Beyond the Second Sex

It’s probably the most quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate Kirkpatrick’s incisive and compelling biography of Simone de Beauvoir, this appears as ‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one’. Most English readers will recognise the 1953 translation by H M Parshley better: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Either way, it’s become a talisman in the nature–nurture debate, a badge of blank slate-ism, the only line of Beauvoir’s work most people ever refer to and one of the most woefully abused sentences ever to have been written.