Judith Thurman

Judith Thurman is the author of the introduction to this edition of The Second Sex, where she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s book through the tension between intellectual argument and lived experience. Her account connects the work’s analysis of women’s position as the Other to Beauvoir’s own life, the making and transmission of the book, and the collective consciousness it helped foster. The introduction’s final emphasis is not on a settled solution but on the continuing, difficult hope of becoming one’s own woman.

Identity and approach

Thurman presents The Second Sex as a work whose significance cannot be separated from the circumstances of its author. She describes Beauvoir as a public intellectual whose life as a woman—and, in the introduction’s formulation, as Jean-Paul Sartre’s woman—helped propel her toward the subject. At the same time, Thurman stresses that the book’s intellectual framework drew on existentialism: the opposition between a sovereign subject and an objectified Other offered Beauvoir a conceptual scaffold for examining how women are defined in relation to men.

The introduction also resists turning Beauvoir into a single, uncomplicated emblem. Thurman notes that biographical attention to Beauvoir has often been directed toward her personal life, while questions about Sartre have tended to focus on his work. She uses that imbalance to expose a deeper contradiction: Beauvoir’s intellectual argument challenged the assumption that humanity is male, even as public discussion could continue to position her chiefly through her relationship to Sartre. Thurman characterizes the supposed twinship between them as an illusion rather than a complete account of their intellectual or personal relation.

The book’s argument and design

Thurman describes The Second Sex as at once a work of unusual scale and a book animated by contradictions. She likens its structure to a scriptural account of a fall into knowledge: the two volumes trace the consequences of that awakening across history and contemporary life. In her reading, the historical account and the study of women’s lived experience together make visible the forces that have objectified women, rather than treating women’s situation as an isolated matter of individual character.

For Thurman, the book’s reach is not only a matter of the evidence and theory it assembles. Beauvoir writes about intimate fears, desires, fantasies, and ambivalence with a candor Thurman regards as unprecedented. That frankness gives readers a way to recognize experiences they may have understood as private or aberrant as part of a wider condition. The book’s analytical account of women as the Other thus meets an intimate register: it names a social structure while making room for women to recognize themselves within it.

Thurman also attends to the texture of Beauvoir’s prose. She calls its ambition exhaustive and its effect at once incisive and difficult to contain, invoking Elizabeth Hardwick’s description of the book as “madly sensible and brilliantly confused.” The phrase captures a central tension in Thurman’s assessment: the work’s accumulation and discursiveness do not cancel its intellectual force, but are part of the experience of confronting a subject too extensive to be reduced to a polished sequence of compact claims.

Composition and English editions

Thurman sets the scale of Beauvoir’s achievement against the conditions of its composition. The eight-hundred-page study ranged across folklore, custom, law, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, literature, economic systems, and received ideas. Beauvoir researched and wrote it in about fourteen months, between 1946 and 1949, while also pursuing other literary projects, traveling, editing and contributing to Les Temps Modernes, maintaining her commitments to Sartre and their circle, and sustaining a transatlantic love affair with Nelson Algren.

The English-language history of the book illustrates how translation and abridgment could alter access to that achievement. The first English edition appeared in 1953. Blanche Knopf heard of the book in Paris and, initially imagining it as a highbrow sex manual, asked the retired Smith College zoology professor H. M. Parshley to assess it. His favorable report led to his commission as translator, but Alfred A. Knopf required cuts, judging the work too long for the American market. Beauvoir eventually protested that important material would have been omitted, though she approved the edition.

Thurman contrasts that history with the translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, the first new translation since Parshley’s. Its cuts were restored, and Thurman praises its fidelity, clarity, and elegance. She also makes clear why restoration matters: an abridged edition could not fully convey the scope of a work whose claim to comprehensiveness was central to its argument and undertaking.

Intellectual legacy and continuing urgency

Thurman presents The Second Sex as a catalyst for collective recognition as well as a body of theory. In her account, political transformation cannot begin while indignation remains diffuse and private; it requires the formation of a shared cause and identity. Beauvoir’s gathering of facts and ideas helped bring that consciousness into being, and her writing reached readers who had felt alone in their responses to being female. The book’s influence, as Thurman describes it, lies partly in making such experiences speakable in public.

That legacy does not mean that independence is simple or that a refusal of ownership removes every source of dependence. Thurman identifies a persistent conflict between the desire not to be possessed and the continuing appeal of romantic love, financial security, and purpose or status derived from a man. She presents Beauvoir’s argument that women may need to make a greater moral effort than men to choose independence, while pointing to the tension between that formulation and the bodily, emotional, and social obstacles expressed in Colette’s account of escape. The conflict complicates any easy reading of liberation as a clean break from desire or vulnerability.

Thurman closes by addressing a possible young reader for whom the title might seem dated. She recommends reading the book as a deeply personal meditation on a hope that remains elusive: becoming, in every sense, one’s own woman. That ending gathers the introduction’s historical and intellectual claims into an open question of possibility—not a declaration that the conditions Beauvoir described have disappeared, but an invitation to measure the book by the work of independence that remains.