An Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Author: Rachele Dini Series: The Macat Library

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The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir sets out groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman, charting the oppression of "the second sex." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men, and her most startling thesis became a rallying cry for the feminist movement.

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Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex is a masterpiece of feminist criticism and philosophy. An incendiary take on the place of women in post-war French society, it helped define major trends in feminist thought for the rest of the 20th century, and its influence is still felt today.

The book’s success owes much to Beauvoir’s brilliant writing style and passion, but both are rooted in the clarity of her critical thinking skills. She builds a strong argument against the silent assumptions that continually demoted (and still demote) women to “second place” in a society dominated by men. Beauvoir also demonstrates the central skills of reasoning at their best: presenting a persuasive case, organising her thoughts, and supporting her conclusions.

Above all, though, The Second Sex is a masterclass in analysis. Treating the structures of contemporary society and culture as a series of arguments that tend continuously to demote women, Beauvoir is able to isolate and describe the implicit assumptions that underpin male domination. Her demolition of these assumptions provides the crucial ammunition for her argument that women are in no way the “second” sex, but are in every way the equal of men.

About the Author

Dr Rachele Dini studied at Cambridge, King’s College London and University College London. Much of her current work focuses on the representation of production and consumption in modern and contemporary Anglo-American fiction. She teaches at Cambridge and for the Foundation for International Education, and her first monograph, Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Twentieth-century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.