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Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex

Philosophy asks big questions in careful steps. This page is a short introduction to Simone de Beauvoir and her best known book. It is general education. It is not advice for your own situation, and it is not therapy. It is a short orientation and does not settle scholarly debates. The ideas below are described as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents them.

Who she was

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was a philosopher, novelist, feminist, public intellectual and activist. She was one of the major figures in existentialism in post-war France. Her first philosophical novel was She Came to Stay (1943). She is best known for her trailblazing work in feminist philosophy, The Second Sex (1949).

She refused to identify herself as a philosopher and called herself an author. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that decades of scholarship, mostly by feminist scholars, secured her place in philosophy.

The Second Sex

A famous line of the book is "One is not born but becomes a woman" (1953 translation). Many credit it with alerting us to the sex-gender distinction. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it is debated whether Beauvoir understood herself as inaugurating that distinction.

A central claim of the book is that woman is the Other and man is the essential being. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the book a deliberate feminist phenomenological investigation of the sexed or gendered body, and a founding text in feminist phenomenology. It draws on narrative accounts of women's lived experience.

Situated freedom

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes her idea of situated freedom: our capacity for agency is constrained, though never determined, by our situation.

Sources

This page draws on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Simone de Beauvoir" (first published Aug 17, 2004; substantive revision Jan 11, 2023) at plato.stanford.edu. The link goes to the organization's own site.

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