Sexuality, Existentialist Feminism, and The Second Sex
The Second Sex was originally published as a two-volume book in France. These works were very quickly published in America as
The Second Sex owing to the quick translation by
Howard Parshley, as prompted by
Blanche Knopf, wife of
publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting much of her intended message. Nevertheless, to this day, Knopf has prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, having declined all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.
In her own way, Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of
Erica Jong and
Germaine Greer. Algren, no paragon of primness himself, was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir later described her American sexual experiences in
The Mandarins (dedicated to Algren and on whose character Lewis Brogan is based) and in her autobiographies, venting his outrage when reviewing American translations of her work. Much bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.
In the essay
Woman: Myth and Reality, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. And she argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them and to subjugate them. She argued that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy so that the lower group became the "other" and had a false aura of mystery around it. And she said that this also happened with other things such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.
Beauvoir's
The Second Sex, published in French in 1949, sets out a
feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir accepts the precept that
existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the concept of
The Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression.
The principal 1932 treatment by the feminist author
Adrienne Sahuqué, borne circa 1890, entitled
Les dogmes sexuels (Paris, Alcan, 1932) had already approached, fifteen years prior to the publication of
The Second Sex the question of sexist prejudices against women.
Beauvoir argues that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She submits that even
Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir says that this attitude has limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they are a deviation from the normal, and are outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". For feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.
Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.
A critical essay, "Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe," was written by
Suzanne Lilar in 1969.
