The Second Sex: Complete and Unabridged Edition »

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at lycées at Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to 1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. The author of several books, including The Mandarins (1957), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, both American, are longtime residents of France and former teachers at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris.

Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, and brilliantly introduced by Judith Thurman, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of “woman” and to explore the power of sexuality.

Sixty years after its initial publication, The Second Sex is still as eye-opening and pertinent as ever. This triumphant and genuinely revolutionary book began as an exceptional woman’s attempt to find out who and what she was. Drawing on extensive interviews with women of every age and station of life, masterfully synthesizing research about women’s bodies and psyches as well as their historic and economic roles, The Second Sex is an encyclopedic and cogently argued document about inequality and enforced “otherness.”

This long-awaited new translation pays particular attention to the existentialist terms and French nuances that may have been misconstrued in the first English edition; restores Beauvoir’s phrasing, rhythms, and tone; and reinstates significant portions of the “Myths” and “History” chapters that were originally cut due to length, including accounts of more than seventy female figures.

A vital and life-changing work that has dramatically revised the way women talk and think about themselves, Beauvoir’s magisterial treatise continues to provoke and inspire.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is the most important feminist book ever written, and yet English readers have never known precisely what it says. The 1953 English translation of the book by H. M. Parshley, which cemented its international reputation, was an abridged version, with cuts made at the insistence of its American publisher, Alfred Knopf. As feminists often note derisively, Parshley was a zoologist who lacked grounding in the existentialist philosophy that gave de Beauvoir much of her vocabulary. But until now, his translation has been the standard one, and no complete English version of The Second Sex has existed. So the arrival of Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier's new, unedited edition, which comes out just over sixty years after the book's first appearance in France, is an important literary event.

Introduction to the Vintage Edition

Book One: Facts and Myths

Part One: Destiny
1. The Data of Biology
2. The Psychoanalytic Point of View
3. The Point of View of Historical Materialism

Part Two: History
4. The Nomads
5. Early Tillers of the Soil
6. Patriarchal Times and Classical Antiquity
7. Through the Middle Ages to 18th Century France
8. Since the French Revolution: the Job and the Vote

Part Three: Myths
9. Dreams, Fears, Idols
10. The Myth of Woman in Five Authors
      a. Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust
      b. D.H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride
      c. Claudel and the Handmaid of the Lord
      d. Breton or Poetry
      e. Stendhal or the Romantic of Reality
      f. Summary
11. Myth and Reality

Book Two: Woman's Life Today

Part Four: The Formative Years
12. Childhood
13. The Young Girl
14. Sexual Initiation
15. The Lesbian

Part Five: Situation
16. The Married Woman
17. The Mother
18. Social Life
19. Prostitutes and Hetairas
20. From Maturity to Old Age
21. Woman's Situation and Character

Part Six: Justifications
22. The Narcissist
23. The Woman in Love
24. The Mystic
Part Seven: Toward Liberation
25. The Independent Woman

Conclusion