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This chapter draws on a variety of Beauvoir's works to explore the different dynamics through which oppression operates. Oppression functions so as to close down the ambiguities of embodied subjectivity and to deny freedom, most often by objectifying and treating persons as if they were things. It may, however, operate in different ways, and three primary modes of oppression are distinguished and discussed: asymmetrical recognition, indifference, and aversion. These are paradigmatically described by Beauvoir as they operate, respectively, in the spheres of gender (in The Second Sex), race (in America Day by Day), and age (in The Coming of Age). The question of to what extent oppressed groups may become complicit in their own oppression is also addressed: Sometimes the line between oppressors and oppressed is far from unambiguous.

Simone de Beauvoir has played a major role in raising Women's Liberation founders' understanding that male ascendancy has imposed limitations on women's achievement of human potential. Many leading Women's Liberation organizers have adopted feminist consciousness, ideology, and an example from Beauvoir. The chapter brings into light the influences of Simone de Beauvoir on different women activists and their thinking patterns. “The Second Sex”, written by Beauvoir, managed to manipulate many women's thinking and raised their consciousness towards a need for a women's liberation movement. The chapter provides an accounts of different activists and how they were affected by reading Beauvoir's views in her book.

This chapter reconstructs how the public was introduced to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's most famous work, and considers its critical reception. It mentions reviewers and critics who saw themselves as custodians of literary standards and public taste, and held very firm and contrasting views on the broader reading public. It elaborates how the reviewers and critics' views provide new ways to understand Beauvoir's arguments and the expectations that took shape around her. The chapter describes The Second Sex as an eight-hundred-page manuscript that challenges philosophical argument, literary criticism, history, and social science, as well as provide a detailed description of sexual and bodily experience. It points out how The Second Sex was considered ahead-of-its time with its narrative of the philosophical reconsideration of the female condition or situation.

This chapter examines Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex and its place in contemporary French feminist discussions. In particular, it discusses the issues The Second Sex raises, the analyses it provides, and the criteria of justice it invokes in relation to de Beauvoir’s claim, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), that existentialism is the philosophy for our times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously. It also argues that The Second Sex is relevant today not only as an analysis of patriarchy but also because it is grounded in the categories and claims of The Ethics of Ambiguity about the need to confront evil, which continue to provide insight into a host of contemporary issues such as gender oppression. Finally, the chapter outlines a genealogy of postwar French feminism that interprets their critical voices as commentators on the tensions already signaled in de Beauvoir’s scrutiny of gender oppression, giving rise to multiple avenues for feminist thought.

This chapter mentions Alfred C. Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the most prominent research on sexuality that François Mauriac associated with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It analyses Kinsey and his team of American scientists' investigation of sexual acts, practices, inclinations, and tastes they had discovered among their fellow citizens. It also talks about critics who were deeply invested in the role of literature, and the responsibility of the writer who warned that The Second Sex and the Kinsey report debased the public. The chapter likens The Second Sex and the Kinsey report to the “erotic jungle” of American popular culture and fashion magazines, and to a world of commerce, sensationalism, and prurience. It explores the scholarly study of sexuality and the public's fixation on the subject that situates The Second Sex in the larger history of contemporary culture.

This chapter asks how Simone de Beauvoir’s work is now read from the perspective of feminist theory that postdated her. It focuses on readings of Beauvoir introduced by Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, and Elizabeth Wilson. It considers Beauvoir’s work from the perspective of innovations such as the sex–gender distinction and its subsequent critique, the Nietzschean critique of resentment, feminism of embodiment, and new materialist feminisms. Since a new series of questions has emerged with which to approach the status of biology in Beauvoir’s work, I argue for a productive reading of Beauvoir, giving new attention to some of the distinctive ways in which she sees biology and embodiment as expressive. It is to look in new ways for and at excessive reserves in this well-known text.

This chapter examines the doctrine of the Trinity and the literature regarding the styling of ‘woman as a man's other’. The first part of the chapter discusses the various views on feminism. In Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, the problem is that a woman has autonomous freedom but she finds herself in a world in which men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. The view that the texts of philosophy are ‘sexed’ are shown to be more convincing using Jean-Joseph Goux's ‘The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the Exchange of Women’. The second part of the chapter looks into the doctrine of Trinity. It also suggests feminizing the Spirit to offset the language of fatherhood and sonship right into the eternal life of God. The chapter concludes that the doctrine of Trinity still tells nothing about sexual difference.

Nearly twenty years after Margaret Simons broke the news of the scandal of the English translation of Le deuxième sexe, Toril Moi’s 2002 essay deepened feminist claims in relation to Parshley’s translation. This reprint chronicles the long and at that time unsuccessful struggle with Alfred Knopf for a new translation/scholarly edition. Moi showed that “the philosophical incompetence” of the translation damaged both de Beauvoir’s reputation and that of feminist philosophy by detailing Parshley’s silent deletions of sentences and parts of sentences, his tendency to turn “existence” into “essence,” misreading of philosophical references to “subjectivity,” botched references to Hegel, misunderstanding of Beauvoir’s account of alienation, and elimination of nuance from key discussions of themes like motherhood. Since de Beauvoir’s works will not enter public domain until 2056, the refusal of the publisher to commission a new translation meant that essays like this one were essential to teaching Beauvoir’s Second Sex to English-speaking students.

This chapter discusses Simone de Beauvoir's reflections on love that are read alongside the USA TV series Desperate Housewives. Interpreting Desperate Housewives through and against Beauvoir writings exposes the continuing subordinated situation of women in an era convinced that it has at last attained, or is certainly moving quickly toward, women's full equality and freedom. Beauvoir's The Second Sex became a founding text for second wave feminism. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir elaborates how women have been held to a life of immanence. She insists that women retain an ambiguous freedom, within the limits of her concrete situation, to reject her subordination and to seek authentic love. Desperate Housewives concentrates on the surface performances of love and on the impact of earlier love stories on current love relations. The Second Sex, She Came to Stay and Desperate Housewives all disrupt the romantic visions of love.

Although Beauvoir’s notion of becoming a woman is frequently understood as a gradual and protracted process, Beauvoir also explicitly sees it as a brutal, immediate, and definitive transition. This alternative temporality becomes clear when we attend to Beauvoir’s repeated use of the reflexive verb se faire (to make oneself) throughout The Second Sex. In assuming the attitude of se faire objet (making oneself an object), a girl transforms the structure of her prereflective consciousness from a child’s consciousness where her body is at the center of her subjectivity to a double, divided consciousness that is both her own and the conduit for another’s desires. This opens a new ontology of sexual difference. Being a woman is not about taking on a construct, set of performances, or sexual style, but assuming a secondary perspectival configuration of prereflective consciousness that makes such styles and performances possible.

This chapter explores the feminist elements in von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). The film itself is rife with images of sexual violence and bodies in pain—to say nothing of its suffering heroine—making it a difficult subject to tackle for feminist study. However, the chapter, as inspired by The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir’s 1952 essay on the Marquis de Sade, shows that, despite these issues, the film itself cannot be completely dismissed in feminist discourse. Antichrist, it argues, encourages spectators to explore a new politics through the extreme bodily experiences of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character. A grotesque mother, Gainsbourg embodies and acknowledges the existence of “foreign realities” in Eden that shatter patriarchy’s deadening taxonomies.

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” is the sentence most commonly associated with Simone de Beauvoir. This chapter discusses some of the peculiarities that have emerged in the translation and quotation of the sentence in the German-speaking world. Comparing the translation of Beauvoir’s sentence in the hands of German feminist and activist Alice Schwarzer with the version that appears in both existing full text translations of The Second Sex into German, the author argues that the latter version aligns with Beauvoir’s phenomenological account of womanhood, whereas Schwarzer’s translation elides the statement’s philosophical basis. Schwarzer’s rendering of the sentence made a significant contribution to 20th-century German feminism in its own right. Yet Beauvoir’s authorship of Schwarzer’s version of the translation, which is taken for granted, must be questioned.

Finnish is one of the few existent Finno-Ugric languages, a language without articles, and with only one, genderless word for the pronouns “she” and “he”. Due to this, the problems faced by the Finnish translators of The Second Sex differed in some ways from those discussed after the publication of the new English translation. This chapter describes the genesis of the second, unabridged Finnish translation, the choices made by the translators as well as the philosophical interpretations motivating those choices. In addition, Beauvoir’s way of understanding the concept of becoming is analyzed. The chapter ends with a discussion of the philosophy of translation and of the reception of the second Finnish translation.

Nearly 20 years after Margaret Simons broke the news of the scandal of the English translation of Le deuxième sexe, Toril Moi’s 2002 essay deepened feminist claims in relation to Parshley’s translation, and chronicled the long and still-unsuccessful struggle with Alfred Knopf for a new translation/scholarly edition. Moi showed that “the philosophical incompetence of the translation produces a text that is damaging to Beauvoir’s intellectual reputation in particular and to the reputation of feminist philosophy in general” by detailing Parshley’s silent deletions of sentences and parts of sentences, his tendency to turn existence into essence, misread philosophical references to “subjectivity”, remain clueless about references to Hegel, and misunderstand Beauvoir’s account of alienation. These failures falsely emboldened Beauvoir’s critics by eliminating nuance from key discussions of themes like motherhood. “Her works will not enter the public domain until 2056,” Moi pointed out, and the stubborn refusal of the publisher to commission a new translation meant that essays like this one were absolutely essential to teaching Beauvoir’s Second Sex to English speaking students—“while we wait.”

This chapter examines Simone de Beauvoir’s impact on feminist politics and feminism more generally. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, remains the most cogent and thorough book of feminist theory yet written. With its exhaustive portrayal of the ways in which male domination and female subordination penetrate every aspect of everyday life and shape our cultural myths and fantasies, it offers detailed evidence for the basic claims of second wave feminism: that male supremacy is a coherent system of power relations, and that “the personal is political.” De Beauvoir’s influence pervades the early radical feminist critiques of Marxism. It was de Beauvoir who first pointed out the reductionism of Friedrich Engels’s attempt to trace women’s oppression to the formation of classes. She argues that “historical materialism takes for granted facts that call for explanation”.

The author argues that the exclusion of the indefinite article in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation of “the famous sentence” in The Second Sex obscures Beauvoir’s phenomenological account of feminine existence. While it is best to understand the recent translation as an informed, interpretative reading of Beauvoir, this essay suggests that reading the end of the sentence as “becoming a woman” undoes the common Anglo-American reading of Simone de Beauvoir as a social constructionist (for example, in the work of Judith Butler). This undoing is important for the way readers become oriented to Beauvoir’s phenomenological commitments. Thus the inclusion of the “a” gestures to a phenomenological sensibility. There is a sphere within the lived experience of femininity that the exclusion cannot capture.

This chapter praises the 2010 translation of The Second Sex, driven by criticism of H.M. Parshley’s original translation by writers like Toril Moi, which was received with mixed reviews, reigniting the old controversy over the success of the English translation of Beauvoir’s message. In her review, Meryl Altman defends not only the choice of translators, but also the integrity of their work. In fact, Altman observes, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s lack of “professional stakes” in the translation prevented them from adding words here and there to generate a “more opinionated” translation. Rather, she claims, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier remain neutral and resist the temptation of modernizing Beauvoir by importing anachronisms that would have obscured the meaning of Beauvoir’s key philosophical insights. Ultimately, Altman argues that the new translation succeeds at refreshing sections of the text, restoring the many authors that Beauvoir cites, and rekindling an interest in Beauvoir and feminism.

This chapter argues that both the H.M. Parshley and the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translations of: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” lead to dead ends. By omitting the “a,” the new translation erases the diversity of women and negates their capacity for liberation. By inserting it, the older translation obscures the ways the material realities produced by the myth of woman subvert the emergence of a woman and haunts the lives of women who challenge the myth. For the nuances of the French to cross the language divide we need to let the “a” float between these English translations. Read as “One is not born but becomes (a) woman” the sentence speaks to the phenomenological ambiguities, and current political realities of being (a) woman—the subject of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and of this particular sentence.

This introductory chapter presents the literary writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), the renowned French existentialist author of The Second Sex. Such insight into her own thought is often provided by Beauvoir's prefaces to works by other authors. For instance, Beauvoir's 1964 “Preface” to La Bâtarde has been described as more reflective of her philosophy than of author Violet Leduc's life. Beauvoir's confrontation with her critics is another source of drama in this study. A criticism that spans the decades of these texts is the charge that an existential novel, with its focus on action and philosophical questions, forsakes the aesthetic function of literature. Yet, for Beauvoir, the true mission of the writer is to describe in dramatic form the relationship of the individual to the world in which he stakes his freedom.

When translating The Second Sex—published in 2009 and 2010—the translators had to find the right translation for the word femme, a word with multiple meanings and connotations. For the iconic sentence, On ne nait pas femme: on le devient, a translation was chosen that omits the indefinite article “a” (used in the 1953 translation): One is not born, but becomes, woman. While the antecedent for the pronoun le in the French is femme, it refers to a state of being, the essence of woman. The dropping of the indefinite article “a” indicates generality and not specificity. Much engaging discussion has evolved over this choice, bringing up issues of grammar, philosophy and of course translation.