You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
andrewspink 's review for:
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
challenging
informative
sad
slow-paced
This is such a famous book and was such a game-changer when it was published that I was very curious to find out what it had to say. I must confess, I was disappointed. Large swathes are taken up with Freudian psychology, which no one believes anymore and are just largely irrelevant. For such a long book, that is quite a lot of hard work for nothing. She also makes the same mistake that Freud did, that is, to take the case notes of mentally ill patients and extrapolate from those people to the normal healthy population. It is really not the case that most boys feel "horror towards their father" because they are jealous of his relation with their mother, for example.
The book was published in 1949. I was surprised that there is little explicit mention of the war, aside from a few references to a soldier being a normal occupation. But in many other ways, it is clearly a book of its time. For example, she says that Darwin's idea that sexual selection is frequently by the female in many species is "disparaged today". Nowadays, we know that Darwin was right.
A lot of the ideas that must have been very radical at the time, e.g. that women and men are equal in intellectual capacity (limited only by a confined life experience) are at least in theory common belief now (albeit not in practice). She writes that "in no country is her legal status identical to man's". In 14 countries, that is now the case and 143 guarantee equality in their constitution.
She writes down a lot of the common prejudice of her time as fact. Muslims over the whole world are lumped together as the same and dismissed. Colonial and racist statements such as "infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples" are sometimes quite shocking. And of course, she clearly doesn't understand homosexuality at all, let alone more modern insights into the whole spectrum of gender identities.
This was a hugely important book when it was written. I have to say that it was not really worth the effort to struggle to the end of this long volume.
The book was published in 1949. I was surprised that there is little explicit mention of the war, aside from a few references to a soldier being a normal occupation. But in many other ways, it is clearly a book of its time. For example, she says that Darwin's idea that sexual selection is frequently by the female in many species is "disparaged today". Nowadays, we know that Darwin was right.
A lot of the ideas that must have been very radical at the time, e.g. that women and men are equal in intellectual capacity (limited only by a confined life experience) are at least in theory common belief now (albeit not in practice). She writes that "in no country is her legal status identical to man's". In 14 countries, that is now the case and 143 guarantee equality in their constitution.
She writes down a lot of the common prejudice of her time as fact. Muslims over the whole world are lumped together as the same and dismissed. Colonial and racist statements such as "infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples" are sometimes quite shocking. And of course, she clearly doesn't understand homosexuality at all, let alone more modern insights into the whole spectrum of gender identities.
This was a hugely important book when it was written. I have to say that it was not really worth the effort to struggle to the end of this long volume.