Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex has been called a “feminist bible,”

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman

To a reader of this new translation—a young feminist perhaps, for whom the very title may seem as quaint as a pair of bloomers—I would suggest that the best way to appreciate The Second Sex is to read it in the spirit it was written: as a deep and urgent personal meditation on a true hope that, as she will probably discover, is still elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense, one’s own woman.

Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.”

No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself.

This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other.

Biological need—sexual desire and desire for posterity—which makes the male dependent on the female, has not liberated women socially. Master and slave are also linked by a reciprocal economic need that does not free the slave.

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions.

“Blessed be the Lord our God, and the Lord of all worlds that has not made me a woman,” Jews say in their morning prayers; meanwhile, their wives resignedly murmur: “Blessed be the Lord for creating me according to his will.”

Montaigne well understood the arbitrariness and injustice of the lot assigned to women: “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.