The Second Sex: Writing, Publication and Divergent Readings

In her later memoir, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that The Second Sex began in a desire to write about herself: explaining personal experience first required explaining women's situation. She began with myths created by men, then read physiology and history, remaining alert to researchers' own gender biases. She dated composition from October 1946 to June 1949, a period also including travel in the United States and work on a travel book.

In 1949, Gallimard published the book in Paris in two installments, the first volume in June and the second in November. Les Temps modernes prepublished chapters on sexual initiation, lesbianism and motherhood from May to July, beginning controversy before the full work appeared. These months come from the author's retrospective account.

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Volume I was titled Facts and Myths and Volume II Lived Experience. Literary scholar Ingrid Galster observes that this structure connects conditions assigned to women by society with how women experience them. Drawing on philosophy, history, literature and biology, the work consistently asks about possibilities for action: who can pursue projects and who is assigned to serve others.

Beauvoir did not consider any single theory sufficient to explain women's position. She examined psychoanalysis, historical materialism and biology, insisting that bodily differences be understood within specific social values. The argument consequently moved from institutions and representations to marriage, work and everyday life, rather than remaining a discussion of abstract rights.

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The childhood discussion opening Volume II applies this method to family and education. Beauvoir compares adults' expectations of girls and boys: girls are often asked to please others, attend to their appearance and learn household work, while boys receive more encouragement toward adventure and independence. In her account, toys, praise and blame together train children's understandings of themselves.

She also cautions that a doll does not by itself determine a girl's destiny; an individual object's meaning depends on the organization of life as a whole. Her aim is to explain how society creates habits regarded as natural, not to deny bodily existence. The psychological-development judgments in the book belong to her theory at the time and should not be treated as experimental conclusions applying to every family.

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The August 1949 issue of La Nef offers a concrete example. In Madame de Beauvoir et son sexe, Armand Hoog criticized her shifts between direct description and abstract philosophical language and interpreted her demand for emancipation as a refusal of her given condition.

The immediately following review was signed Francine Béris. She praised the work for claiming women's equal standing as subjects and rejected “writing as well as a man” as a form of praise. She nevertheless questioned whether sexual difference could be entirely transcended and did not accept every conclusion. Publication of both reviews together shows that the debate concerned style and evidence as well as whether women had to accept roles defined by others; French readers did not respond uniformly.

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Knopf brought the work to the United States, publishing Howard Parshley's English translation in 1953. Anna Bogic studied correspondence between translator and publisher: in July 1949, the firm first asked Parshley, a zoology professor at Smith College, to assess Volume I. He supported translation and subsequently accepted the assignment.

Abridgment entered negotiations before translation began. Beauvoir agreed in principle to some cuts but required consultation; editor Harold Strauss and Blanche Knopf also sought language more accessible to general readers. The English text therefore emerged from negotiations among publisher, author and translator, not the translator's individual choices alone.

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Elizabeth Hardwick published a lengthy review in Partisan Review, identifying on its first page the ten-dollar Knopf edition under review. She acknowledged Beauvoir's learning, persistence and verbal vitality but thought the work tried to encompass too much female experience, lacked specificity of scope and exhausted readers through repeated assertions and qualifications.

The assessment combined recognition with resistance, rather than simple endorsement or denunciation. It also questioned the weight given to biological and anthropological material in explaining modern women. Once the work entered American literary journals, readers debated not only women's rights but also how a large interdisciplinary book should organize evidence.

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Toril Moi's passage-by-passage comparison in 2002 returned attention to translation. She argued that certain philosophical terms concerning subjecthood, existence and authenticity lost their technical meanings in the old English version and that omitted quotations could alter levels of argument. The issue concerned more than the elegance of individual sentences: it affected readers' ability to identify the freedom and situation under discussion.

Moi also examined French editions, finding that some older paperback versions had omitted chapters analyzing male writers, later restored. The circulation of The Second Sex is therefore a history both of readers' acceptance and criticism and of which text they actually encountered. Citation and comparison require identification of the edition.

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