Editions

The Second Sex

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099595731

  • Length: 864  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 44mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 619g

  • RRP: £12.99

The Second Sex

TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE BORDE AND SHEILA MALOVANY-CHEVALLIER
ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTINE REID

'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' Guardian

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence.

Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099595731

  • Length: 864  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 44mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 619g

  • RRP: £12.99

Reviews

  • A masterpiece

    Vogue

  • Discovering The Second Sex was like an explosion in my skull, shattering illusions bred in a conventional fifties childhood...Re-reading the book now I realise how much of it is still entirely relevant, and that (despite advances) women are as much in need of liberation as ever

    Bel Mooney

  • De Beauvoir was not just a genius as a theorist. She dared to live it. Challenging conventional marriage and sexual practice, she used her own experience to explore the emotional costs of jealousy, attachment, monogamy, bohemianism, sexuality, of love

    Susie Orbach

  • A fine piece of work, a lucid translation

    Independent

  • A fresh, much expanded, more intelligible book which repays re-reading by adherents of the old version, and cries out for attention from young women who have not been exposed to this most powerful of feminist thinkers

    Irish Times

More from this Author

About the Author

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was a French philosopher, novelist, and essayist, and the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir's first book, L'Invitée, was published in 1943. In 1945 she published Le Sang des autres, a novel dealing with the question of political involvement. Beauvoir's breakthrough work was the semiautobiographical Les Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Concourt. Roman Catholic authorities banned it and de Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), in which de Beauvoir argued that "one is not born a woman; one becomes one".

Simone de Beauvoir

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