A Myth is Probed: Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe Under the Microscope of Gender Research

Abstract

In celebration of the 50-year anniversary of the first edition of The Second Sex, well-known scholars from the fields of philosophy, biology, sociology, psychoanalysis, history, and literature have meticulously read the almost one-thousand-page standard work of feminism. In doing so, they have attempted to reconstruct those questions to which the work provided an answer at the time of its publication in the year 1949. The seemingly timeless formula of the constructed nature of feminine identity is placed in its original context and the author brought from the mythological distance to close critical proximity. These critical readings are overall well documented and allow a first glimpse, to my knowledge, into de Beauvoir’s workshop. A second volume—also edited by Ingrid Galster—documents the reactions that appeared in the French press at the time of the first publication of The Second Sex.