the second sex

A landmark work of philosophy and social analysis, first published in French in 1949. Beauvoir asks what it means to be a woman and argues that womanhood is largely shaped by society rather than fixed by nature. She draws on history, biology, psychology, literature and myth to show how women have been treated as the secondary sex, defined in relation to men. The second part follows a woman's life from childhood through marriage and motherhood to old age. The book is long, wide-ranging and sometimes controversial, and it remains a central text of feminist thought and of existentialist ethics.