100 Great Books: (Book 20: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir)
French novelist Gustave Flaubert once said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Known for his obsessive revisions and solitary habits, Flaubert structured his life to minimize distraction. He believed that discipline off the page made freedom on the page possible.
At one level, being regular and orderly in one’s life seems like a no-brainer. However, it is easier said than done. Modern life is distracting, and if you are juggling multiple responsibilities, having perfect order is a luxury many of us can’t afford.
The challenge, then, is not to imitate Flaubert’s monastic routines but to adapt his principle to messier lives. Order today is provisional and fragile: a meeting runs long, a child gets sick, an inbox fills faster than it can be cleared. In this context, discipline means returning to important priorities even when conditions are imperfect, and resisting the temptation to wait for the right time. Personal discipline, works through repeated acts of recommitment. Therefore, it needs to be directed toward ourselves, not the calendar.
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (”On ne naît pas femme : on le devient.”)
Published in 1949, The Second Sex exposed how femininity is a social construction, a performance demanded and enforced by patriarchal culture. De Beauvoir argued that women exist as the “Other” against which men define themselves as the essential, universal human subject.
Who was Simone de Beauvoir?
Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family that fell into financial decline. Brilliant and ambitious, she became the youngest person to pass the agrégation in philosophy in 1929, finishing second only to Jean-Paul Sartre, who would become her lifelong intellectual and romantic partner. Unlike most women of her era, she never married and never had children, choices she defended as necessary for her intellectual freedom.
During World War II, she taught philosophy while writing novels and essays. The Second Sex, published when she was 41, drew on philosophy, history, biology, psychoanalysis, and literature to create a comprehensive examination of women’s oppression. The book was immediately controversial and was denounced by the Vatican, mocked by conservative critics, and dismissed even by some feminists who found it too intellectual or too pessimistic.
De Beauvoir continued writing novels, memoirs, and essays until her death in 1986. While she resisted being labeled a feminist during much of her life, The Second Sex became the foundational text of second-wave feminism and remains essential to understanding gender, power, and freedom.
