Download The Second Sex – Deckle Edge

The Second Sex Hardcover – Deckle Edge

Author: Visit Amazon's Simone de Beauvoir Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0307265560 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Review

Praise from the UK for the new edition of The Second Sex:
 
“[A] masterpiece. . . . Restores essential passages that have been missing for 60 years.” —The Times
 
“Groundbreaking. . . . A fresh, much expanded, more intelligible book which repays re-reading by adherents of the old version, and cries out for attention from young women who have not been exposed to this most powerful of feminist thinkers. The Second Sex [is] the foundation text of second-wave feminism. It is probably the most important and influential philosophical treatise of the 20th century.” —The Irish Times
 
“The Second Sex is an inquiry into a subject with profound implications for the entire human race, and its ideas are as fresh and inspiring as they were when [Beauvoir] began work. . . . Now Beauvoir’s great work is available in a full English translation for the first time. . . . It is a fine piece of work, a lucid translation.” —The Independent

About the Author

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at lycées at Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to 1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. The author of several books, including The Mandarins (1957), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, both American, are longtime residents of France and former teachers at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris.

Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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Direct download links available for Download The Second Sex Hardcover – Deckle Edge

• Hardcover: 832 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1ST edition (April 13, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307265560
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265562
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir argues in her book Le deuxième sexe (1949:13) that gender is a social construct: "On ne na?t pas femme: on le devient. Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que rev?t au sein de la société la femelle humaine; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le m?le et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. ?[One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, pschological, 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] [v].

De Beauvoir underscores the role played by prejudice in the oppression of women in contemporary societies. She points out that the key to understanding how girls develop as opposed to boys is to be found not in any "myth of the second sex" but in the manner of their upbringing in a society geared toward male supremacy. In other words, women consider themselves inferior because men regard them as such. Beauvoir offers her views on the subtle ways in which matrimony has often been made to work to the detriment of women. She perceives marriage as a male contraption to perpetuate gender inequality when she notes:? Le mariage s'est toujours présenté de manière radicalement différente pour l'homme et pour la femme.

Those who read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir are really reading one of two versions. In 1953, H. M. Parshley translated from the French for an American audience. He did a perfectly wretched job as his mastery of French was pedantic at best. Much of the essence of de Beauvoir's original thought was either mistranslated or simply excised. The publishing company Alfred Knopf insisted that there was nothing wrong with Parshley's version and that, despite De Beauvoir's pleading for a competent translation, there was no need for a revision. It was not until 2009 that a fresh re-translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevalier made available to a long awaiting reading audience the howl of gender pain that Simone de Beauvoir had unleashed after a lifetime of suffering under an oppressive patriarchal hegemony.

Once one reads The Second Sex (hopefully the latter revision), then one can trace the historical causes of a male bashing of women that is rooted in a myriad of discrete sectors of gender interaction: patrimony, menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, reproductive rights, and economic disequilibrium just to name a few. The methodology that de Beauvoir uses is the broad historical and sociological sweep, one that begins with what she terms "Facts and Myths." Here she examines a triangular vortex of biology, history and myth, all of which intersect and coalesce over three millennia to produce the current sad state of depressed feminism against which she railed following the Second World War. In the book's second volume "Lived Experiences," de Beauvoir outlines the genesis of a patriarchal imprinting on young and impressionable feminine minds that leads them down a path that encourages them to accept the status quo of women forcefully designated as The Other.

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