Le Deuxième Sexe Reading Order

Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) by Simone de Beauvoir is the foundational text of modern feminist philosophy and one of the most influential non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Published in two volumes — 'Les faits et les mythes' (Facts and Myths) and 'L'Expérience vécue' (Lived Experience) — the work begins with the famous question 'What is a woman?' and with Beauvoir's observation that woman has always been defined in relation to man, as the 'Other' to his 'Self,' as the object to his subject. Drawing on existentialist philosophy (particularly Sartre's concepts of transcendence and immanence), classical mythology, psychoanalysis, and an enormous range of historical and literary evidence, Beauvoir argues that femininity is not a natural condition but a construction: women are not born to their situation but are 'made' into it by a society that has every interest in keeping them in their secondary position. The second volume traces the lived experience of this construction from childhood through old age, including the specific experiences of the married woman, the mother, the prostitute, the lesbian, and the woman mystic. Le Deuxième Sexe was immediately controversial — the Vatican put it on the Index of Forbidden Books, Communist critics accused Beauvoir of bourgeois individualism, and many male intellectuals dismissed it — but it shaped the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s directly, and its central sentence ('On ne naît pas femme: on le devient' — 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman') is one of the most quoted lines in modern thought.