Sign Up

Higgins Hall, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

View map

The importance of The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), first published in 1949 by French existential  philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) cannot be overstated: A wide-sweeping, ground-breaking history and analysis of the treatment of women in Western society, its influence on both philosophy and the feminist movement has been enormous and continues to this day. First translated incompletely into English in 1953, it was retranslated in its entirety (all 700 pages) by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of its publication, reinstating a third of the original text.