The Second Sex

Introduction

The Second Sex (French Le Deuxième Sexe) is Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 foundational work of modern feminist philosophy. Across two volumes and approximately 800 pages, the book systematically analyzes the historical, biological, psychoanalytic, economic, mythical, and lived dimensions of women's situation. Its central thesis — that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — articulates the structural claim that the feminine is a social construction rather than a biological essence, and that the political and existential implications of this fact require a fundamental rethinking of gender relations.

The Second Sex is among the most influential single works of twentieth-century philosophy. It shaped the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and remains the foundational text of contemporary feminist philosophy, continuously engaged across feminist theory, social theory, and political philosophy. Its philosophical sophistication — the integration of existentialist ethics, Marxist social analysis, phenomenological description, and historical research — has been increasingly recognized in recent decades as the early reception of the work as primarily a political-cultural intervention has given way to fuller engagement with its philosophical substance.

Form, length, date, language

The Second Sex is in two volumes totaling approximately 800 pages in French. Volume I (Facts and Myths) analyzes women's situation from the perspectives of biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, history, and myth. Volume II (Lived Experience) develops a phenomenological analysis of women's lived experience from childhood through old age. The work was published in two parts in 1949. The original language is French.

The English translation history is significant. The first English translation by H.M. Parshley (1953) was substantially abridged (some 15% of the original text was cut) and made significant philosophical errors. The new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2009) is the first complete English version and substantially improved scholarly access to the work; the new translation revealed that important philosophical arguments had been obscured for nearly six decades.

Why it was written

Beauvoir reports in her Memoirs that the project of The Second Sex began when, in conversation with Sartre about herself, she was struck by how much being a woman had shaped her existence in ways she had not previously examined. She set out to understand systematically what it had meant and means to be a woman.

The broader philosophical purpose engages both the existentialist framework Beauvoir had been developing with Sartre and the broader question of structural conditions of human freedom. Being and Nothingness had treated freedom largely in ontological terms, sometimes leaving the impression that the structural freedom Sartre describes is equally available regardless of circumstance. The Second Sex demonstrates by extended analysis that the conditions of facticity (especially gender, but by extension class, race, and other axes of differentiation) substantially shape what freedoms are actually available and what taking them up requires. The book is therefore both a foundational feminist work and a substantial development of existentialist ethics.

Structure and argument

Volume I: Facts and Myths. Four parts.

Part 1 (Destiny) examines biological, psychoanalytic, and historical-materialist accounts of women's situation. Beauvoir analyzes each in turn, accepting what is empirically supportable while rejecting the deterministic conclusions each has been used to ground. The conclusion is that none of these factors alone (biology, psychology, economic structure) accounts for women's actual situation; the situation is shaped by all of them together, mediated by historical and social processes.

Part 2 (History) provides an extensive historical survey of women's situation from prehistoric societies through the contemporary period. The argument is that women's subordination is not the natural outgrowth of biological difference but a historical product that has taken different forms in different periods.

Part 3 (Myths) analyzes the cultural representations of women across literature, religion, and popular imagination. Five major French writers (Henri de Montherlant, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton, Stendhal) receive extended individual treatment as exemplifying different patterns of male imagination of the feminine.

Volume II: Lived Experience. Four parts developing a phenomenological analysis of women's lived experience across the life course.

Part 1 (Formative Years) traces the development of female identity from childhood through young womanhood. The famous opening of this volume — One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — articulates the structural thesis.

Part 2 (Situation) analyzes the lived situations of married women, mothers, women in social life, prostitutes, and aging women.

Part 3 (Justifications) analyzes the strategies through which women have tried to make their situation bearable: narcissism, the woman in love, the mystic.

Part 4 (Toward Liberation) considers the conditions of women's liberation and the obstacles to it, concluding with reflections on what genuine equality would require.

Key passages

• Introduction to Volume I — the framing of women as the Other and the question of why this positioning has been so durable.
• Volume I, Part 2 (History) — the historical survey of women's situation across societies and periods.
• Volume II, opening — One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
• Volume II, Part 1, Chapter on the Young Girl — the extended phenomenology of female adolescence.
• Volume II, Part 2, Chapters on Marriage and Motherhood — the analysis of women's situation in their primary social roles.
• Volume II, Part 4 (Toward Liberation) — the closing analysis of the conditions of genuine equality.

Reception history

The initial reception of The Second Sex in France was substantial and controversial. The Vatican placed the book on the Index of Forbidden Books; French reviewers across the political spectrum attacked it (Catholic critics for its rejection of inherited gender norms, Marxist critics for its insufficient class analysis, conservative critics for its sexual frankness, even some feminist critics for what they took to be its excessive Sartrean influence).

The international reception developed gradually through the 1950s and 1960s. The first wave of English-language feminist engagement (Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, 1963; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, 1970; Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) drew substantially on The Second Sex. The second-wave feminist movement that emerged from the late 1960s onward took the book as a foundational reference.

The academic philosophical recovery of The Second Sex as a major philosophical work in its own right (rather than as a political-cultural intervention that happened to draw on philosophy) has been one of the major developments in feminist philosophy of the past three decades. The new translation (2009) was a major event in this recovery; the work of Toril Moi, Margaret Simons, Kate Kirkpatrick, and many others has continued the recovery.

Contemporary engagement

The standard French text is in the Gallimard edition. The standard English translation is now the Borde-Malovany-Chevallier (2009); the older Parshley (1953) is no longer scholarly standard because of its abridgments and translation errors. Major recent scholarly work includes Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994; revised 2008), Kate Kirkpatrick's Becoming Beauvoir (2019), the Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Claudia Card, ed., 2003), and the substantial editorial and interpretive work of Margaret Simons. Active scholarly debates concern the philosophical originality of Beauvoir's analysis relative to Sartre, the relation between Beauvoir's analysis and contemporary feminist theory (especially Judith Butler's performativity), the application of The Second Sex's analytical framework to questions of race and intersectionality, and the contemporary status of the work's account of biological sex.

Further reading

• de Beauvoir — the author
• Existentialism — the tradition
• Sartre — the lifelong philosophical partner whose framework Beauvoir extends
• Authenticity — the existentialist value at issue
• Justice — the political concept the analysis of women's situation engages
• Free Will — the structural condition the analysis presupposes and complicates

The foundational work of modern feminist philosophy.