Recommendations
Books Like The Second Sex
Best books to read after The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Readers who love The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir are drawn to its combination of philosophical ambition, the comprehensive investigation of women's lived experience under patriarchy, and the foundational claim that 'one is not born, but becomes, a woman' — they want books that deal with feminist philosophy, the existentialist analysis of social construction, and the tradition of the foundational feminist text.
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She Came to Stay
by Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's companion first novel — Françoise, Pierre, and Xavière. The companion investigation of the same subject in fictional form: Françoise is a woman whose situation is shaped by the constraints that The Second Sex identifies and names
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The Mandarins
by Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's companion Prix Goncourt novel. The companion investigation of the same subject in the postwar political world: Anne Dubreuilh is a woman whose intellectual and emotional life is shaped by the constraints that The Second Sex analyzes
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Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
by Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir's companion autobiography. The companion investigation of how a woman becomes a subject: Beauvoir's own account of her escape from the bourgeois Catholic world that defined her as the future-wife and future-mother that The Second Sex argues she was not born to be
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
The companion founding feminist text. Wollstonecraft argues against the same 'nature' arguments for female inferiority that Beauvoir refutes in The Second Sex's first volume; both are organized around the argument that women's apparent incapacity is the product of their education, not their nature
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A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's companion essay — the material conditions for women's intellectual freedom. The companion investigation in a different register: where Beauvoir uses philosophical analysis, Woolf uses the essay-as-fiction; both organized around what women's intellectual life would look like with the same conditions as men
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The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
Friedan's companion — the American feminist text that The Second Sex made possible. The companion as the American application of Beauvoir's analysis: where Beauvoir provides the philosophical framework, Friedan provides the sociological investigation of how the mystique of femininity operates in postwar American suburbia
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Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's companion philosophical masterwork. The companion philosophical text: The Second Sex applies Sartrean existentialism (transcendence and immanence, the subject and the Other, bad faith) to the situation of women, while also revealing the limits of Sartre's analysis
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Gender Trouble
by Judith Butler
Butler's companion founding text of gender theory. The companion investigation of the same claim that 'one is not born, but becomes, a woman' — but radicalized: where Beauvoir treats gender as a social role imposed on biological sex, Butler argues that sex itself is also a social construction, and that gender is a performance with no original
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