The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
Language: English
Pages: 804
ISBN: 1784870382
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.
can only be confirmed by risking itself; no superiority is ever given since man is nothing when reduced to his subjectivity; hierarchies can only be established among men’s acts and works; merit must be ceaselessly won: Montherlant knows it himself. “One only has rights over what one is willing to risk.” But he never wants to risk himself amid his peers. And because he does not dare confront humanity, he abolishes it. “Infuriating obstacle that of beings,” says the king in La reine morte (The
included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.”48 Lady Chatterley and Mellors attain the same cosmic joys: blending into each other, they blend into the trees, the light, and the rain. Lawrence develops this doctrine extensively in A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: “Marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the
One must keep in mind that the decisions and feelings the young mother expresses do not always correspond to her deep desires. An unwed mother can be overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her, be openly distressed by it, and yet find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams; inversely, a young married woman who joyfully and proudly welcomes her pregnancy can fear it in silence, hate it with obsessions, fantasies, and infantile memories that she herself
the formation of a human being. There are many women who, out of custom and tradition, are still refused education, culture, responsibilities, and activities that are the privileges of men, and in whose arms, nevertheless, babies are placed without scruple, as in earlier life they were consoled for their inferiority to boys with dolls; they are deprived of living their lives; as compensation, they are allowed to play with flesh-and-blood toys. A woman would have to be perfectly happy or a saint
companions; cooking, washing, running her home, raising her children, the woman shows more initiative and independence than the man enslaved to orders; he must obey his superiors every day, wear a removable collar, and affirm his social rank; she can lie about in a housecoat in her apartment, sing, laugh with her women neighbors; she acts as she pleases, takes small risks, and efficiently tries to attain a few results. She lives much less according to convention and appearances than does her