Recommendations
Books Like Le Deuxième Sexe by Simone de Beauvoir
Books for readers who loved Beauvoir's foundational feminist argument and her analysis of woman as the Other
Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) argues that femininity is a social construction — 'on ne naît pas femme, on le devient' — and traces the lived experience of this construction from childhood to old age. These 8 books extend, apply, and respond to Beauvoir's analysis of women's situation, from literary fiction to philosophical essay to memoir.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
The American sequel to Le Deuxième Sexe in practical impact — Friedan's analysis of 'the problem that has no name' (the depression of educated women trapped in suburban domesticity) brought Beauvoir's argument to an American popular audience and helped trigger second-wave feminism.
- 2
Buy on AmazonA Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's 1929 essay on the material conditions necessary for women to write — the most important predecessor to Le Deuxième Sexe in its combination of philosophical argument, literary analysis, and autobiographical illustration.
- 3
Buy on AmazonMemoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
by Simone de Beauvoir
The first volume of Beauvoir's autobiography — her account of her own construction into femininity, and her escape from it through education, is the lived version of Le Deuxième Sexe's theoretical analysis.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer
Greer's 1970 feminist manifesto is the most direct descendant of Le Deuxième Sexe in its combination of philosophical argument, cultural analysis, and anger — where Beauvoir is systematic, Greer is polemical, but the target is the same.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Mandarins
by Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's Goncourt-winning novel, written while she was working on Le Deuxième Sexe — its women characters face the same questions about autonomy, love, and work that the essay analyses theoretically.
- 6
Buy on AmazonSexual Politics
by Kate Millett
Millett's 1970 doctoral dissertation analyses how power operates in literary texts — a direct application of Beauvoir's analytical method to canonical male authors including Lawrence, Miller, Mailer, and Genet.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's first novel is the most powerful literary demonstration of what it means to be doubly othered — by race and by gender — and extends Beauvoir's analysis of woman as Other into the specific experience of Black women in America.
- 8
Buy on AmazonGender Trouble
by Judith Butler
Butler's 1990 philosophical critique extends and challenges Beauvoir — where Beauvoir argues that gender is a social construction layered onto biological sex, Butler argues that the sex/gender distinction itself is unstable; the most important theoretical response to Le Deuxième Sexe.
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