1953

1953 marks the first English-language publication of The Second Sex in H. M. Parshley’s translation. It brought Simone de Beauvoir’s major work to an English-reading audience, but the edition was abridged and edited: its publication year thus names both an important act of transmission and the limits that accompanied it.

The first English edition

Blanche Knopf encountered the book while scouting in Paris and initially treated it as a potentially sensational literary property, imagining it as a highbrow sex manual. She asked H. M. Parshley, a retired zoology professor at Smith College, to write a reader’s report. His favorable assessment won him the translation commission. Alfred Knopf then asked him to condense the manuscript for the American market, disparaging Beauvoir’s prolixity; when Parshley sought her guidance on the proposed cuts, she did not answer at first, but later protested that important material would be missing. She nevertheless approved the edition graciously.

What the year came to signify

The 1953 translation was produced under pressure to shorten the book, and its interventions went beyond cutting. The translators of the later complete edition explain that Parshley removed or altered long, dense paragraphs and simplified complex philosophical language. Because Beauvoir’s extended paragraphs and sentences carry the development of her reasoning, these changes affected not only the amount of text but also the form in which her argument reached readers.

The same issue appears in the handling of existentialist terms. Parshley rendered “authentic” in ways such as “real, genuine, and true,” and translated pour-soi, or “for-itself,” as “her true nature in itself”—a reversal of the distinction between conscious being-for-itself and being-in-itself. The French title of the second volume, “L’expérience vécue” (“Lived Experience”), became “Woman’s Life Today,” weakening its philosophical emphasis. These examples made 1953 a consequential point in the reception of Beauvoir as a philosopher, not simply a date in the publication history of a feminist book.

Later reassessment

The first edition remained the English translation until Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced a new one, the first complete English version. Their account describes restoring cuts, retaining Beauvoir’s philosophical language, and preserving features of her syntax and punctuation rather than modernizing or simplifying them. The contrast clarifies the double legacy of 1953: Parshley’s edition made the work available in English, yet its abridgments and terminological shifts also shaped—and sometimes obscured—what English-language readers encountered as Beauvoir’s argument.