The Second Sex

Beauvoir wrote Le Deuxième sexe between the autumn of 1946 and the spring of 1949, working in cafés on the Left Bank and at the National Library. She had originally set out to write a short essay about herself — what did it mean to have been born a girl? — and discovered, in the reading she did to answer the question, that the reading was the book. Gallimard published the two volumes six months apart in 1949. The first volume was immediately attacked by François Mauriac in Le Figaro, by the Vatican's Osservatore Romano, and by half the Paris literary press; the second was attacked more sharply. Beauvoir's mail for the next year contained letters calling her a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, a Marxist, a bourgeois, and (from the readers she was actually reaching) 'the woman who wrote the book that changed my life.'

The book's Anglophone reception was disfigured for fifty-six years by H.M. Parshley's 1953 English translation. Parshley — a Smith College zoologist working from a French text he did not fully read — cut roughly fifteen per cent of the original (all of it argumentative content), consolidated Beauvoir's paragraph structure, and translated her philosophical vocabulary as if it were general essayistic prose. Every anglophone reader from Betty Friedan to Kate Millett to Judith Butler read The Second Sex through Parshley's abridgment. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier's complete English translation only appeared from Knopf in 2009. Serious argument about the book in English continues to run behind the two translations at once.

The argument works in two directions. Volume one refutes the explanations — biological, psychoanalytic, historical materialist — that had been used to make women's subordination look like a natural fact. Volume two then works through the situation as a woman lives it, from childhood through old age, and closes with an argument that legal rights alone are not sufficient. What matters, Beauvoir argues in the final chapter, is that women achieve economic independence, that men be raised to see women as ends rather than instruments, and that men and women be free to recognise each other as separate subjects.

Volume one opens with an introduction so influential it is now printed as a stand-alone essay in the anthologies. Beauvoir names the question — what is a woman? — and observes that the question would be senseless if asked about men, because a man is a human subject by default. Woman, by contrast, is defined always in relation to man: as his relative and subordinate Other. The rest of volume one then works through the three explanations that had, since the mid-nineteenth century, been used to justify this arrangement as natural. The first part, Destiny, refutes them in turn: biological explanations (women are not their ovaries), psychoanalytic explanations (Freud's account of women as failed men substitutes a male norm for an argument), historical materialist explanations (Engels's account is closer to the truth but underrates the specificity of what happens between the sexes). The second part, History, is a two-hundred-page survey of women's position from nomadic prehistory through Greek and Roman law, medieval Christianity, the querelle des femmes, the French Revolution, industrial capitalism, and the suffragist movements. The third part, Myths, reads the woman-as-myth in five male authors — Henry de Montherlant, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton, Stendhal — and closes with a chapter on the general myth of the eternal feminine.

Volume two, Lived Experience, moves from myths and structures to what a woman actually lives. It opens on the sentence Beauvoir is now inseparable from — 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — and proceeds through the four parts of the volume. Formation covers the girl's earliest years, the discovery of the difference between the sexes, the young girl and her early self-image, sexual initiation, and the lesbian (whose situation Beauvoir treats with more nuance than her critics allowed for). Situation covers the married woman, the mother, the woman in society, the prostitute and the hetaira (courtesan), the middle-aged woman, the woman's overall situation and its shaping of character. Justifications is a shorter part reading three specific patterns — narcissism, being in love, and mysticism — as ways women have tried to give their subordinate position a meaning. The final part, Toward Liberation, is only two chapters long: one on 'the independent woman' (the working woman, the writer, the political actor) and a conclusion titled simply 'Conclusion.'

The Conclusion is Beauvoir's argument in twelve pages. Legal rights — the vote, the right to work, the right to divorce, the right to abortion — are necessary but not sufficient. What is required is: economic independence for every woman, in a labour market that does not treat her work as marginal; a raising of men that teaches them to see women as ends rather than instruments; and — the argument Beauvoir carries from The Ethics of Ambiguity two years earlier — a relation between the sexes in which each recognises the other as a separate subject rather than as a projection of the self. She closes on a line that is often misread as bland but is in fact the whole book compressed: 'It is by working together in fraternity that men and women will clearly bring about their liberation.' The Second Sex is not a manifesto for one sex against the other. It is a manifesto for the abolition of the position of Other altogether.