de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

Simone de Beauvoir in 1967.

Our meeting tonight -- which will take place thanks to all who have helped to dig out the library and surrounding roads after Saturday's massive snowfall -- will be on the Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, first published in this country in 1953.

Let me offer the following as a brief intro to the reading.  The Second Sex is a lengthy work, so lengthy it was first published in two volumes (and the French edition, still in print, remains so).

It is a work that incorporates de Beauvoir's insights gleaned from the fields of biology, history, anthropology, sexology, etc. De Beauvoir builds her argument on a scaffolding of French existentialist philosophy.  Here are a few terms you need to know to understand the text in light of this:

en soi: "in itself": an inanimate object is a thing in-itself.  A table, for example, doesn't change.

por soi: "for itself": a human being is "for itself." Unlike a table, it can change, it is a "becoming."

Mitsein: from German, "being with."  Communities of people are a "Mitsein."

Alterity: "Otherness."  It is de Beavoir's basic premise that women are in a state of alterity vis à vis men, and this situation has led to their subordination to men throughout history.