The Second Sex Scandal

In the autumn of 1949, Simone de Beauvoir sat in the Café de Flore, her usual table by the window, watching Saint-Germain-des-Prés come alive with its usual cast of intellectuals, artists, and tourists hoping to glimpse Sartre. At forty-one, she was already famous—novelist, philosopher, Sartre's companion—but the book about to be published would transform her from literary figure to global icon and pariah.

"The Second Sex" lay in galleys before her, two volumes that had taken her three years to write. What had begun as a personal investigation—why had she never felt inferior as a woman?—had become a comprehensive analysis of women's oppression throughout history. The early reviews were already arriving, and they were venomous.

"Unsatisfied, cold, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything," she would later write about the attacks. François Mauriac, the Catholic novelist, wrote to a friend: "I've learned everything about your boss's vagina." The Communist Party called her a "bourgeois decadent." Even women attacked her—how dare she suggest they were oppressed when they were perfectly happy?

Sartre arrived, late as always, his pockets bulging with newspapers and amphetamines. "The males are howling," he observed with satisfaction, scanning the reviews. "You must have hit a nerve."

"They're not even discussing my arguments," Beauvoir replied, lighting another cigarette. "They're discussing my sex life, my relationship with you, whether I'm feminine enough to write about women."

"Of course," Sartre said. "You've shown them that women are made, not born. That threatens everything—their marriages, their mistresses, their mothers, their entire understanding of the world. Did you expect gratitude?"

She hadn't expected gratitude, but she'd hoped for engagement with her ideas. The book demonstrated systematically how patriarchy operated through biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, myth, and lived experience. She'd shown how women internalized their oppression, becoming complicit in their own subjugation. Most radically, she'd argued that women's liberation required not just legal equality but complete transformation of society.

As the afternoon wore on and the attacks mounted, Beauvoir felt a strange elation. The violence of the reaction proved her thesis—that women's situation was political, not natural. Every insult, every attempt to reduce her to her body, every dismissal of her intellect confirmed what she'd written. She was no longer just describing women's condition; she was living proof of it.

Years later, when young feminists told her "The Second Sex" had changed their lives, she would remember this afternoon at the Flore. The book she'd written to understand herself had become a mirror in which millions of women recognized their own situation. She hadn't intended to start a revolution. But then, as she'd learned from Sartre, we often become what we never intended through the accumulation of our choices.