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Simone de Beauvoir’s essential masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a revolutionary exploration of inequality and otherness. Unabridged in English for the first time, this long-awaited 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 when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come. Review "The effect of the new translation, which should be applauded, is to make Beauvoir more herself. . . still lively, still apropos." --Slate“This is the edition Beauvoir herself would have wanted, one so true to the original that we can hear her voice in the text. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s new translation is long overdue, and it is a triumph.” -Margaret Simons, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois University“[Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation] can be read with confidence, enlightenment, and pleasure. . . . A significant step forward and a remarkable achievement. So if you’re one of those people who always meant to read The Second Sex-why not now?” -Women’s Review of Books “From Eve’s apple to Virginia Woolf’s room of her own, Beauvoir’s treatise remains an essential rallying point, urging self-sufficiency and offering the fruit of knowledge.” -Vogue "[A] long-awaited achievement." -"Book Bench," newyorker.com About the Author Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain theagrégation 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 onLes Temps Modernes. The author of several books, includingThe 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 ofIsak Dinesen andSecrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, is a staff writer atThe New Yorker. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionIn 1946, Simone de Beauvoir began to outline what she thought would be an autobiographical essay explaining why, when she had tried to define herself, the first sentence that came to mind was “I am a woman.” That October, my maiden aunt, Beauvoir’s contemporary, came to visit me in the hospital nursery. I was a day old, and she found a little tag on my bassinet that announced, “It’s a Girl!” In the next bassinet was another newborn (“a lot punier,” she recalled), whose little tag announced, “I’m a Boy!” There we lay, innocent of a distinction- between a female object and a male subject- that would shape our destinies. It would also shape Beauvoir’s great treatise on the subject.Beauvoir was then a thirty- eight- year- old public intellectual who had been enfranchised for only a year. Legal birth control would be denied to French women until 1967, and legal abortion, until 1975. Not until the late 1960s was there an elected female head of state anywhere in the world. Girls of my generation searching for examples of exceptional women outside the ranks of queens and courtesans, and of a few artists and saints, found precious few. (The queens, as Beauvoir remarks, “were neither male nor female: they were sovereigns.”) Opportunities for women have proliferated so broadly in the past six decades, at least in the Western world, that the distance between 2010 and 1949, whenThe Second Sex was published in France, seems like an eternity (until, that is, Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was back then, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come. |
