The Second Sex (1949): Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Landmark

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) is a study of women’s condition by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, published in Paris in two volumes in 1949. Drawing on history, biology, psychoanalysis, literature and personal testimony, it argued that women had been made into the “Other” of men and that femininity is shaped by society rather than by nature. Scandalous on publication, it became one of the founding texts of modern feminism.

Background: Beauvoir and existentialism

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9 January 1908 into a respectable but financially struggling bourgeois family. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and in 1929 came second in the highly competitive agrégation examination, the youngest person then to pass it. That year she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who came first, and began a lifelong partnership with him; they never married or lived together.

By the late 1940s Beauvoir was a well-known novelist and a central figure in the existentialist movement, co-founding the journal Les Temps modernes with Sartre and others in 1945. Existentialism held that human beings have no fixed essence and must create themselves through free choices. Beauvoir had explored ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

French women had only gained the right to vote in 1944. Contraception was restricted, abortion was illegal, and married women needed their husbands’ permission for many legal acts. Beauvoir later said that she had begun by planning to write about herself and realised that the first thing to explain was what it had meant to her to be a woman.

Writing and publication

Beauvoir researched and wrote the book between about 1946 and 1949, reading widely in history, anthropology and medicine. Her travels in the United States in 1947, recorded in America Day by Day, and her reading on race in America shaped her thinking about oppression.

Chapters appeared in Les Temps modernes from 1948 onward. Gallimard published the first volume, Facts and Myths, in June 1949, and the second, Lived Experience, in November. The first volume reportedly sold some 22,000 copies in its first week.

What the book argues

The first volume examines how women have been described by biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism, and rejects each as a sufficient explanation. It then traces women’s history from early societies to the twentieth century and analyses myths of womanhood in literature, from the writers Montherlant and D. H. Lawrence to Stendhal.

Beauvoir’s central claim is that man has set himself up as the Subject, the absolute and the norm, while woman is defined only in relation to him, as the Other. Unlike other oppressed groups, women were scattered among men, bound to them by family and economics, and had rarely formed a collective “we”.

The second volume opens with its most famous sentence: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” It follows a woman’s life from childhood through adolescence, sexual initiation, marriage and motherhood to old age, describing how girls are taught passivity and how domestic life confines women to repetition rather than creative projects. It discusses lesbianism, prostitution, contraception and abortion with a frankness then rare.

The book ends with the “independent woman”. Beauvoir argued that economic independence through work was essential to liberation, though not enough on its own, and looked forward to a future in which men and women would recognise each other as equals.

The method of the book was as important as its conclusions. Beauvoir combined philosophical analysis with what would later be called lived experience, drawing on diaries, novels, medical case studies and testimony from women she knew. She treated women’s situation not as a fixed fact of nature but as a set of possibilities shaped by history, economics and culture. This made the book less a programme of reforms than an argument that women’s lives could be otherwise. She also insisted that women had sometimes accepted or even sought their dependence, since it brought security as well as constraint, an argument that later readers found both bracing and uncomfortable.

Reception and scandal

The reaction in France was fierce. Conservative and Catholic critics condemned the book’s discussion of sexuality. The novelist François Mauriac attacked it in the newspaper Le Figaro, and Beauvoir received abusive letters. Some on the left argued that women’s liberation would follow automatically from socialism. In 1956 the Vatican placed the book on the Index of Forbidden Books.

The first English translation, by the American zoologist H. M. Parshley, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1953 and became a bestseller. It cut a substantial part of the text, often estimated at around 10 to 15 per cent, and mistranslated some philosophical terms. A complete translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier was published in 2009 in Britain and 2010 in the United States, though it too has attracted debate.

The book spread quickly in other languages, including German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and became especially influential in the United States, where the Parshley edition was widely read on university campuses. For many women in the 1950s, a time when domestic life was strongly promoted after the war, it offered one of the few serious analyses of their situation.

Key people

• Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), philosopher, novelist and author of the book, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins.
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), philosopher and Beauvoir’s partner, whose existentialism provided much of the book’s vocabulary.
• H. M. Parshley (1884–1953), American zoologist and first English translator.

Influence and legacy

The Second Sex became a key text for the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s. American writers such as Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, and Kate Millett acknowledged its influence. Its distinction between biological sex and socially constructed womanhood anticipated the later sex–gender distinction in feminist theory.

Beauvoir herself became an activist in the 1970s. She signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, in which women declared they had had abortions, then illegal in France, and supported the campaigns that led to legal abortion in France in 1975. In the same era, events such as the Women’s Strike for Equality showed how far her questions had entered politics.

Later feminists criticised aspects of the book, including its largely white, middle-class perspective and its negative view of motherhood and the female body. Philosophers have also debated how far her ideas depended on Sartre’s, with recent scholarship stressing her originality. Scholars such as Margaret Simons and Toril Moi have argued that Beauvoir developed key ideas independently and in some respects influenced Sartre rather than simply following him. In France the book’s reputation also grew over time, and it is now taught as a classic of twentieth-century philosophy.

Timeline

• 1908, 9 January: Simone de Beauvoir is born in Paris.
• 1929: Beauvoir passes the philosophy agrégation and meets Sartre.
• 1945, October: Les Temps modernes is founded.
• 1949, June: Volume one of Le Deuxième Sexe is published by Gallimard.
• 1949, November: Volume two is published.
• 1953: H. M. Parshley’s English translation appears.
• 1956: The book is placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.
• 1971, 5 April: Beauvoir signs the Manifesto of the 343.
• 1986, 14 April: Beauvoir dies in Paris.

Why it matters

The Second Sex gave feminism a philosophical foundation at a time when the subject was rarely taken seriously. By asking how women come to be what society expects them to be, Beauvoir opened questions about gender, freedom and equality that remain central to debate today.