The Second Sex.

“ONE IS NOT BORN, BUT RATHER BECOMES, A WOMAN.”

Translated and Edited by H.M. Parshley. First UK edition. 8vo. 702 pp. Original quarter purple buckram with grey cloth covered boards, spine lettered in gilt, top edge in purple, bottom edge untrimmed, dust jacket (some faint spotting to endpapers, jacket price clipped, spine panel very slightly faded, otherwise a near fine copy). London, Jonathan Cape.

The first English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex; surely one of the most important and influential works of feminist philosophy. It provided much of the theoretical groundwork for the then burgeoning second-wave feminist movement. Most notably, it introduced the distinction between 'sex' and 'gender', what would, arguably, become the movements guiding concept. Reflecting wider trends in early-twentieth-century French Hegelianism, Beauvoir reinterpreted Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and applied it to gendered power relations in human society. For Beauvoir, masculinity has always been perceived to constitute the positive norm in a way that has rendered women the ‘universal Other’, defined in relation to 'man' and thus a wholly negative 'second sex'. It is in this sense that Beauvoir asserted that 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'.

Stock Code: 241763