The Independent Woman, Paperback

"Like man, woman is a human being."

When The Second Sex was first published in Paris in 1949--groundbreaking, risqu , brilliantly written and strikingly modern--it provoked both outrage and inspiration. The Independent Woman contains three key chapters of Beauvoir's masterwork, which illuminate the feminine condition and identify practical social reforms for gender equality. It captures the essence of the spirited manifesto that switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and continues to exert profound influence on feminists today.

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Jean-Paul Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. The Second Sex, first published in 1949, has been translated into forty languages and become a landmark in the history of feminism. Beauvoir was the author of many other books, including the novel The Mandarins, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt. She died in 1986.