The Second Sex

The founding text of second-wave feminism that Simone de Beauvoir researched and wrote in just fourteen months between 1946 and 1949. This Vintage Books Edition, August 1974 made available H.M. Parshley's English translation of the monumental work that begins with the declaration "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman."

De Beauvoir marshals biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, and existentialism to anatomize how patriarchy constructs "woman" as Other - as object rather than subject. Her analysis moves from ancient myths through contemporary marriage, exposing how economic dependence and social conditioning trap women in immanence rather than transcendence.

Though later critics questioned Parshley's cuts and translations, this Vintage edition introduced millions of English readers to de Beauvoir's revolutionary thesis: that women's liberation requires both economic independence and the dismantling of femininity itself as a social construct. For those tracing feminism's intellectual lineage from Wollstonecraft through hooks, this is the indispensable turning point - the book that gave the women's movement its philosophical foundation.