Talk:The Second Sex

translation

Someone should mention something about the poor translation.

See this article: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9402EED6163FF931A1575BC0A9629C8B63&pagewanted=all

It is rather puzzling to refer to Beauvoir's sexuality in the first sentence of the entry on her.

November 6, 2006: Is de Beauvoir's sexual preferences really relevant to this article?

When was the first translation into English of _The Second Sex_ published?

Was it still in the 1950s? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.173.230.154 (talk) 16:25, 1 April 2007 (UTC).

The oldest listed is the edition published by Jonathan Cape in 1953--Cailil ^talk 23:33, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Ironically, the male sex has proven to be the "other" sex. Biologically, the female sex is the default (if the fetus is unstimulated by the appropriate hormones) and the male sex arises as the non-default sex (when exposed to the appropriate hormones). For more information, see: Neil Carlson, Physiology of Behavior, 9th ed. Fuzzform 05:24, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Don't really see how that makes it "other", dozens of hormones interact in the formation of a foetus. And if you follow the "useless male nipples" theory, see Genital tubercle. EamonnPKeane (talk) 02:03, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Article needs cleanup

Speaking as a general reader this article is overwhelming in its unchecked verbosity. I'm sure that it means something to specialists but the section Content of The Second Sex appears to be an essay or original research. It is hard to tell as its footnotes are extremely limited. RegardsTrilobitealive (talk) 01:44, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello, I agree that the article is dense, but I'm sure that it would be helpful to those who may not want to read the whole book. It seems somewhat in keeping with the intent of the WikiProject Books ("Mainly, we just want you to write articles!"), but really does seem like somebody pasted in their essay. N8mills (talk) 08:30, 6 January 2008 (UTC) It's completely overlong. A brief synopsis would be helpful to those (that cannot be bothered to read the book in its entirety) but this is not the place for a complete reiteration of all the themes included in the book. This article should be much more concise.Jatrius (talk) 11:02, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

I have left word on User talk:TEKARNSIDE, who appears to be the author of the synopsis, asking for help in this regard. I wonder about the possibility of putting a smaller synopsis here and then having a separate page with the long synopsis. I would not want to tackle such a cleanup as I'm unfamiliar with the book. This was helpful to me when I read it but it just isn't short enough to be a good general article.Trilobitealive (talk) 14:36, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I haven't been back to these Beauvoir pages for a long time. I'm not surprised that my summary of Le Deuxieme Sexe has been considered to be too long for inclusion on the Second Sex page as such. On the other hand, I remain utterly convinced that it will be of great use to some, as the comment by Crosscountrycpjon confirms. Ideally, I think it would be a link of some kind from from the Second Sex page. If someone can arrange this I, personally, would be well satisfied and others would benefit. Having spent a fair portion of my professional life working on, and publishing (refereed) articles and books on, Simone de Beauvoir, I am not impressed when readers cast a quick eye over the summary and simply dismiss it as 'too long'. Such comments say more about the readers than about the quality of the summary. What would be much more significant is if anyone were to point out places where the summary is inaccurate. I believe in the difference between biased and 'objective' statements, and I think the whole Wikipedia project is based on such a belief. My summary is a careful attempt to encapsulate in a relatively short compass - without any evaluative comment of my own - exactly what Beauvoir says in a French text of nearly 1,000 (largish) pages. If readers have any specific criticisms of it within that context, I would be genuinely interested to hear them. The length of my own piece (which is not 'research', or an 'essay', or even an 'article' - it's just a summary) relates to my precise intentions. To produce a shorter summary would involve more significant judgements about importance and would inevitably be more contentious. The great controversy about Parshley's English translation is partly - though only partly - about sections of the text that he simply omitted. Indeed, I eventually uploaded my summary after engaging in discussion about Parshley's translation. It became clear that, even by their own admission, many had not read the complete English text, let alone the original French one. It seemed to me that I was providing a service by offering a very systematic and accurate summary of Beauvoir's book, in English. So, in short, why not make my summary a link from the Second Sex page, for those who find it useful, and take up with me any faults that you find in it? TEKARNSIDE 81.132.141.251 (talk) 10:14, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi, TEKARNSIDE. Thank you for your long essays which I found here. Remarkable in that the chapters of Part Two (Volume One) have names. Where did you find those titles? I only have the second translation where I am now but I do have the first translation available. I'm trying to add a brief synopsis. -SusanLesch (talk) 03:23, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

More faithful

"I would like very much for another translation of The Second Sex to be done, one that is much more faithful, more complete and more faithful."

More faithful is here mentioned twice. Is this really the correct quote? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.11.226.39 (talk) 14:39, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Did someone regurgitate the entire book?

This article seriously needs cleaning up! Please anyone with any knowledge of Beauvoir do so asap!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Natasha1985 (talk • contribs) 18:32, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I very much agree. An encyclopedia article needs to summarize a book like this for the general reader. It is fine in an expanded article to go into gory detail after this, but this article fails to provide any concise summary whatsoever. Iamcuriousblue (talk) 23:59, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Weasel Words and Unsourced Points

I noticed that the following phrases were weasel words and should either be changed or removed:

• is one of the best known works
• and often regarded as a major feminist work

Also, these phrases are unsourced:

• Beauvoir wrote the book after attempting to write about herself.
• The first thing she wrote was that she was a woman, but she realized that she needed to define what a woman was, which became the intent of the book.
  

Delduþling♦talk 00:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Positive Reviews of the New Translation

I had a look at the four positive reviews of the new translation listed as references 9 to 11 (except for the one in the Irish Times, which I couldn't access) and it seemed to me that these are actually only reviews of the book and its historical importance and not of the translation itself. The reviewers do not seem to comment on whether or not the translation is correct and/or well written, apart from mentioning that the deleted parts have been restored. The current sentence citing references 9 to 11 thus seems incorrect and possibly biased to me. Opinions? And are there any reviews that specifically focus on the translation and argue that it is better than the old one? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.152.99.237 (talk) 01:59, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

The NYT reviewer Plessix-Gray thought the new one was highly problematic, citing examples of poorer translations than in the first one. Knopf blew it again. Now we can wait another 40 or 50 years for a proper translation. Mathglot (talk) 01:14, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

"Myths," Volume II, and Criticisms

Please correct me if I'm wrong as this question may be answered in relation to the particular edition that I have read--the Vintage Edition (1989) that comes under fire in the article--but it seems that the article is missing reference to Part III of Volume I, entitled "Myths," which itself is further broken down into three chapters. I am also wondering if there should be included in the synopsis a summary of Volume II: Woman's Life Today. Also, perhaps something can be said about the criticisms de Beauvoir received for her work. For example, in the Introduction to the Vintage Edition (1989), Deirdre Bair acknowledges the lasting criticisms that de Beauvoir "is guilty of unconscious misogyny, that having written about women, she has taken great care to separate herself from them," and, quoting C.B. Radford, that "The Second Sex is 'primarily a middle-class document, so distorted by autobiographical influences that the individual problems of the writer herself may assume an exaggerated importance in her discussion of femininity'" (pp. xiii-xiv). (Albertine1 (talk) 17:08, 17 September 2011 (UTC))

 Done Hello, Albertine1. By the date of your comment I think you refer to this version (from 10 September). Yes I'm sorry it took a while to do volume II but it is there now. Your suggestion for adding criticism is wonderful. I will try to add some from the 1989 Bair introduction. Thank you for the good idea. -SusanLesch (talk) 17:45, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Detail

I appreciate that The Second Sex is an important book and that its contents are worth describing, however, I question whether the level of detail that has been added here recently, apparently sourced mainly to the book itself, is appropriate. I'm not at at all sure that listing the number of chapters per section, for instance, is a good idea. I've no intention of cutting back this material myself, or for that matter to make significant changes here at all, but for the record I think the article could be more concise. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 22:11, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Hello, Polisher of Cobwebs. Did you see what this article used to be, in terms of detail? Here is the long version. -SusanLesch (talk) 00:44, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I do agree that the current version of the article is better than that version. However, I'm not sure that the present level of detail is justified, and I see other editors have expressed similar concerns here recently. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 01:13, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Only one other person has posted to this page since we did, and that person replied to a post that came in 2008, before this translation was published. So I'm sorry but your statement about "other editors" just isn't true. I added sections to delineate this synopsis, which might help. Although I am opposed to deleting this synopsis, if anyone would care to summarize the entire book in a sentence or a paragraph, I encourage them to add a "Summary" section. -SusanLesch (talk) 17:09, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Half a year went by without comment from anybody. I came across a summary and added that. -SusanLesch (talk) 19:09, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Welcome and caution

Hi there. I'm very sorry but as of 11 December (about a week ago) all of the quotes from this book refered to the second translation which is given as a source. You're welcome to use your copy from 1971 if you list it here with its ISBN, and you are careful to insert your source where you use it. Thank you. -SusanLesch (talk) 00:10, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your additions and corrections. I am left with this diff still to account for. WorldCat has 47 pages of 464 editions of this book. I found for 1971 the notation "eBook". Is that correct? If not, then which English edition do you have? By the way, "Undo" can't be used anymore because of intervening edits so whatever changes are possible have to be done manually. -SusanLesch (talk) 18:37, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

 Done except we need your ISBN. -SusanLesch (talk) 19:12, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

The book is said to be put by the Vatican in its "list of prohibited books", however this page reports the last edition of the Index, which dates 1948 ! One year before the publication of the "Second Sex". http://www.cvm.qc.ca/gconti/905/BABEL/Index%20Librorum%20Prohibitorum-1948.htm Can anyone check? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.110.91.36 (talk) 14:46, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Unclear citation style

This section is essentially a continuation of section #Welcome and caution above, which hasn't received any attention for some time. It is also referenced in the {{citation style}} hatnote on top of the article.

The article has an unclear citation style, making it difficult to verify claims made. With three different source editions and nearly a hundred references listed by author and page number only, it's not clear which source is meant by each footnote. For example, references such as Beauvoir, p. 59 or Beauvoir, pp. 619, 622, 626. These look like unlinked short citations. In a very few cases, the reference is disambiguated with year, as in Beauvoir (1971), p. 565 but even in these cases, there is no wikilink to the source, which proper use of shortened footnotes with {{sfn}} or {{harv}} would provide automatically. Pinging @SusanLesch: who has worked on this before. Mathglot (talk) 00:13, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Mathglot. Thank you for the comment. I'm sorry, I screwed this up so I will fix it. I can't do it for at least a few days. Do you have a preference, for which system you'd like to see? By sometime in October this could be done. -SusanLesch (talk) 02:01, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

@SusanLesch: Thanks, kind of you. I will look into it, and post again here about which one. No hurry, it waited this long, can wait some more. Mathglot (talk) 20:17, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

@SusanLesch: Whichever way you choose, you will need to know the year of the work cited. The shortened footnotes as illustrated in the #Overview section of in the shortened footnote guideline will work best here. This requires three things:

• have separate Notes and References sections
• use of {{sfn}}-style references for citations inline, including the year
• use of {{cite book}} template in the References section, and include year= or date= param for each

The first and last are already done. So to fully implement this, it only remains to change the existing citations to sfn format using the {{sfn}} template.

For example, where you currently have <ref>Beauvoir, p. 261.</ref> you would change this to {{sfn|Beauvoir|19xx|p=261}} where 19xx is the year of the work cited. That's all there is to it.

Because of the number of repeated citations to the same work, this will be a tedious task. However, it can be done all at once with a single short command, using an editor that can do global regex replace. This will look something like this:

• search /Beauvoir, pp?\.?\s+(\d{1-4})/
• replace /{{sfn|Beauvoir|19xx|p=\1}}/

I believe WP has an optional regex tool available, but I haven't tried it. If you're not familiar with regex-replace, I have a regex-editor I can use to help you do this, if you can tell me the year. If the years are different for different footnotes, we would have to disentangle that first, but I could still help. If most of the notes are for one year, and only a few for some other year(s), then if you fix the notes by adding the year just for the citations involving the less frequently cited year, I can add the year for the rest with a regex operation, and convert to {{sfn}} at the same time.

There are other ways to do the citations for this article, but this would be my preference, as it is the most user-friendly method. Mathglot (talk) 19:05, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Mathglot, thank you very much. Again I'm sorry I didn't do this right and am happy to learn now. October is a reasonable deadline. With luck this won't take me very long. -SusanLesch (talk) 21:08, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Sure, take your time, and no need for any apologies, we're all volunteers here. ☺ Please {{ping}} me when you're done. Mathglot (talk) 18:25, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Mathglot, maybe you can help. I did the lead to test this out. It had three citations, and I put them all in the form you specify. The Overview page said to put in refbegin and refend, and ref=harv for each book. But why don't the links work? I have a quiz this week and a basketball game tonight but am able to come back to this afterwards. This is really a very easy task. Everything not specified otherwise was read from the 2009 translation. -SusanLesch (talk) 16:38, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

@SusanLesch: You almost had it. You have to follow the requirements of {{sfn}} quite carefully. There is Mediawiki software in the background doing the linkage for you, and like any software, you have to specify things exactly right. In particular, sfn year must match cite year (not 'origyear'); author's last name must match 'last'. Have a look now, and see how convenient it is having those links working, makes it feel quite snappy and connected. Mathglot (talk) 06:58, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Mathglot, thank you for your help. It's done and you can remove the "Citation style" template if it looks okay to you. Best wishes. -SusanLesch (talk) 16:58, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

@SusanLesch: Well done, and fast, too! I've removed the template. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 04:19, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

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Woman as “Other

The concept of "the other" originates from French feminist author Beauvoir's book "The Second Sex". Man as "the one"，woman as "the other".According to Beauvoir, in patriarchal societies, women are perceived as objects in relation to men, relegated to a secondary position within society. Men are positioned at the center of the societal structure, with their perspective assumed to represent that of all humanity. Caroline Criado Perez, in her book "Invisible Women" (2019), highlights various examples of gender bias in society, such as medication dosages being primarily based on male standards, pianos being designed with male hand widths in mind, and car crash test dummies being modeled after men, resulting in more injuries and fatalities for women in car accidents. This illustrates how society is dominated by a male-centric perspective, where "humanity is male" .Women confirm their worth by how men evaluate and approve of them, while men's worth is established by having their strengths recognised and praised by the same sex.

In the biblical narrative of "Genesis," Adam is depicted as the first man created by God, followed by the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. which is a cultural metaphor that expresses the concept that "women are inherently subordinate to men", reliant on men for their survival and development.This cultural metaphor expresses the notion that women are inherently subordinate to men.Gender inequality is pervasive in society, evident in disparities in resources, workplace opportunities, political representation, and familial roles. In traditional marriages the man becomes the head of the family in the full sense of the word, gaining through marriage a stable sex life, a home to be cared for, and the right to have a family name in order to procreate, whereas women are tacitly recognised as needing to care for the family unconditionally, taking on the blame of being a wife and a mother in exchange for social acceptance.Beauvoir consider that the glorification of motherhood was to better enslave women. She denying their maternal instincts and the value of domesticity. When women are trapped in the family, it is difficult for them to gain a foothold in a male-dominated society. The loss of material support can lead to unconscious subjection to male-dominated discourses and an inability to express themselves and speak out independently.

A patriarchal society perpetuates the notion even the man with the lowest class rights can still have women who are weaker compared to him at his disposal. Women are not seen as individuals, but have to be valued in favour of male existence in order to be "female" by society's standards.The concept of woman as "other" exposes the systemic oppression faced by women due to gender disparities under patriarchy. Despite recognizing their marginalized status, it is very difficult for woman to peel herself away and become "The One".

Beauvoir's concept of woman as "other" has been influential in feminist philosophy, serving as a foundational theory in the feminist movement's history. It sheds light on the status quo of women's existence and calls for gender equality in society. Over time, this concept has metamorphosed into a symbol within feminism, providing a framework for comprehending and confronting gender-based oppression. Ge lilu (talk) 02:15, 28 March 2024 (UTC)