The Second Sex

Introduction

Beauvoir published the two volumes, nearly a thousand pages in all, in Paris in 1949; parts had appeared beforehand in Les Temps modernes. The first volume, “Facts and Myths”, examines and rejects biological, psychoanalytic and Marxist explanations of women’s subordination, then traces it through history and through myths and literature. The second, “Lived Experience”, opens with the sentence quoted in the summary and follows a woman’s life from childhood through marriage and motherhood to old age. The book caused a scandal; in 1956 the Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books. A first, abridged English translation appeared in 1953, a complete one only in 2009.

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Criticizes

• The Interpretation of Dreams1900 · Sigmund Freud

Taken up in

• Throwing Like a Girl1980 · Iris Marion Young

Criticized in

• Gender Trouble1990 · Judith Butler

More works by Simone de Beauvoir

• 1947The Ethics of Ambiguity