Hailed by some feminists as the single most important theoretical work of this century, but ignored or reviled by others, Simone de Beauvoir's "The second sex" (1949) occupies an anomalous and even uneasy place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an undeniable impact not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century Western thinking about 'woman' in general. This collection of six new essays by scholars from the disciplines of French, English literature, history, cultural criticism, feminist theory and philosophy is a contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously significant text for a new generation of feminist readers, but also for all cultural theorists, for whom the question of the feminine is at the centre of key debates in philosophy and postmodern criticism. This volume provides new perspectives on the place of "The second sex" in cultural history, on women and representation, on the role of 'fictions' and on the problem of ethical agency in the work of the leading intellectual woman of this age.