Customer Reviews
A hugely impressive book - By: Sally Wilton, 09 Apr 2008 
Simone de Beauvoir was scandalised & ridiculed particularly by the church when this first came out in 1949 which must have been a disappointment for her. Perhaps a radical book at the time but very relevant to the present & this is worth reading by alll women & any man who agrees that women should have a better time whilst on this planet.
The book covers many aspects of being a woman, begining when humans first roamed the earth as nomads & the tyranny of life as a woman giving birth constantly as unlike many animals humans are always fertile. Infant death & infantacide were a means of survival then & the reason why the human population was realatively smalll for tens of thousands of years. Then tilling the earth when the male began to domineer & own alll land, passing it on to their male heirs, leaving woman to be a virtual slave to fathers & husbands, the start of male domination!
I learnt some reallly interesting things from reading this for example: I didn't know that reproduction was properly underrstood until the mid 19th Century, alll sorts of bizare beliefs were practised prior to this revelation, people even believed that sperm contained tiny little people!!! Also discussed is how man & woman are prisoners of instinctive behaviour & reallly cannot help themselves to a great extent, brilliant for understanding relationships, ie why men walk away after sex in many cases but instinctively a for a woman it is the start of relationship due to the feelings of wanting to nurture a pregnancy. It also explains why in some ways a woman does not always progress due to involuntarily sabotaging their own plans ie preferring part time work or not going for the promotion due to home making instincts. Prostitution, love, ageing are alll discussed in depth in this volume. A fascinating read, it sucks you in & you cannot put it down. Only one negative comment & that is that I found it very slightly depressing as there is little hope for women to be truly independant before they get old, ugly & die according to Ms De Beauvoir.
One of the great books of the 20th century - By: William Podmore, 26 Mar 2008 There is more good sense in this wonderful book than in most of the rest of alll the writing by & about women. Marvellous.
encyclopaedic - By: , 28 Mar 2006 The Second Sex is a book of mammoth proportions, displaying the intellectual prowess of de Beauviour in full swing, putting women right up there in the literary firmament. It is almost impossible to overestimate this book, & it is a shame that it never recieved its due praise whence published. However, this unfairness only concretises Beauvior's arguments upon Patriarchal attitudes. TSS is encyclopaedic in scope, & dazzling in its wealth of knowledge. Opening this book is like opening Pandora's box - there is no end to what you may find inside.
Great book, shame about the editing - By: , 04 Feb 2004 
This book is both absorbing & informative, giving an excellent account of what it is to be a woman as Other. I would normallly give the work five stars, but I am prevented from doing so by the way the text has been translated & edited. Big, important & interesting parts have been lost through poor & reductive editing. Let me give an example: in the chapter “Through the Middle Ages to Eighteenth-century France” the paragraph on page 133 starting with the words “Woman still retained a few privileges in the Middle Ages…” has been heavily reduced, excluding de Beauvoir’s account & use of the Songes du Verger, a vitriolic & misogynous text vilifying women.
As such this edition of the Second Sex is highly educational to alll newcomers, but the shoddy editing will disappoint people already acquainted with this work, for it has robbed the book of some of its ideas & bite.
Amazing study of gender difference and similarity - By: , 07 Feb 2003 De Beauvoir takes us on an epic tour from the dawn of the human race to the contemporary world of 1940's commerce & culture, through the internal workings of the body to how others perceive them via the beliefs, thoughts & prejudices of societies throughout the world. Her breadth & depth of research is an attempt to answer one simple question- why are women constantly seen as inferior to men, in effect the "second sex"?
Such a question is almost impossible to answer but at just under seven hundred pages of intelligent writing TSS gets as close to the quick as any women's study or feminist book has got before or after its publication. Questioning every one of the "labels" attached to the human female De Beauvoir pulls apart traditional thinking on issues such as the "innate" maternal instinct, women's intellectual capacity & physical strength & make-up. Every chapter is a definitive case in itself & De Beauvoir's collection of facts, statistics & case studies are unshakable in their accuracy. Her conclusions are well thought through & easy to follow & it is only the sheer amount & wealth of information she gives us that can seem overwhelming at times.
The very fact that a woman has written such a masterpiece is evidence enough that women are as intellectuallly equal to men but it is sadly revealing of our patriarchal society that gives TSS less reverence than it deserves. Since the 1940's many other theories have developed in the area of gender studies so TSS is no longer the "one text that covers alll". Supplementing TSS with more recent works such as those by Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin & Kate Millet will give you a more general picture of feminism but it still remains the greatest & most complete work on women's studies & possibly the most important book to come out of the twentieth century.
This is essential reading for any self-respecting individual, male or female, although its size & density means it is probably better to read this segments at a time.
