- Length
- 822 pagesBorde and Malovany-Chevallier, The Second Sex, Knopf, 2010 - the first unabridged English
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Second Sex
The founding work of modern feminist philosophy, and a case study in what a translation can do to a book. For more than half a century English readers had a version made by a zoology professor who removed a seventh of the text and, at least once, reversed the author's meaning into its opposite.
- Date
- 1949
- Author
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1953 English, H. M. Parshley Abridged by about 15 per cent and unreliable on the philosophy; in copyright Attested
- 2009 English, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier The first unabridged English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 6 years
Read in English for fifty-six years in a translation by a zoologist who cut a seventh of it and reversed the meaning of key passages.
What the book says
Nine hundred pages asking what a woman is, and finding that the question has never been asked symmetrically. A man, Beauvoir observes, does not begin an account of himself by noting that he is male; he speaks as a human being, and the female is defined against him as a deviation from a norm that presents itself as neutral. She calls this being the Other - not one of two comparable terms but the term defined by the first - and the book is an investigation of how it is produced and maintained. The first volume works through the explanations on offer and finds each insufficient: biology describes a body without establishing what it means, psychoanalysis takes male development as the standard, historical materialism reduces the matter to property. The rest is history, myth and, in the second volume, description - childhood, girlhood, initiation, marriage, motherhood, the woman in love, the mystic, the independent woman - showing at each stage how a person is formed into what is then called her nature. The book's most quoted sentence opens that second volume: one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.
What it argues
That woman is not a natural kind but a position, and that the position is produced. Beauvoir's method is existentialist: there is no essence laid down in advance from which conduct follows, so any account of what women are like is an account of what they have been made into. The mechanism is the asymmetry of the Other. A man is a human being who is also male; a woman is defined by her sex all the way down, so that whatever she does is read as a woman doing it. What follows is not a claim that men and women are the same, and Beauvoir is careful about this - the body is a situation and not a destiny, but it is a situation. What she denies is that anything observed about women's behaviour under these conditions establishes anything about what women are.
What it answered
Sartre, from inside the framework they shared, and behind him the biological, psychoanalytic and Marxist accounts she works through in the first volume. She is also answering a French intellectual culture that treated the question as settled or trivial, and the reception confirmed it: the book was attacked on publication, put on the Vatican Index, and Camus told her she had made the French male look ridiculous.
How it argues
By accumulation across disciplines - biology, history, myth, literature, and above all first-person testimony from interviews, diaries and novels. Beauvoir uses the phenomenological method on lived experience rather than on perception, describing how a girl learns her situation from the inside. The volume of evidence is the argument: no single case establishes the pattern and the pattern is unmistakable by page four hundred. The prose is direct and unacademic, and the book was written in about fourteen months.
The moment
Paris in 1949, four years after French women first voted. Beauvoir had placed second to Sartre in the agrégation at twenty-one, the youngest person ever to pass it, and had spent two decades as a novelist and essayist. She said the book began when she tried to write about herself and found she had first to describe what it meant that she was a woman - a realisation she dated to a conversation in which she noticed that the world had been described from a standpoint presented as universal and belonging to someone else.
How it travelled
Enormously, and in a damaged form. Blanche Knopf, told that a French book about women was selling, thought it might be the next Kinsey Report and her husband engaged a friend to translate it - H. M. Parshley, a retired Smith College zoologist who had never translated a book, knew little philosophy and relied on undergraduate French. He cut at the publishers' insistence and mistranslated the existentialist vocabulary throughout, at one point rendering a phrase about existing for oneself as women's true nature in itself, which reverses Beauvoir's position exactly. That was the text on which the American women's movement was built. Friedan, Millett, Greer and Firestone all read it; the corrected version arrived in 2009.
The strongest objection
That the account of femininity is written from one position and reads it as general. Beauvoir describes a European, educated, middle-class situation and treats it as the condition of woman, and her treatment of motherhood, of working-class women and of women outside France is thin or absent - a criticism pressed hard from the 1980s onward by writers arguing that the category woman she analyses was already racially and economically specific. The related charge is that she accepts the terms she is attacking: the independent woman she describes as an ideal looks a great deal like a man's life made available to a woman, which leaves the norm in place. Her defenders answer that the book is explicit about writing from a situation, and the criticism is largely one of scope.
Why read it
The introduction, which contains the whole argument in thirty pages, and the opening of the second volume on childhood, which is where the famous sentence occurs and where the description does its most damaging work. Use the 2009 translation; the older one is not the same book.
- First printed
- 1949
- First in English
- 1953
- Digitised
- No
The 1953 English by H. M. Parshley cut about 145 pages, roughly fifteen per cent, including half of one chapter and the names of seventy-eight women in history. Knopf declined proposals for a new translation for decades; Borde and Malovany-Chevallier's unabridged version appeared in 2009 in Britain and 2010 in America.
Parshley's 1953 English is the version most readers used and is unreliable. The 2009 translation is complete and is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and being re-read. The new translation has produced a substantial revaluation of Beauvoir as a philosopher rather than as Sartre's follower, and recent scholarship argues that several ideas long credited to him originate with her.
On quoting this book
In copyright, and the most famous sentence differs between the two English translations at exactly the point where the philosophy turns. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much of the shared existentialist framework is hers rather than Sartre's is now an active scholarly argument, with several recent studies claiming considerably more for her than the standard account allowed. Whether the 2009 translation is a success is itself disputed - Toril Moi, the most prominent critic of Parshley, attacked the new version in the London Review of Books - so the English text remains contested even after the restoration. And whether the famous sentence should read becomes a woman or becomes woman is a question about the article that changes the claim, and the two translations differ on it.