Abstract
Book II of The Second Sex is called Woman’s Life Today’, and it is, basically, a 400-page proof of the opening sentence ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.1 It is civilization as a whole, says de Beauvoir, which produces ‘this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine’.2 By means of a copious documentation of the events of childhood, adolescence, sexual initiation, marriage, motherhood, lesbianism, prostitution, middle age and old age, de Beauvoir ventures to demonstrate exactly how society has constructed this Other known as woman.
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© 1997 Joseph Mahon
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Mahon, J., Campling, J. (1997). The Independent Woman. In: Campling, J. (eds) Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376663_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376663_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39774-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37666-3
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