'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex ' Guardian

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence.

Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

Comment devient-on soi ? TeIle est la question que posent les Cahiers de jeunesse de Simone de Beauvoir. Quand ils commencent, en 1926, leur rédactrice a dix-huit ans et " Simone de Beauvoir ", telle qu'elle deviendra célèbre, n'existe pas. Nous allons assister, de page en page, à sa naissance, en vertu de la métamorphose de mademoiselle de Beauvoir, jeune bourgeoise catholique du début du XXe siècle, en celle que ses amis appelleront le Castor, une femme libre. Il est rare d'assister sur le vif à une pareille "invention de soi". "J'accepte la grande aventure d'être moi ", écrit-elle, et cette phrase symbolise la difficile entreprise où elle se jette, courant tous les risques sans aide, avec sa prodigieuse vitalité et son ardent amour de la vie. En effet, ce n'est pas seulement comme femme qu'elle se cherche, c'est comme individu, et cela bien avant de faire la connaissance de Jean-Paul Sartre, en 1929. Quand nous tournons la dernière page, en 1930, un être nouveau existe, dont l'assurance et l'autonomie nous frappent : " Conscience de toute ma force... Etrange certitude que cette richesse sera reçue, que cette vie sera source où beaucoup puiseront. Certitude d'une vocation. "

First published in 1949, "The Second Sex" is a landmark in the history of feminism. Of all the writing that emerged from the existentialist movement, Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking study of women has had the most extensive and enduring impact. It is at once a scholarly work of anthropology and sociology, of biology and psychoanalysis, from the pen of a writer and novelist of penetrating imaginative power. "The Second Sex" stands, six decades after its first appearance, as the first landmark in the modern feminist upsurge that transformed perceptions of the social relationship of man and womankind in our time. In this new translation to mark the 60th anniversary of publication, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have produced the first integral translation, reinstating a third of the original work. In this new translation to mark the 60th anniversary of publication, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have produced the first integral translation, reinstating a third of the original work.

Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother's final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother's refusal to 'go gentle' while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir 'shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence' ( Sunday Telegraph ). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.

Comment quitter l'enfance et décider de son destin au lendemain de la guerre de 1914-1918 ? Simone de Beauvoir a la chance de ne pas affronter seule les choix cruciaux de l'adolescence. Sa grande amie de coeur Élisabeth Lacoin, dite "Zaza", et son condisciple préféré à la Sorbonne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, partagent les tourments philosophiques et sentimentaux de sa jeunesse. Alors qu'elle-même va s'engager avec Sartre, entre Zaza et Maurice se tisse un lien amoureux. Ce sont les vivantes conversations de ce trio que leurs lettres prolongent. Pour cette génération des années 20, la situation diffère radicalement selon le sexe : les deux jeunes filles se heurtent aux barreaux dressés par leur milieu bourgeois et leur époque, barreaux inexistants pour le jeune homme, qui jouit sans effort de la liberté. Simone gagnera son combat, Zaza s'y brisera, elle mourra prématurément à vingt et un ans. La conviction féministe de la future autrice du Deuxième sexe s'ancre dans ce drame. Merleau-Ponty et Simone se retrouveront pour la création de la revue existentialiste Les Temps modernes, en 1945. De 1920 à 1959, ces lettres croisées inédites, au ton retenu mais intense, nous ouvrent l'intimité de trois individualités d'exception.

« Les hommes d'aujourd'hui semblent ressentir plus vivement que jamais le paradoxe de leur condition. Ils se reconnaissent pour la fin suprême à laquelle doit se subordonner toute action : mais les exigences de l'action les acculent à se traiter les uns les autres comme des instruments ou des obstacles : des moyens [...] Chacun d'entre eux a sur les lèvres le goût incomparable de sa propre vie, et cependant chacun se sent plus insignifiant qu'un insecte au sein de l'immense collectivité dont les limites se confondent avec celles de la terre ; à aucune époque peut-être ils n'ont manifesté avec plus d'éclat leur grandeur, à aucune époque cette grandeur n'a été si atrocement bafouée. Malgré tant de mensonges têtus, à chaque instant, en toute occasion, la vérité se fait jour : la vérité de la vie et de la mort, de ma solitude et de ma liaison au monde, de ma liberté et de ma servitude, de l'insignifiance et de la souveraine importance de chaque homme et de tous les hommes [...] Puisque nous ne réussissons pas à la fuir, essayons donc de regarder en face la vérité. Essayons d'assumer notre fondamentale ambiguïté. C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir.» - Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir, novelist, dramatist, and philosopher, was the most distinguished woman writer in modern France. A leading exponent of French existentialism, her work complements, though it is independent of, that of Jean-Paul Sartre. In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Madame de Beauvoir penetrates at once to the central ethical problems of modern man: what shall he do, how shall he go about making values, in the face of this awareness of the absurdity of his existence? She forces the reader to face the absurdity of the human condition and then, having done so, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity which will enable him not to master the chaos, but to create with it.

On a toujours embarrassé les écrivains en leur demandant : pourquoi écrivez-vous ? Mais jamais sans doute ne se sont-ils sentis aussi perplexes qu'au lendemain de la dernière guerre. Étonnes par quatre années d'horreur et par les perspectives qui s'ouvraient soudain au monde, ils découvraient que les vieilles valeurs avaient fait long feu et qu'une nouvelle figure de l'homme était en train de naître : quel rôle l'avenir leur réservait-il? les mots pouvaient-ils encore servir? à qui ? pour quoi ? Entre le nihilisme, l'esthétisme, l'action politique, où se situait la littérature? Ce livre n'apporte aucune réponse à ces questions : c'est un roman. Il relate seulement l'histoire de gens qui se les sont posées. On dit volontiers que les écrivains ne sont pas des personnages romanesques : pourtant les aventures de la pensée sont aussi réelles que les autres et elles mettent en jeu l'individu tout entier : pourquoi ne tenterait-on pas de les raconter ?

«- Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas ?- Rien, tout va très bien, dis-je d'un ton dégagé.- Allons ! Allons ! je sais ce que ça veut dire quand tu prends ta voix de dame du monde, dit Robert. Je suis sûr qu'en ce moment ça tourne dur dans cette tête. Combien de verres de punch as-tu bus ?- Sûrement moins que vous, et le punch n'y est pour rien.- Ah ! tu avoues ! dit Robert d'un ton triomphant ; il y a quelque chose et le punch n'y est pour rien ; quoi donc ?- C'est Scriassine, dis-je en riant ; il m'a expliqué que les intellectuels français étaient foutus.»

'It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity'

How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good and evil, and show instead how we make our own destiny simply by being.

One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

「第二性」是西蒙．波娃（１９０８～１９８６）的傑作。這部被視作二十世紀女性運動宣言的經典名著迄今在全世界各國仍然享譽不衰，銷售量已逾一百萬冊以上。批評界公認它是討論女人最健全、最理智、最充滿智慧的一本書。
現在棈選全書最精采的部分，分成第一卷「形成期」（歐陽子譯），第二卷「處境」（楊美惠譯），第三卷「正當的主張與邁向解放」（楊楊翠屏譯）刊行，以饗讀者。

Jean-Paul Sartre was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most popular philosophers of the 20th Century. Also a prominent novelist, playwright and biographer, Sartre was, above all, the embodiment of the engag intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an individual who attempted to live his life in accordance with the philosophy he professed. It was this that gave his lifelong preoccupation with freedom, choice and what he came to refer to as social conditioning, its cutting edge. Sartre's life was in many ways an illustration of his brand of existentialism in action. These three interviews, including one with Simone de Beauvoir, take Sartre on a wide-ranging tour of his philosophy and politics. Topics discussed include "freedom of choice," his uneasy relationship with Freudian concepts, his debates with Marx, and his acute observations on drama, the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, women's rights, the May "Events" and of course, the Vietnam War. Their breadth remains a testimony to one man's attempt to make philosophical sense of the tumultuous world around him.

When Andree joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andree is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. Under her red coat, she hides terrible burn scars. And when she imagines beautiful things, she gets goosebumps... Secretly Selvie believes that Andree us a prodigy about whom books will be written. The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.
Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.

In three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (
[London]), Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.

Enthralling as faction, suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women,
gives us a legendary writer at her best.

Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his lover, Helene, to die. He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must ultimately decide how many others to send to a similar fate.

Of all the writing that emerged from the existentialist movement, Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking study of women will probably have the most extensive and enduring impact. It is at once a work of anthropology and sociology, of biology and psychoanalysis, from the pen of a writer and novelist of penetrating imaginative power. THE SECOND SEX stands, four decades after its first appearance, as the first landmark in the modern feminist upsurge that has transformed perceptions of the social relationship of man and womankind in our time.

Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at La Guardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and back again. Embraced by the Conde Nast set in a swirl of cocktail parties in New York, where she was hailed as the 'prettiest existentialist' by Janet Flanner in "The New Yorker", de Beauvoir traveled west by car, train, and Greyhound, immersing herself in the nation's culture, customs, people, and landscape. The detailed diary she kept of her trip became "America Day by Day", published in France in 1948 and offered here in a completely new translation. It is one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer's pen. Fascinating passages are devoted to Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Antonio. We see de Beauvoir gambling in a Reno casino, smoking her first marijuana cigarette in the Plaza Hotel, donning raingear to view Niagara Falls, lecturing at Vassar College, and learning firsthand about the Chicago underworld of morphine addicts and petty thieves with her lover Nelson Algren as her guide. This fresh, faithful translation superbly captures the essence of Simone de Beauvoir's distinctive voice. It demonstrates once again why she is one of the most profound, original, and influential writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome'. On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chili con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure'.