The Second Sex
The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement.
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Delving into every aspect of female history, biology, psychology and sexuality, The Second Sex must have made quite a stir when it was first released over 50 years ago. Over the course of those years, many theories proposed in the book have either become verified fact or have been completely disproven.
To a reader discovering this book for the first time today, it is nothing more than a mix of common sense and misleading data. The words, though, get into your psyche. While reading I could feel myself getting worked up, wanting to stand up, be counted, rebel against, well, men.
Simone de Beauvoir seemed to be fighting for absolute sameness between men and women and that's where she lost me. While she admits that men and women differ biologically, she rather convincingly tried to reason that someone was to blame for that difference. That men were stealing womens power because women were forced to carry and raise the children they had. It doesn't even make sense as I write it here, so maybe I lost the true meaning in the never-ending cry of it's-not-our-fault-that-we've-been-held-down.
She pointed out that women are forced to bow down to men because they have been raised that way. Inversely, shouldn't she also accept that men take control of women because that is the way they were raised to behave? The message to rise against biology and psychology and to change the system is a very important one, but blaming the entire male gender for womens fear of standing up for herself is prejudice. If I was a man, I would be horrendously offended.
As a women, I see the value of the kind of passion about our gender. The Second Sex is powerful and compelling and often times inaccurate. It's to be expected based on the multitude of changes garnered by the feminist movement over the last 50 years. The book makes you think and that is always a good thing.
Obviously de Beauvoir's book is essential reading, and this was the first time I thought I would read a long book on kindle for iphone, buying this before a book group discussion of The Second Sex. But as other reviewers (whom I should have looked at before!) have noted, you only get a fraction of the book. Pretty basic problem for the Kindle, and not as advertised.
I'm only in the Author's Introduction, but I'm rating this as 5 stars because I think the intro is fantastic, and in scanning ahead I don't see any diminishment in quality. Some of reviewers here mention that they can only read a chapter at a time. I've been going about 3 sheets (6 pages) before I have to stop. There's just too much new information for me to grapple with by that point. This business with woman as The Other is a major mind blower. My initial reaction was that Beauvoir is out of her mind. To think that women in general believe that the meaning of their existence is a construction forced upon them by men, if they really believe this, simply astounds me. Yet I realize that Beauvoir isn't just some hack that fell off the turnip truck. She actually spoke for many women of her day, I gather. Well, that was the early 20th century. What about now? I've got the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, but won't be reading it until I'm done with The Second Sex, which will take me a while. Are women today still largely The Other? Defining themselves according to male expectations, and aiding and abetting the process by remaining complicit? Or are huge numbers of women redefining themselves on their own terms? There is the pro-life woman, there is the pro-choice woman, there is the stay at home woman, there is the career woman, etc. I'm guessing that women are making these choices, perhaps within a male framework. Hasn't this lead to a fracturing of solidarity? Was there ever a real solidarity of women, or just more vocal or publicized groups than others? Ultimately, is the woman of today happier than the woman of yesteryear? I sure don't know, but these are some of the questions that I have. Anyway, this is a very good book, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
As you read reviews of this book, be aware that there are two translations into English, and Amazon (as I write this) displays reviews of the old (H.M. Parshley) translation on the page for the new (Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier) translation. Some of these reviews echo a common opinion that the Parshley translation is bad.
The new translation won't be released until April 2010, and you can see the date of each review just after the review title.
I've suggested in feedback to Amazon that it treat translations as more different than editions, for instance saying something like, "This review is about a different translation," and putting "[new translation]" in the title of the "edition."
That said, I give the book, even in the old translation, five stars. Some people project this book onto the mere-equality end of the modern spectrum of equality feminism vs. specialness feminism, but it doesn't fit there. The problem of being a woman goes beyond solving by political equality, and it comes from a problematic specialness.
_The Second Sex_ is one of those rare basic books. Here is an important point that doesn't fit previous (or later) categories, but it's too coherent to be rejected; the mind has to expand to try to fit it. This is also one of those books that relit for me that sense that being a human is worthwhile and grand, since, here is one of us, look at Simone de Beauvoir.
As your typical middle class white middle aged man, this book is like source code to the woman. Every woman I've ever known in my life, crazy, irresponsible, shallow, shrew, or not, can be explained by this book. I wish I had read it during my teens & I wish it were required reading for every young male on earth.
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