THE SECOND SEX by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

This work was published in 1949 and has a place in the positioning of Womans Issues on Womans terms from that time on.For that it deserves its status as a landmark Book that put Half of Humanity on the map of Social and Political Welfare.

You can get a brief overview of the structure of the Work in this link.

Some of the Scholarship is impressive in a way that makes one admire someone who has managed to produce a corpus almost single-handedly thus inspiring a whole generation of academic researchers to put meat and bones on a vast conception.

The high praise though has to be counter-balanced by quite fundamental flaws in structure and conclusions which , if this work was a building , would not get the necessary safety certificates to make it a viable place for habitation.

The first is in the cultural and colonial assumptions which make this work a very Euro-Centric vision with the implied theme that only Europe or the West has the answers and progress is to be judged in how Europeanised ( the more palatable euphemism being "Westernised") Non-European Societies can become.The very few Examples from Africa/Islamic World , mostly French Occupied Algeria are given a very negative , almost dismissive , short-shrift.Mostly her objections to Polygamy which she implies is very Common though it is quite rare in the Algerian/Muslim World.An odd objection to dismiss a whole religion and continent considering she was also involved in a "Morganistic" relationship at the time sharing the affections of Sartre with up to four Woman simultaneously.She also seems to have an almost pathologically negative attitude to the concept of Family on the sole evidence that she did not always get along with her Mother.Then there is the dearth of any examples from South America , Asia or even Slavic case studies which hardly make the Work conducive to establishing an Universal as opposed to a Highly Western European template for Womanhood.

Another major anomaly is her citing of quotes from Fiction Novels ( again mostly Western European ones) with the same weighting as one would give scientifically based academic peer reviewed case study analysis.A flaw that is entirely understandable as it is her Work that made this kind of detailed study of the field of gender issues whilst she could not turn to input that was not there before.Despite this valid consideration her methodology has to be seen as critically flawed in every sense of the word.

Her work has inspired many students and academics to delve into the issue of feminism and gender as this article by one of  the brightest , if one can comprehend what she is saying , is Judith Butler.

In the video below we have a lecture which clarifies , or not , the themes of the Book.


Ultimately Beauvoir asks the question of not what does it mean to be a Woman , but what does it mean to be a Western European Woman , which means the answer will only be as good as the question , which in this case cannot lead to a Universal Answer but only a template which will not be applicable to Non-European Cultures and Values , if  , indeed, the answer even matches the Questions to Europeans in todays Social and Employment Corporate marketplace.