"one day i wanted to explain myself to myself... and it struck me with sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was 'I am a woman.' " Simone de Beauvoir

I'm reading a brand new translation of de Beavouirs "Second sex" in Swedish. It's a fantastic work!! Can't believe what it must felt reading this back in the 50's! ( )

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life. ( )

A life changing book for me. Read and discussed it for my Soc III class at school, and the strength and passion of De Beauvoir's arguments led to my signing up for a feminist theories class the following semester. Fascinating, compelling, and definitely deserving of Great Books stature. ( )

a defining book, worth reading again and again, and aging very well ( )

Great book but a bad translation. The historian who originally translated TSS into English obviously knew less about existentialism than I (and I know very little). He also cut out quite a bit of information about women in history (which is mentioned in the introduction to the Vintage edition). Never fear, though; I have it on good authority from a de Beauvoir scholar that a new translation is in the works and should be out in a few years. The people who are working on it are knowledgeable in philosophy as well as women's history. I do highly recommend this book and for the time being, this edition is all we have (unless you can read French), but get ready to throw away your current copy for a more complete and accurate translation of The Second Sex sometime soon. ( )

very interesting
( )

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2007/06/30... ( )

Full of wisdom. A great place to start in learning about the history of feminism.

A feminist classic, though better discussed in a group than read alone. ( )

Reading after what amounts to a dare. Slow going.

In this book Simone de Beauvoir said women made up the "second sex," as in "second-class citizens," and were little more than "human incubators" if they chose to give birth.

We know that the starting point of Beauvoir's writing of The Second Sex was her decision to write about her own life. With that personal standpoint, the formulas of existentialism may have looked inadequate indeed. Her first step for The Second Sex was research. Such a choice was an acknowledgment of her commitment to the "facts" of facticity, beyond the general assertion of the existence of facticity in the for-itself, as much if not more than to the more expected existentialist stress on the freedom of the for-itself. An empirical study steeped in Hegelian-existentialistphenomenological-structuralist theory, The Second Sex was written because Beauvoir chose to tell her own life story. In this work, she progressed from heroic assertions of freedom and vague acknowledgments of facticity to the actual details from which freedom and facticity are present for a whole gender. Thus she could progress to the study of facticity and freedom as they were embodied in one human life: "I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the 9th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail," she matter-of-factly begins.

As The Second Sex was a study necessary as a preface to her own autobiography, her call for a different kind of female autobiography at the end of The Second Sex can be seen as a preface to her own autobiography, one of a specific kind; in which truth, in all of its mystery, will be "unveiled," and meaning will be discovered.

A classic analysis of the position of women in Western society. It stands up well after more than half a century. ( )

This book was groundbreaking in terms of the second wave of feminism. De Beauvoir is the author of such phrases as, "man has removed women's wings, and then chastises her because she can not fly". There is much here today's women and men may disagree with but the power of the book remains.