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Reading <i>The Second Sex</i> Sixty Years Later

Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years Later e ss ay s Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years Later Julia Kristeva (Translated by Timothy Hackett) Published in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women’s liberation and continues to accelerate it. Let’s try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifest yle and endowed with philosophical tenacit y, pedagogical talents, and contagious st yle without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, “the free woman is just being born” (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenom- enon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say “anthropological revolution” for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png philoSOPHIA State University of New York Press

Reading <i>The Second Sex</i> Sixty Years Later

Kristeva, Julia, --; Hackett, Timothy. tr.
philoSOPHIA , Volume 1 (2) – Jun 5, 2012
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State University of New York Press
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2155-0905

Abstract

e ss ay s Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years Later Julia Kristeva (Translated by Timothy Hackett) Published in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women’s liberation and continues to accelerate it. Let’s try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifest yle and endowed with philosophical tenacit y, pedagogical talents, and contagious st yle without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, “the free woman is just being born” (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenom- enon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say “anthropological revolution” for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new

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philoSOPHIA – State University of New York Press

Published: Jun 5, 2012

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