ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of female sexuality was "exceedingly frank and objective. Beauvoir's main biographer elaborates on the young woman's observation: "Beauvoir was not usually considered a sympathetic figure. Miss de Beauvoir follows the Existentialist plot which tends to be like a poster, all black and white. In a lead review of unusual length for its time, Redfield refers to Beauvoir as "the extreme feminist personality type. To enter the world of Beauvoir is to come into a world in large degree vanished from the American scene". "The simple fact is that Beauvoir is not interested in common humanity, male or female, but in gifted woman kept from full expression by man-made limitations." Of all the modern works that "every" sociologist ought to have read or otherwise know about, perhaps none has suffered more extremely in its wayward reception than Beauvoir's The Second Sex, routinely referred to as the Magna Carta of modern feminism.
