The first English-language edition of The Second Sex, published in 1953, brought Simone de Beauvoir’s monumental study to English-language readers through H. M. Parshley’s translation. Its history also established a lasting tension between accessibility and fidelity: the American publisher requested cuts, and the resulting edition abridged and edited Beauvoir’s text, including its complex philosophical language. A later translation presented itself as the first complete English version, restoring the material and formal features that the earlier edition had altered.

Discovery and commissioning

Blanche Knopf, wife of Beauvoir’s American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, heard about the book while scouting in Paris. Expecting what she understood as a highbrow sex manual, she sought a reader’s report from H. M. Parshley, a retired professor of zoology at Smith College. Parshley’s report praised the book as intelligent, learned, and well-balanced, and said it was not feminist in a doctrinaire sense; his enthusiasm secured him the translation commission.

The publisher then asked Parshley to condense the work for the American market. He appealed to Beauvoir for guidance on the proposed minor cuts and abridgments. After receiving no immediate reply, he eventually received an indignant letter warning that much of what she considered important would be omitted. Beauvoir nevertheless approved the edition graciously.

The 1953 text and its limits

Parshley approached the translation as a labor of love, but the account of its production notes that he lacked a background in philosophy and French literature. The edition was abridged and edited, and some of Beauvoir’s complex philosophical language was simplified. Long, dense passages were cut or reshaped, so English readers encountered a version that did not preserve the full extent or form of the original argument.

Those changes mattered because Beauvoir’s style was not merely a surface that could be regularized without consequence. Her long paragraphs and sentences carried the development of her reasoning. The later translators argued that cutting sentences and paragraphs, or substituting more conventional punctuation, failed to render her voice: her prose had a consistent grammar, and its form followed a logic.

Restoration and translation principles

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first complete English translation after Parshley’s. They translated the book without abridgment or simplification, retaining its philosophical language and restoring passages removed or altered in 1953. Their account emphasizes that paragraphs sometimes extending for pages are integral to how Beauvoir develops her arguments, rather than dispensable excess.

The translators also chose not to modernize Beauvoir’s language or to retrofit the vocabulary available to her in 1949. In particular, they avoided using the contemporary application of the word gender. They stayed close to her complicated syntax and punctuation, including her extensive use of semicolons, even where those usages might initially feel awkward to present-day English readers. Their stated aim was to find the original work’s voice and intent, not to simplify or readapt it for a new audience.

Significance of the edition history

The contrast between the two English versions shows how translation and editing can shape the intellectual work available to readers. The 1953 edition carried The Second Sex into English but did so in a form constrained by a publisher’s demand for condensation; the later complete version treated the original’s length, syntax, and punctuation as part of its thought. The publication history therefore concerns not only when the book became available in English, but also which version of Beauvoir’s argument English readers could encounter.