The Second Sex

⚖The case for it

The eight-hundred-page problem is real, and so is the translation trap: whichever English edition you pick, you lose something. So read it the way people actually read it, in pieces, and start with Volume II. That is where Beauvoir follows a life from childhood to old age, taking apart each stage until you see it was assembled by other people rather than handed down by nature. The dated biology can stay dated; the ordinary middle-class women in her examples still carry the point, because the point is not who they were but how thoroughly the world had already decided what they would become.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Unabridged, it runs to eight hundred pages, and English readers choose between bad options: the old Parshley translation cut whole sections and mangled the existentialist vocabulary; the 2009 replacement restores everything in wooden prose. The biology and psychoanalysis chapters have aged into period pieces, the case studies are mid-century French wives, and the survey of myths runs long after the point has landed.

— the honest librarian