Toril Moi / 'It changed my life!'

'It changed my life!'

Everyone should read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, argues Toril Moi

Toril Moi
12 January 2008

T

his week we celebrate the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir. Born in Paris on January 9 1908, she was brought up to follow the usual path for a French Catholic girl of good family: religious devotion, marriage and children. Her parents sent her to the kind of Catholic girls' school that elite students used to joke about, as places "where one only goes to class once a week, and where the chorus of mothers and governesses at the back of the class whispers the right reply to the dear child". That this girl went on to become a world-famous writer and intellectual, and the greatest feminist thinker of her century, is a phenomenal achievement.

An accomplished novelist, Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins in 1954. She is also one of the most important French memoirists of the 20th century. Yet on her 100th anniversary, it is to The Second Sex, her epochal essay from 1949 on the oppression of women, that we should return.

Ever since it was published, The Second Sex has provoked intense responses. In 1949, it unleashed a sexual scandal. "Unsatisfied, cold, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything, even an unmarried mother," Beauvoir comments in her memoirs. For half a generation, an aura of risqué sexuality clung to the book. Early American editions had a naked woman on the cover. In the 1950s and early 1960s, any young woman caught reading The Second Sex would be considered decidedly subversive.