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Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years Later

Published in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women’s liberation and continues to accelerate it. Let’s try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifestyle and endowed with philosophical tenacity, pedagogical talents, and contagious style without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, “the free woman is just being born” (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenomenon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say “anthropological revolution” for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new form of assuring the continuity of the human species along with the bold definition of transcendence as freedom. What becomes of humanity if birth, freedom, and the spectacle are put in the hands of women? Obscurantists, fundamentalists, and puritans of all stripes become alarmed and decry the scandal. If the future is hereby opened up—with all the risks that this entails—does it welcome and offer new possibilities? This anthropological revolution has been in preparation since the beginning of time. The British suffragettes inscribed it in their political agenda and feminist movements after May ’68 intended to deepen it. But this revolution essays