The Second Sex
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First published in France in 1949 as Le Deuxième Sexe, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a landmark work of feminist philosophy that asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be a woman? Drawing on history, biology, literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Beauvoir examines how woman has been defined in relation to man, cast as the subordinate Other rather than recognised as an autonomous subject. Across its two volumes, she traces the forces that shape women’s lives, from childhood and sexual experience to marriage, motherhood, work and old age. Her inquiry exposes femininity not as an immutable destiny, but as a condition formed through social expectations, institutions and power.
Written with the intellectual rigour of existentialism and an unusually close attention to lived experience, the book challenged established assumptions about sex, freedom and identity. Its publication provoked controversy in France and helped lay the foundations for modern feminist thought, influencing generations of writers, philosophers and political movements. Both a philosophical investigation and an urgent examination of everyday life, The Second Sex remains one of the defining works of twentieth-century thought.
From the book
“If the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline of our projects.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
On The Second Sex
“With The Second Sex, the modern feminist polemic was born.”
— Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books