbacks and backtracks that leave you covering the same ground over and over until the way becomes clear. It was a massive, inspirational undertaking that became a seminal work...which doesn't make it a fantastic read now. In a way, I envy the first generation who got to crack the spine on this one and be utterly shocked by it because today it's more than just a little bit dull.

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986), was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist, who was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism. She wrote many books, such as The Mandarins ;She Came to Stay;The Woman Destroyed;The Ethics Of Ambiguity;Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter);The Prime of Life;Force of Circumstance);All Said and Done;Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre;Wartime Diary, etc.

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1949 book, “For a long time I have wanted to write a book on woman… Enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps we should say no more about it… however… the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem… first we must ask: what is a woman?... If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline to explain her through the ‘eternal feminine’… then we must face the question: what is a woman?.. [In the Book of Genesis] ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute---she is the Other.” (Pg. xv-xix)

She continues, “what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she---a free and autonomous being like all human creatures---nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They… doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego… How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered as a state of dependency? What circumstances limit women’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light… I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavoring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.” (Pg. xxxiii-xxxiv)

Book One (“Facts and Myths”) deals with biology, psychoanalysis, Marxism [“Historical Materialism”], history, myths and literature. Book Two (“Woman’s Life Today”) covers childhood; the young girl; sexual initiation; the lesbian; the married woman; the mother; social life; prostitutes; maturity to old age; the Narcissist; the woman in love; the mystic; before concluding with a chapter on “The Independent Woman.”

She suggests, “The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man’s weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarcerated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature. It is the advance from stone to bronze that enables him through his labor to gain mastery of the soil and to master himself.” (Pg. 84; Bk I, V)

She observes, “When they revered the Goddess Mother, it was because they feared Nature… then it became the conflict between family and State that defined woman’s status; the Christian’s attitude toward God, the world, and his own flesh was reflected in the situation to which he consigned her… it was the social regime founded on private property that entailed the guardianship of the married woman, and it is the technological evolution accomplished by men that has emancipated the women of today… Feminism itself was never an autonomous movement: it was in part an instrument in the hands of politicians, in part an epiphenomenon reflecting a deeper social drama.” (Pg, 144-145; Bk I, VIII)

She points out, “Man has succeeded in enslaving woman; but in the same degree he has deprived her of what made her possession desirable. With woman integrated in the family and in society, her magic is dissipated rather than transformed; reduced to the condition of servant, she is no longer that unconquered prey incarnating all the treasures of nature.” (Pg. 211; Bk I, IX)

She begins Book II with the book’s famous statement: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as the OTHER.” (Pg. 301, Bk II, XII)

Of the married woman, she comments, “Save during the brief flare of an amorous passion, two individuals cannot constitute a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both realize the day after their marriage…. Difference in sex often implies differences in age, education, situation, which allow of no real mutual understanding: intimates, the two are yet strangers.” (Pg. 513, Bk II, XVI)

She notes, “There is an extravagant fraudulence in the easy reconciliation made between the common attitude of contempt for women and the respect shown for mothers. It is outrageously paradoxical to deny woman all activity in public affairs, to shut her out of masculine careers, to assert her incapacity in all fields of effort, and then to entrust to her the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all: the molding of a human being… They are permitted to play with toys of flesh and blood.” (Pg. 584, Bk II, XVII)

She asserts, “It is understandable… that woman takes exception to masculine logic. Not only is it inapplicable to her experience, but in his hands, as she knows, masculine reasoning becomes an underhand form of force; men’s undebatable pronouncements are intended to confuse her… And so, annoyed, he will accuse her of being obstinate and illogical; but she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded.” (Pg. 680-681, Bk II, XXI)

She states, “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself---on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.” (Pg. 742-743, Bk II, XXIII)

She summarizes, “The free woman is just being born… It is not sure that her ‘ideational worlds’ will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance---this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto women’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.” (Pg. 795, Bk II, XXV)

Beauvoir was a true “pioneer”; modern American feminists are sometimes disappointed in her actual opinions [e.g., see her conversation with Betty Friedan in It Changed My Life; not to mention her lifelong deferential attitude toward Sartre]. However, if one bears in mind that book was published shortly after the Second World War, its revolutionary nature is astounding. It remains absolutely “must reading” not just for feminists (whether Second Wave, Third Wave, or beyond), but for anyone wanting to read a vast, comprehensive and well-argued analysis of the nature of women.

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986), was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist, who was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism. She wrote many books, such as The Mandarins ;She Came to Stay;The Woman Destroyed;The Ethics Of Ambiguity;Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter);The Prime of Life;Force of Circumstance);All Said and Done;Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre;Wartime Diary, etc.

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1949 book, “For a long time I have wanted to write a book on woman… Enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps we should say no more about it… however… the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem… first we must ask: what is a woman?... If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline to explain her through the ‘eternal feminine’… then we must face the question: what is a woman?.. [In the Book of Genesis] ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute---she is the Other.” (Pg. xv-xix)

She continues, “what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she---a free and autonomous being like all human creatures---nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They… doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego… How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered as a state of dependency? What circumstances limit women’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light… I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavoring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.” (Pg. xxxiii-xxxiv)

Book One (“Facts and Myths”) deals with biology, psychoanalysis, Marxism [“Historical Materialism”], history, myths and literature. Book Two (“Woman’s Life Today”) covers childhood; the young girl; sexual initiation; the lesbian; the married woman; the mother; social life; prostitutes; maturity to old age; the Narcissist; the woman in love; the mystic; before concluding with a chapter on “The Independent Woman.”

She suggests, “The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man’s weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarcerated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature. It is the advance from stone to bronze that enables him through his labor to gain mastery of the soil and to master himself.” (Pg. 84; Bk I, V)

She observes, “When they revered the Goddess Mother, it was because they feared Nature… then it became the conflict between family and State that defined woman’s status; the Christian’s attitude toward God, the world, and his own flesh was reflected in the situation to which he consigned her… it was the social regime founded on private property that entailed the guardianship of the married woman, and it is the technological evolution accomplished by men that has emancipated the women of today… Feminism itself was never an autonomous movement: it was in part an instrument in the hands of politicians, in part an epiphenomenon reflecting a deeper social drama.” (Pg, 144-145; Bk I, VIII)

She points out, “Man has succeeded in enslaving woman; but in the same degree he has deprived her of what made her possession desirable. With woman integrated in the family and in society, her magic is dissipated rather than transformed; reduced to the condition of servant, she is no longer that unconquered prey incarnating all the treasures of nature.” (Pg. 211; Bk I, IX)

She begins Book II with the book’s famous statement: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as the OTHER.” (Pg. 301, Bk II, XII)

Of the married woman, she comments, “Save during the brief flare of an amorous passion, two individuals cannot constitute a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both realize the day after their marriage…. Difference in sex often implies differences in age, education, situation, which allow of no real mutual understanding: intimates, the two are yet strangers.” (Pg. 513, Bk II, XVI)

She notes, “There is an extravagant fraudulence in the easy reconciliation made between the common attitude of contempt for women and the respect shown for mothers. It is outrageously paradoxical to deny woman all activity in public affairs, to shut her out of masculine careers, to assert her incapacity in all fields of effort, and then to entrust to her the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all: the molding of a human being… They are permitted to play with toys of flesh and blood.” (Pg. 584, Bk II, XVII)

She asserts, “It is understandable… that woman takes exception to masculine logic. Not only is it inapplicable to her experience, but in his hands, as she knows, masculine reasoning becomes an underhand form of force; men’s undebatable pronouncements are intended to confuse her… And so, annoyed, he will accuse her of being obstinate and illogical; but she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded.” (Pg. 680-681, Bk II, XXI)

She states, “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself---on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.” (Pg. 742-743, Bk II, XXIII)

She summarizes, “The free woman is just being born… It is not sure that her ‘ideational worlds’ will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance---this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto women’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.” (Pg. 795, Bk II, XXV)

Beauvoir was a true “pioneer”; modern American feminists are sometimes disappointed in her actual opinions [e.g., see her conversation with Betty Friedan in It Changed My Life; not to mention her lifelong deferential attitude toward Sartre]. However, if one bears in mind that book was published shortly after the Second World War, its revolutionary nature is astounding. It remains absolutely “must reading” not just for feminists (whether Second Wave, Third Wave, or beyond), but for anyone wanting to read a vast, comprehensive and well-argued analysis of the nature of women.

Simone de Beauvoir makes her points very well. She does get a bit over-done with biology is destiny. Because women are burdened with being the mothers of any clan, they allegedly are destined to be subordinate to men. Really? But she does think technology will liberate women to a degree. I want to re-read this book. It's a lot to take in the first time.

I used this book to write my senior research paper in high school during academic 1964-65, along with Betty Friedan's magnum opus, then did not look at it again for 36 years. In the intervening years, I came to know Helen Wentz, the "American Quaker" who was one of Simone's pen-pals, and Nelson Algren but remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that Simone and Nelson were once lovers until recently. I happened upon a volume of Simone's memoirs, Force of Circumstance, decided to read them to research a project of mine and came away awed by her writing ability.Driven by the need to understand this complex woman, I decided to reread her favorite book. Yes, it is repetitive, but the story is that she wrote and researched it very quickly. Yes, it is dated. However, sometimes there is genius in stating the obvious. Freud's genius was in reminding the world that humans are composed of the conscious and the unconscious. We knew that: we simply had to be reminded of it. A more recent example of that kind of genius is Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel." Sometimes, genius consists in opening the debate. An example of that sort of genius was Henri Pirenne's work, which I believe is called "Charlemagne and Mohammed." Although it is generally held that Pirenne's speculations are wrong, in order to challenge them, generations of scholars discovered and rediscovered much about the Middle Ages. In The Second Sex the genius of Simone de Beauvoir was to state the obvious and to open the debate that led generations of scholars to learn and relearn much about women. As the 20th Century drew to a close and pundits began drawing lists of most influential people and books, Simone and The Second Sex appeared on all of the lists. It was well placed. The book needs to be read today not as history but as philosophy, argument and document. Where would we all be without it?

This book was worth every cent, it took me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as high as the mountain. I was so enchanted by this that I could not put it down. I felt like I was in a movie watching everything that I was reading. I recommend this to anyone and everyone who would like to be taken away to another dimension

So commences Simone de Beauvoir in her monumental work concerning one of the most essential issues of human existence. She uses the singular form (but in a collective sense) and follows it with a question mark. How do women become "women", with defined places in society, and particularly vis-à-vis the opposite sex. She says that women become the "other," different from the "normal standard." De Beauvoir's erudition is astonishing; her book is grand "tour de force," examining virtually all aspects of human knowledge. The book is the classic feminist manifesto, written more than 60 years ago, and it still eclipses all subsequent works. It is dense; rich in insights, and lengthy, and clearly not for the "fun read" crowd. No review can do it justice, certainly not mine. One can only hope to throw out enough tidbits that the reader says that the effort in tackling this book will be well-compensated. De Beauvoir accomplished this remarkable feat of analysis and hypotheses just as she was turning 40. As only one example of her erudition in literature, in a couple of pages she moves from Alain Fournier's depiction of Yvonne de Galais in "Le Grand Meaulnes" to Henry Miller's concept of god in a [...] to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov sacrifices at Sonia's feet.

"The Second Sex" is divided into two books, one entitled "Facts and Myths," the other "Woman's Life Today." Of course parts of the book are dated; consider that one chapter is entitled "The Point of View of Historical Materialism." Yes, Communism has wound up in the proverbial dust-bin of history, as is another chapter title, the male-dominated point of view of psychoanalysis. She examined the concept of woman in the works of five authors: Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton and Stendhal. It was personally reassuring that she liked Stendhal the best, saying: "...from this carnival atmosphere where Woman is disguised variously as fury, nymph, morning star, siren, I find it a relief to come upon a man who lives among women of flesh and blood." Elsewhere, making a comparison with the so-called "Negro Problem" and "Jewish Problem," which she says is neither, she says that: "the woman problem has always been a man's problem." Other uncomfortable insights: "that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but that which kills."

In the second book De Beauvoir speaks of the acculturation process whereby girls are taught to be "coquettish and seductive," and are ambivalent in arousing male interest. She says that "the feminine body is peculiarly psychosomatic," and that "woman's sexuality is conditioned by the total situation." The entire chapter on a Married Woman makes for more uncomfortable reading, including the insight that: "Many married women find amusement in confiding to one another the `tricks' they use in simulating a pleasure that they deny feeling in reality;" "This is indeed a melancholy science- to dissimulate, to use trickery, to hate and fear in silence, to play on the vanity and the weaknesses of a man... to `manage' him."

In the chapter on the Mother, her discussion on abortion could tumble out of today's newspapers. She says that a mother who is harsh with her child is seeking vengeance on the man. In terms of her Social Life, she repeats the familiar aphorism that "woman dresses to inspire jealousy in other women,..." and that it is only in Old Age that a woman gains her independence, and can determine who she actually is. Another acute sentiment: "Man enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes..." Her conclusion certainly starts depressingly enough: "No, woman is not our brother; through indolence and depravity we have made of her a being apart, unknown, having no weapon other than her sex... but moreover, an unfair weapon of the eternal little slave's mistrust."

I found some significant information in some of the other posted reviews: There is the issue of a faulty translation, which even excludes portions of the original text, and this matter has never been resolved. There is also the very real matter of her personal life, failing to "walk the talk," and assuming a subordinate position to Jean-Paul Sartre, including the rumored procurement of younger women. Alas! Subordinate no longer, though, they lay side by side in Montparnasse cemetery, for those with pilgrimage inclinations.

Overall, a superlative book that can be read and enjoyed numerous times for the central insights De Beauvoir renders.

Simone DeBeauvoir's The Second Sex was the first comprehensive book about women's lives - as told by a woman. There is so much in this it's impossible to describe: biology, history, politics, - you name it. She covers a remarkable breadth of information and a lot of it is in-depth as well.

You can't really have a conversation about feminism without some point of DeBeauvoir's coming into it - whether the speaker realizes it or not. It's a seminal book.

DeBeauvoir is a gem and a scholar. They're discovering now that a lot of Sartre's work (Sartre was her companion for most of their lives) was probably influenced by her far more than he credited her. Not that I care: The Second Sex outweighs most of his work on its own. But of course, it doesn't surprise.

This book is a real masterpiece by a great writer who manages to create a lucid,
systematic, clear portrait of women's history and situation. It touches both the practical
side of women's condition and the more subtle sociological and psychological issues that
explain the whys and hows of their condition. It is not an "agry" book againts males, but a
very balanced analysis that puts the blame for discrimination both on the arrogance and hypocrisy
of the dominating male gender and on the passive acceptance that women often offer in exchange
for indulgence and "adoration". I wish I could say that this book is now old and outdated, but having lived
both isn the US and Italy, I must say that its content is very much actual and relevant today in
both countries. Don't think this book is hard to read. It will be hard only if you are one of those
persons wwo have lost the ability and habit of thinking (too much TV maybe?) This book WILL make
you think. Remember that this is no boring essay but some arid sociologist but the work
of a great artist and as such will touch on philosophy, and on a deep view of human character,
desires and aspirations. Another very strong point of this book is the beautiful writing style
of Simone, so if you have even a basic grasp of French try by all means to read in its original language.

Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught at Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years; she retired in 1999, after a discrimination claim was filed against the college by two male students who claimed to want to be admitted to her advanced Womens Studies courses. She also wrote the books Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation,Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy,Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language,Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage,QUINTESSENCE: Realizing the Archaic Future A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto, and the store Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big.

This book was first published in 1968, and this edition includes a (1975) "Feminist Postchristian Introduction" by Daly (where Daly wrote of her 1968 self in the third person).

Here are some quotations from the (229-page 1975 edition) of the book :

"The question that comes to my mind is, 'What sense does it make to assert that in Christ "There is neither male nor female"? ... But that is the point: it could not mean anything on earth, where there definitely were and are females and males and where that distinction has been overemphasized and distorted, especially in the church." (Pg. 22)
"One of (Daly's) contemporary critics argued that she had been selective in exhuming only misogynistic texts from the so-called Fathers of the Church. His assumption was that there were some philogynistic texts to be found. Clearly, Daly wins hands down since no scholar of her time nor of any period since has been able to find such texts to refute her position." (Pg. 23)
"Briefly, if God is male, then the male is God." (Pg. 38)
"Women discovering self-actuaization in sisterhood in 1975 ... rarely talk of 'partnership' with men, since this term seems to imply ... as if we could glimpse nothing more desirable than an equal slice of the patriarchal pie." (Pg. 41)
"There is no small irony in the fact that during an age in which opinion of women was so low, some of them were, in fact, members of the hierarchy, whereas in a later and more enlightened age, when the Church itself is urging them to take a more active part in public life, they are completely excluded from the hierarchy." (Pg. 90)
"If women's subordination were really so 'natural,' it would not be necessary to insist so strongly upon it. It would seem that people would not have to be told authoritatively to behave 'naturally.'" (Pg. 116-117)
"...that dream world which is precisely the 'metaphysical world of woman,' the ideal, static woman, who is so much less troublesome than the real article... For the celibate who prefers not to be tied down to a wife, or whose canonical situation forbids marriage, the 'Mary' of his imagination could appear to be the ideal spouse." (Pg. 161)

I recently finished THE SECOND SEX by Simone de Beauvoir, which I had been "reading on" for more than a year. I adopted a system of reading chapters of it between other books after starting out great guns the summer of 2004, reading 200 pages and realizing that if I didn't do something to break it up, I would never finish it.

That is not to say that THE SECOND SEX is not a great book. It is. It's valuable. It's interesting. It's educational, not just about views of women in the first part of this century in Western culture, but also about the logical and writerly process that de Beauvoir uses to address such a massive topic: The topic of Woman; the topic, really of Woman as Other.

But there are issues with the translation that can't be ignored. If memory serves me, Parshley had trouble getting de Beauvoir to help him with his translation. Questions he directed to her went unanswered for months, so he not only translated the book, but cut large sections (yes, this 732-page version is abridged!) that he thought were not important, or were redundant. Parshley also was not a philosopher, but was a zoologist, and as such did not understand the depth of such existential and philosophical terms as "immanence." Once the translation was finished and published, de Beauvoir was furious with the results. Though Parshley can hardly be blamed given the situation in which he was working, it does make one wonder how much what one is reading resembles de Beauvoir's original ideas and objectives.

Considering her objectives, this leads me to one of my favorite quotes about THE SECOND SEX. Nelson Algren, the Chicago writer who was the longtime lover of de Beauvoir (with whom she traveled when she wrote America Day by Day; he was also the writer of The Man with the Golden Arm), said that when the book came out, there was much brou-haha, especially when 22,000 copies were sold in France the first week after it was published. Algren noted that de Beauvoir was the most reviled and the most beloved woman in Paris, and it was clear: "She meant it."

The book is quite logically organized, which makes it easy to pick up and put down (and to read bits of between other works). Part I: Destiny includes chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. The other parts of the book are: history, myths, the formative years, sitautions, justifications and toward liberation. De Beauvoir uses examples from myth, literature and doctor's case files to illustrate her positions. And her positions are more and less relevant today than they were in the 1940s when she wrote the book. The chapter on lesbians seesm less relevant, since she bases her understandings of the homosexual orientation on situational and envrionmental factors. However, I found her chapter on motherhood to be extremely cogent, as she deals with the issues of expectations of self-realization through children, the disappointments and the isolation of mothers, and the societal expectations of mothers of both girls and boys. And de Beauvoir notices the logical conflict between a society that lauds motherhood for women, but denies them a public voice and equal public standing. This is a typical style of argument for de Beauvoir, and I find her insight, her wisdom, her logic and her organization in this book to be impressive.

De Beauvoir writes, "One is not born a woman; one becomes one." I think it can be argued that she is not saying that female humans are born the same as male humans, because we all know, or are ourselves, people who were born with strong tradtional male or female traits inherently. Rather, after reading this large and complete work, I think she is saying that women are not born second-class citizens, they become them, through societal shaping, political pressure and self-monitoring. They become the Other because they start to believe they are. While I think we have made strides since THE SECOND SEX was written, reading this book nearly 70 years after it was written is a little upsetting: some of the saddest aspects of the life of the Other for women still ring true.

The Second Sex was quite a risque undertaking for De Beauvoir at that time. Few feminist writers before then had challenged the status quo through such a massive attempt in depicting the female experience. It's certainly a fascinating read but, one has to cringe at De Beauvoir's naive attempt at generalizations. Her book is clearly only a depiction of females in the upper-crust of society, and negates social circumstance. Those familiar with the works of Sartre and other existentialists, will certainly recognize many of the ideas espoused in this book. It often reads like a 'who's who' of the french intelligentsia.

A famous quote by another French feminist (Luce Irigaray) states "how does one talk to scientists?" Paraphrasing Irigaray, how does one review this book?

De Beauvoir was raised in conservative early 20th century France. She had serious trouble achieving notoriety in academic circles. She lived through both World Wars, and could not vote until she was in her late 30s (about the time she wrote The Second Sex). So most of what she wrote made perfect sense -back then- and was a powerful detonator for women's rights throughout the world..

However, we the readers of today live in a different world, at least in North America and Europe. Women's voting rights are a given. Female heads of state are relatively common, though still an obvious minority. Arranged weddings -the kind De Beauvoir saw and might even have been expected to enter into- are now confined to more backward societies. So how are we supposed to take statements such as "she would have had to be raised exactly like a boy" (and then a footnote strengthens the notion even further). De Beauvoir's ideal woman of the future is, essentially, a man of her time. It is plain equality at its more reductive view.

It took thirty-something years for another woman (Irigaray again) to write "Equals to whom?". I understand such a question was probably impossible to even consider in De Beauvoir's time -but it keeps resonating through her book, and unfortunately undermines many of the author's assumptions.

A quick comment on the scientific issues: De Beauvoir dedicates a large part of her book to biology, psychoanalysis, politics and history, attempting to support her ideas from every possible side. Most of her sources are dated, which should not be a major obstacle if the ideas were solid enough to stand on their own. However, the biology section in particular is to a large extent the basis of her edifice and is hopelessly dated. No serious feminist reader today -after Carol Gilligan and many others- can support the concept of education reigning supreme over the development of a child and gender being secondary (or pretty much irrelevant).

Delving into every aspect of female history, biology, psychology and sexuality, The Second Sex must have made quite a stir when it was first released over 50 years ago. Over the course of those years, many theories proposed in the book have either become verified fact or have been completely disproven.

To a reader discovering this book for the first time today, it is nothing more than a mix of common sense and misleading data. The words, though, get into your psyche. While reading I could feel myself getting worked up, wanting to stand up, be counted, rebel against, well, men.

Simone de Beauvoir seemed to be fighting for absolute sameness between men and women and that's where she lost me. While she admits that men and women differ biologically, she rather convincingly tried to reason that someone was to blame for that difference. That men were stealing womens power because women were forced to carry and raise the children they had. It doesn't even make sense as I write it here, so maybe I lost the true meaning in the never-ending cry of it's-not-our-fault-that-we've-been-held-down.

She pointed out that women are forced to bow down to men because they have been raised that way. Inversely, shouldn't she also accept that men take control of women because that is the way they were raised to behave? The message to rise against biology and psychology and to change the system is a very important one, but blaming the entire male gender for womens fear of standing up for herself is prejudice. If I was a man, I would be horrendously offended.

As a women, I see the value of the kind of passion about our gender. The Second Sex is powerful and compelling and often times inaccurate. It's to be expected based on the multitude of changes garnered by the feminist movement over the last 50 years. The book makes you think and that is always a good thing.

A verifiable monster of a book, The Second Sex is an extraordinarily important work in the development of contemporary feminism, but it cannot be lightly tackled. Although there are excellent chapters that cover specific situations, specifically periods within a woman's life, the book as a whole is a bit thick and dense to digest in one sitting, even if that sitting were to last an entire semester. Instead, most people I have spoken to recommend reading just De Beauvoir's introduction and one or two chapters that are relevant to an individual project. I would have to pass along the same recommendation.

I am staggered that the two "Spotlight Reviews" of this book revolve around the book being "dated." Maybe it's just where I'm from. Maybe things are radically different elsewhere in the country and the world, but most of Beauvoir's words still ring true, perhaps not to the same degree as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but true nonetheless. We, as a society, have progressed, but perhaps not so far as some would have us believe. With all due respect to those who think differently, I must disagree. Beauvoir's book may be dated, but it is far from "impenetrable" (interesting choice of term, isn't it?) and is still applicable to the state of women as a gender today.

This translation conveys the same message as the first translation, but is unnecessarily wordy, uses longer complicated sentence structure and is a struggle to get through. It seems to be a literal translation and also uses French terminology with no footnotes to explain their meaning to the English reader. All this book demonstrates is that the decades of criticism surrounding the first translation was unfounded & based in ignorance (no big surprise there).

Does contain a great quote though: "Scandinavians are healthy, strong, and cold. "Fiery" women are those who combine their languor with "fire," like Italian or Spanish women,"

Oh how true it is.

After reading several other reviews, I felt compelled to add one of my own. I loved this book. While several other reviewers described much of the content as dated, I'm surprised at how relevant much of it still is today. As one fascinated with understanding the underlying causes of sexism, particularly in male-dominated professions, as well as dominance in interpersonal relationships, I found this book enlightening and helpful. Read it!

Simone's treatise is the most brave and brilliant piece of literature ever written about gender and its effects on the lives of everyone we know. She continues to speak the truths about men, women and privilege in society and the corrosive effects of the constructed and artificial roles that we still struggle with. The Second Sex is as essential and appropriate reading today as it was 40 years ago. To anyone interested in the roots of gender oppression, definition and equal access to opportunity, this is the go to reference book. Simone de Beauvoir has found another generation of readers who understand its appeal to rationality, historical accuracy and truth.

Reading feminism books that were written after The Second Sex, it's clear that 95% of them get their basis from Simone. Originally she was going to write a book on defining herself, but when she looked into the mirror, the first thing she said is "I am a woman" she spent over two years researching the history of womyn, and her undeniable wit and intellegence is extremely present in this book. She knew what she was talking about and was not afraid
If you want to know why any individual is a feminist, read this book, it pertains to both sexes and it will present you with ideas that you never even thought about or even recognized. It moves beyond the surface of "radical feminism" and digs deep and helps you understand.
The only problem I found is that she didnt come up with an answer, but that was not her purpose, she was only explaining the problem and what she saw, she also repeats herself a lot, but I think she does that on purpose. Tt's outdated and I sincerely wish Simone' were still alive to expand her ideas and see what she thought of womyn today, I'd be the first to buy her "updated views."

This book can be regarded as the defining text of the feminist
movement. The first time I read this book nearly 10 years ago,
I loved it. I keep reading parts of it over time. Her views about
society still seem to current even though she had written his
in the 40s/50s.
Anyone who considers oneself a feminist, or just someone
wanting to understand society, this book is a must-read.

A book that every thinking man should read, especially those of us who live with feminists. Even better, to read and then discuss it with an intelligent woman, preferrably your partner... . I started reading and rereading it in 1990 and haven't stopped. The very best of French philosophy since Descartes...

It's slow going, overflowing with ideas and arguments, and very rewarding. The Second Sex is an intelligent book, clear and logical. It is relevant to everybody, personally and socially, here and now at least as much as it was when it was first published.

A previous review has noted some weaknesses in this translation, which I think are a bit one sided. Cetainly, Toril Moi raises some valid points in her critique of this translation - however, I think these are stylistic issues and translator's preferences. Indeed, there is rarely a "true" translation of a book, and opinions will always differ as to their quality. What I will say is that this book is infinitely better than the first translation, especially with its use of philosophical/existentialist terminology.

I gave this book five stars because I think it is so much better than the original translation. Even though the translators may have made poor choices in parts, they have also restored a great deal of the book that was previously inaccessible in English editions. As to the criticism about the style of the book, I must disagree. I think the book is extremely readable, and had no trouble reading through in its entirety.

Moving briefly away from the translation on to the content, this is a must have book for anyone interested not only in feminism, but also existentialism more generally. This book is for both men and women seeking to live an authentic (gendered) life. As a piece of history it is also important. Though the ideas presented her may no longer seem revolutionary, they were when this book was written. Of course, parts of the book have not aged well as science has advanced, but it does not detract from the greatness of the book.

In "the second sex", de Beauvoir is conducting research to determine how females came to occupy a subordinate social role to males; she turns to biology, historical materialism, and literature where she finds undeniable differences between men and women and countless examples, but no clear reason or justification for woman's implied inferiority.

By walking us through the stages of female's life, de Beauvoir tries to prove that women are not born feminine but shaped by external forces into dependent inferior creatures, or as she put it in her own words:" One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". Maternity caused society to label women and rob their individuality during youth. Labeling women and forcing them into certain roles inevitably results in women living lives of incompleteness and immanence. Age and the subsequent loss of reproductive ability ends woman's purpose and in turn her identity and usefulness.

Great work, great research but the only reason I'm giving this work three stars is because of the mixed feelings I have about it: I agree with some of de Beauvoir's conclusions: the importance of financial independence for every woman, female character is a result of her situation not the opposite, the difficulty of breaking free from the myth of "femininity", and most importantly, women's own role in reinforcing their dependency and otherness. I strongly disagree though with the claim that being a mother or a wife are unfulfilling roles that exacerbate a woman's inferiority. For me, asking for absolute "equality" and taking away woman's motherhood is as cruel and dehumanizing as depriving females of subjectivity and turning them into objects.

Not to criticize de Beauvoir's personal life, but her fixation with resisting the myth of feminine inferiority drove her to the extreme position, rejecting marriage and having kids. Even though de Beauvoir was committed to her relationship with Sartre, she didn't want to marry him and allowed him and herself marginal romantic encounters with males and females.

The paradox of de Beauvoir loving some body and allowing herself to be with somebody else, to me, is as damaging as what she criticized in her work. It is exactly acting like the men she criticized for treating "the other sex" as objects.

First published in 1949 this book will never go out of print while there is still a demand for startling, precise and lucid argument. The central theme (that although women are seemingly doomed to immanence by a misogynist society and culture, we are capable of transcendence)is as fresh and relevant as ever. Read it and think!

Anyone who is interested in women's issues needs to read this book!

To me it appears to be the best discourse on feminism ever written. Well researched it gives a bilogical, historical ,psychological and philosophical persective of so called feminie condition across the centuries and outlines it with great accuracy and professionalism. It deals with various aspects of woman's life , her roles in the family and the society , her psychology and sexuality. Sure, women's condition changed since the book was written, but it's message still seems shockingly revolutionary. No wonder that its publication almost 60 years ago caused so much fear and hatred.

The Borde and Malovany translation first appeared in 2010. Some of the reviews here, complaining about the translation, are about an earlier edition (translated by someone else). Among other corrections, the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation reinstates a large section - over 700 pages - that the original translator left out.

French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir argues in her book Le deuxième sexe (1949:13) that gender is a social construct: "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la société la femelle humaine; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. »[One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, pschological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine] [v].

De Beauvoir underscores the role played by prejudice in the oppression of women in contemporary societies. She points out that the key to understanding how girls develop as opposed to boys is to be found not in any "myth of the second sex" but in the manner of their upbringing in a society geared toward male supremacy. In other words, women consider themselves inferior because men regard them as such. Beauvoir offers her views on the subtle ways in which matrimony has often been made to work to the detriment of women. She perceives marriage as a male contraption to perpetuate gender inequality when she notes:« Le mariage s'est toujours présenté de manière radicalement différente pour l'homme et pour la femme. Les deux sexes sont nécessaires l'un à l'autre, mais cette nécessité n'a jamais engendré entre eux de réciprocité ; jamais les femmes n'ont constitué une caste établissant avec la caste mâle sur un pied d'égalité des échanges et des contrats. Socialement l'homme est un individu autonome et complet ....On a vu pour quelles raisons le rôle reproducteur et domestique dans lequel est cantonnée la femme ne lui a pas garanti une égale dignité. » (196) [Mariage has always been a very different thing for man and for woman. The two sexes are necessary to each other, but this necessity has never brought about a condition of reciprocity between them; women, as we have seen, have never constituted a caste making exchanges and contracts with the male caste upon a footing of equality. A man is socially an independent and complete individual .... We have seen why it is that the reproductive and domestic role to which woman is confined has not guaranteed her an equal dignity] [vi].

I argue along with De Beauvoir and other feminists that the second-class status to which women the world over have been confined is a social construct. I further contend that gender discourse needs to be revisited and debated around address issues that center on gender equality. Finally, I posit that the African woman, in particular, is in dire need of proper education in order to fight male oppression. It is my conviction that a woman's consciousness of her own femininity is to be defined under circumstances dependent on the society of which she is a member. Indeed, a major thesis of De Beauvoir's book is that all her life the woman is to find the magic of her mirror a tremendous help in her effort to assert herself in order to attain self-liberation. It is in the context of their natural differences that men and women must validate their commonality.

Dr. Peter Vakunta is a specialist in French and Francophone literatures.

Thank goodness an earlier review warned this Kindle copy was abridged and messy. This is the problem I keep finding with the Kindle. It's insulting of the store to assume that Kindle readers don't care about clean editing and formatting. As a PhD student in Literature I am looking for a better tool for amassing my huge reading list. Students in every field would be ecstatic with a Kindle that actually served our needs. We need to know more information about the Kindle editions--i.e. who edits and Introduces the volumes. We also need to be able to cite actual page numbers from known editions for quotes, essays, papers and dissertations. I hope Kindle fixes this in the next generation. At the moment I'm making due with the messiness because of the convenience of carrying 300 volumes in one light device. But I'd be out shouting Kindle's praises in the streets (and to the classrooms full of college undergrads I teach) if Kindle would just pay attention to these few details. The search tool can be so helpful as to be heavenly. The dictionary tool should be expanded to include philosophical and theoretical terms also!

The Second Sex is a tour de force. Though outdated in places, the relevance of Simone de Beauvoir's work still shines today. Before I read this book I knew virtually nothing about feminism. Now I have been inspired to go back to college and major in women's studies. I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone wanting a good solid base in feminist thought and reasoning. Admittedly, it is dense and took me four months of on-and-off reading to finish, but for those up to the challenge, this book is for you!

Its good to read this book translated by a woman. I had a very old copy but i have never read it due to very poor translation. The concept and ideas are not obsolete, still accurate for some countries like my country.
The ideas and cases in the book can also be used for comparing conditions then and now and how society changes rapidly. Most things considered taboo then seems normal to us now.
Overall i say its a must read for every woman and men who wants to enhance their vision. Modern classic.

De Beauvoir is a prominent French philosopher that has written a worldly classic book "The Second Sex." Her book has been a study requirement in many universities in the women studies courses.
It is a brilliant and enlightening book about the feminine mystique in a patriarchal chauvinistic male dominated world.

Although I haven't read the flawed English translation by a hostile male, I have read Madame de Beauvoir and the complete uncensoured version of this brilliant piece of work in the original French language. (It's striking that some intellectually challenged reviewers refer to Simone de Beauvoir - one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20 century - as "Simone". In comparison, I can't imagine her lifepartner being addressed as "Jean-Paul", but, of course, referring to prominent women by their first name is a common means of belittling them and their achievements. Read more about it in "The Second Sex".)
Anyone who dismisses the endlessly acute relevance of this masterpiece on human rights as "outdated" - particularly Americans who in 2004 still suffer rampantly archaic sexist issues with women owning the right to their own bodies or the idea of switching the governmental gender balance from a cluster of regressive males to progressive women - only airs their own fundamental ignorance regarding existential conditions for women in a world run by the women-hating male gender.

"The Second Sex" makes for a painful read the intellectual content of which will not be outdated until the day we live in a post-patriarchal society - and that day wont arrive until we have reformed and modernised the male gender. The current destructive relic has long passed its expiry date.

Simone de Beauvoir basically explains the sexual initiation of the female, her relations with the opposite gender, and her place in society, in the style of her classic manifesto of the liberated woman.

As a book published in 1949, Beauvoir's achievement for a woman at her time is really exceptional...

I, a young white man, read Second Sex last week. Although it contained almost nothing that I had not read before, it did what was necessary to my head. It somehow made the position of woman as the Other imaginable by me. Reading it, I imagined what it would be like for me to live in a society that had been dominated by women for more than three thousand years, a society where almost all the most renowned people, heroes, and religious icons were women. A society where the United States of America had had nothing but women presidents and every state was predominantly represented by women, though males account for half the population. Where the predominant forms of music for the last fifty years have all treated men as an interesting and occasionally useful, but often annoying or even maddening objects, and us men run around in skimpy calvin klein-style underwear on MTV while hip-hop women constantly call us "dogs" in their raps and the classic rock section of the local used music store overflows with female lyrics that question what is more important in life, men, cars, or booze? and blame us men for breaking their poor girl hearts and for being warlocks, (...), or idiots (while the woman rock stars collect millions of dollars and boy groupies run around ready to have sex with any security guard to get a shot to have sex with the famous women).

A society where families are dominated by mothers and their husbands live in fear of having their allowance terminated, and have to do menial chores around the house to try to feel, or at least look, useful. Where a boy child realizes before he is 10 that he is a failure and, at best, a second-rate human being (if not an object)(...) A society that is obsessed by the symbol of the womb--in which musical instruments, spaceships, means of transportation, weapons, religious ornaments, political regalia, and thousands of other things are designed to resemble the shape of a womb. A society in which men are scared, brutally scared, of walking around alone at night because almost any woman can physically overpower them and rape them with a sex toy. In which the most famous and influential philosophers of all time, the ones that get taught in university classes and whose books are actually bought and read and that influence the intelligensia, are all women, mostly women who loathe and/or misunderstand men and write things such as "What is the cure for all of a man's problems? Impregnating a woman" but despite such stupidities are adored by female thinkers.

And so on...

So that's why I rated this 5 stars. It did something to me, which is the most important quality in a book for someone who's read thousands.

I found this book enlightening in a number of ways, but especially to understand our contradictory feelings towards marriage and children. This book should be obligatory reading, at least for Argentinian women!

1. The Kindle edition is not actually the full text. In fact, it is not even a decent abridgment of the full text--it's a very brief excerpt, with only the introduction and the first part (the shortest out of seven parts). There was no indication in the product description that this was not an the full book, which is pretty deceptive.
2. What there _is_ of the text is very poorly formatted, to the point of unreadability.

I can't comment on _The Second Sex_ itself, since I now have to wait for a real copy to read anything of it, but don't waste your money on the Kindle edition.

Daly, a leading contributor to the discussion of gender, the Church, and God-talk is the author of tis seminal book on the issue from what is commonly termed the feminist position. I heartily agree with her that there has been much discrimination against women within the history of Europe, and in part within the boundries of the Church. However, I cannot go so far as she does in her assessment of its roots. One can beleive the right thing for the wrong reason, and in my view, this book is an example of such faulty logic.
Starting her thesis with a very useful analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's role as a protofeminist, she uses her life as a stepping stone into the issue of God, gender, and the Church.
Tracing, what is in her opinion, scriptural support for the oppression of women, she goes on to show that modern scholarship has discovered that lo and behold, Genesis does not teach that women are subordinated to men in worth and function! Uh, is that really a modern understanding or did some Church fathers say the same thing? I would argue that it was in many respects Augustine who is the bearer of much of the Western church's understanding of Genesis and that inthe East, it was the influence of various gnosticisms that downgraded the value of women and their bodies- not at all representative of the whole tradition.
And when she speaks of St. paul, she has many cogent remarks that are quite true. Paul wrote to specific communities about specific issues. For us to generalize from this may be problematic, she write. True. However, the manner of her exegesis makes Paul a master of isogesis! For example, Paul in Corinthians 11:7ff makes a few outlandish statements and then, realizing that it was a dumb thing to write, "immediately" corrected himself in the following verse. This is silly. It may be true that that Paul is wrong about his interpritation of Gensis, and I doubt that he is, but it is stupid to say that Paul would write something (or dictate it) and then say to himself, whoops that was dumb, I guess I should say this instead. No scholar that I know of, and Daly is no scholar of scripture, teaches this as an acceptable exegetical method.
And then there is my favorite anti-female text in St. Paul that Daly latches onto in typical fashion. Of course it is not anti-woman in the least, but Daly does what is so predictable. She quotes the first section of Ephesians chapter 5 verse 22 and fails to read on in the sentence immediately following when it says that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church and died for Her. If I am not mistaken, this injuction of mutual submission placed upon the man a crown not of gold but of thornes, or, as Lewis would say, of paper, while at the same time raising up the status of women (and marriage in general) by placing them within the context of the role of Christ and His own Bride.
Her criticism of the patristic period is needed and welcome, but again, it is not a thorough treatment.
Daly's analysis is not all together bad. In fact, I enjoy her writing very much. However, her premise seems to override her scholarship and logic by fitting a few round pegs into a few square holes. Maybe that is too harsh and I should write now, in accordance with her pualine interpritation, that she is right on. Alas, I cannot.
For me,the value of this work is found not in its conclusions, but in its questions.
I would recommend for those intersted in this issue the works of Manfred Hauke, especially his God or Goddess. SOme of his stuff is wierd for me, but he has a strong grasp of the so-called feminist movement as it pertains to Christian literature.

This book is a very important book, historically. If you're looking to study the history of feminism, it's essential. Further, for someone who simply wishes to get a feel for just how far we've come in the last fifty years, it can be very informative to read this book, and see just what constituted "radical" feminist thought around 1950.
But if what you're interested in is cutting-edge, interesting, thought-provoking feminist theory, I'm afraid that this book no longer has what it takes. It was all of these things when it was written, and most of them as recently as the 1970s, but for a modern reader, most of de Beauvoir's concepts and arguments fall into one of three categories:
The first is the "Well, DUH!" category, in which she makes a large production out of an argument that has long since become generally accepted; only the most neanderthal sexist would still argue against the basic right of women to be treated on an equal basis with men in employment, or to be treated as, legally, an equal partner with their spouse in a marriage, for two of the most obvious examples. People may argue still about what exactly constitutes equal treatment, but almost no one would dispute the basic concept.
The second category, and even more unfortunate, is the category of arguments which have long since been discarded as themselves sexist; for all of her attempts to be radical, she was still a product of her time, and rather a lot of ideas got past her internal screen. The most obvious example of this category is her blind acceptance of the claim, then popular among most gynecologists (which of course, at the time, meant "most male gynecologists", since there were very few of any other kind) that almost all menstrual or pre-menstrual difficulties experienced by their patients had no physical cause, but were in fact caused by a psychological problem with accepting their femininity. De Beauvoir, of course, puts a more tolerant spin on this outdated claim, suggesting that it is only REASONABLE that women would have difficulties accepting the demands put upon them by society's reaction to their gender, but that doesn't change the fact that she accepts the basic premise itself, a premise that has long since been recognised (at least by feminists) as patent hooey. There are a great many physical causes of menstrual difficulties, and if there are occasional instances of neurotic triggers, that doesn't make the statement "I can't find a physical reason for your problem, therefore there isn't one," an acceptable diagnosis.
The third category of argument in this book, at least for the reader unschooled in existentialist psychobabble and/or marxist dialectic, is the "WHAT did she just say?" argument. In spite of claims to the contrary in the introduction, this book is rather heavy going for the reader not familiar with the catch-phrases and pet terms of those disciplines. Terms like "immanence", "transcendance", and such are liberally sprinkled throughout the text, and it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the usage. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does make the book rather inaccessible to the average reader.
I do NOT recommend this book to the general public; for committed historians, particularly historians of the feminist movement, there is much to be learned from it. But for the general reader, it has long since lost the relevance that made it worth the effort to parse the 814 pages of impenetrable language.

Blending Philosophy, literature, and her own brand of Feminism, this edition, the better of the two translations of "The Second Sex" is a well written, and insightful look into the condition of Women, the Second Sex.

Though it was in a difficult read at times, it was still a well written book.