The Second Sex

Beauvoir's thesis is that man has been posited as the universal human and woman as deviation from him — the Other, defined by relation rather than in herself. She traces this through biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, myth, and then the lived stages of a woman's life.

Her most quoted line is that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman: femininity is a situation produced by upbringing, law, economics and expectation rather than an essence.

One is not born a woman, in Beauvoir's formulation, but becomes one.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Volume one is the theoretical and historical case; volume two is phenomenological, following a life from childhood through marriage, motherhood and old age, drawing on diaries, letters and case material.

The existentialist framework is doing the work: Beauvoir applies the idea that existence precedes essence to women specifically, and argues that women have been denied the transcendence — the freedom to project and choose — that the philosophy assumes.

It was placed on the Vatican's Index and attacked from left and right. The 1953 English translation by H. M. Parshley cut roughly fifteen percent and mistranslated philosophical terms; the 2009 Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation is the complete one and the one to read.

Later feminists have criticised Beauvoir's treatment of motherhood, her universalising of a bourgeois French experience, and her acceptance of some of the psychoanalysis she also attacks. The book absorbs the criticism and remains the starting point.

If you read it, read the 2009 translation. The 1953 one cut a seventh of the book.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The book's most quoted line states its thesis: that femininity is not a biological given but something produced by upbringing, institutions and expectation. Beauvoir is not denying biology; she is arguing that biological facts acquire their meaning from a situation, and that the situation was built by someone.

Her structural claim borrows from existentialist ethics: man has been posited as the neutral human and woman as the deviation defined against him, so that she is always described in relation and never as the default. The asymmetry is what allows a whole sex to be discussed as a special topic rather than as half of the subject.

He is the human being. She is the human being who is also a woman. That asymmetry is the whole argument.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The first volume argues; the second describes. Beauvoir works through childhood, adolescence, sexual initiation, marriage, motherhood, domestic work, prostitution and old age, using literature, case histories and interview material. The phenomenological detail is what made the book scandalous and is what most readers now find most alive.

Her central evaluative pair distinguishes projects that extend outward into the world from labour that maintains a situation and must be repeated endlessly. Her indictment of housework and of the wife's role is that it consigns a person to the second permanently. Later feminists have contested the implicit ranking, particularly its dismissal of care.

The English edition available for over fifty years was made by a zoologist with no philosophical training and cut roughly a tenth of the text, mistranslating existentialist terminology throughout. A complete translation appeared in 2009. Which edition you read materially changes the book, and older quotations in circulation are frequently unreliable.

It is a work of 1949 and shows it: the psychoanalytic framework, the treatment of lesbianism, the near-total focus on the situation of educated European women, and the absence of race and colonial context from a book written in the French empire. These are real limits and they do not dissolve the argument.

It is long, difficult and genuinely foundational: most later feminist argument is either developing something in it or disputing something in it, and a great deal of what is now assumed began here as a claim that had to be made. If reading all of it is not realistic, read the introduction and then the second volume's chapters on marriage and motherhood, and make sure the edition in front of you is the complete 2009 translation rather than the abridged one.