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The Second Sex

Le Deuxième Sexe

Simone de Beauvoir·1949·French

About this text

De Beauvoir's founding work of feminist philosophy. Her central argument: woman is not born but made: she becomes the Other, defined against the male norm. Drawing on existentialism, psychoanalysis, history, and literature, the book surveys what it has meant to be a woman and asks what it might mean to be free.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other.

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