The Second Sex Read Free

with greater candor and less euphemism, about the most intimate secrets of her sex.
    One of those secrets—the hardest, perhaps, for Beauvoir to avow—is that a free woman may refuse to be owned without wanting to renounce, or being able to transcend, her yearning to be possessed. 5 “As long as the temptations of facility remain,” she wrote, by which she meant the temptations of romantic love, financial security, and a sense of purpose or status derived from a man, all of which Sartre had, at one time or another, provided for her, a woman “needs to expend a greater moral effort than the male to choose the path of independence.” Colette, who would have smiled, and not kindly, at the phrase, “moral effort,” states the problem less cerebrally: “How to liberate my true hope? Everything is against me. The first obstacle to my escape is this woman’s body barring my way, a voluptuous body with closed eyes, voluntarily blind, stretched out full, ready to perish.”
    To a reader of this new translation—a young feminist perhaps, for whom the very title may seem as quaint as a pair of bloomers—I would suggest that the best way to appreciate
The Second Sex
is to read it in the spirit it was written: as a deep and urgent personal meditation on a true hope that, as she will probably discover, is still elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense, one’s own woman.
    —Judith Thurman
    1. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Christina Rossetti, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gertrude Stein, Christina Stead, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Simone Weil, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, Anna de Noailles, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, Marguerite Yourcenar, Sigrid Undset, Else Lasker-Schüler, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Monique Wittig, to name a few.
    2. It has been credited by Beauvoir and others for having given her the scaffold, although a journal from her university years, which was discovered after her death by her companion and adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, suggests that Beauvoir had arrived at the notion of a fundamental conflict between self and Other before she met Sartre, partly through her reading of Henri Bergson, but partly through her own struggle—an explicit and implicit subtext of
The Second Sex
—with an imperious need for love that she experienced as a temptation to self-abnegation.
    3. The cult of the Virgin is “the rehabilitation of woman by the achievement of her defeat”; “The average Western male’s ideal is a woman who … intelligently resists but yields in the end”; “The traditional woman … tries to conceal her dependence from herself, which is a way of consenting to it.” Examples are numerous.
    4. In reference libraries and in lecture halls—Beauvoir audited classes by Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, among others—and in interviews with women of all backgrounds on two continents.
    5. It was a source of her bad faith in fictionalizing the affair with Algren in her finest novel,
The Mandarins
.

Translators’ Note
    We have spent the past three years researching
Le deuxième sexe
and translating it into English—into
The Second Sex
. It has been a daunting task and a splendid learning experience during which this monumental work entered our personal lives and changed the way we see the world. Questions naturally arose about the act of translating itself, about ourselves and our roles, and about our responsibilities to both Simone de Beauvoir and her readers.
    Translation has always been fraught with such questions, and different times have produced different conceptions of translating. Perhaps this is why, while great works of art seldom age, translations do. The job of the translator is not to simplify or readapt the text for a modern or foreign audience but to find the true voice of the original work, as it was written for its time and with its original intent. Seeking