Simone de Beauvoir's "Le Deuxieme Sexe" has been studied extensively since its appearance in 1949. Through the years, certain passages have come to be recognized as central; other as unimportant to understanding Beauvoir's argument. In "Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference", Sara Heinamaa rediscovers those neglected passages in her quest to follow Beauvoir's line of thinking. Heinamaa, like some other recent philosophers, finds that "Le Deuxieme Sexe" is a philosophical inquiry, not the empirical study that it is commonly thought to be. In making this argument, others have seen Beauvoir's masterpiece as a criticism not only of Sartrean phenomenology, but of the phenomenological movement as a whole. Heinamaa thinks differently. She finds that Beauvoir's starting points are in the Husserlian idea of the living body that she found developed in Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenologie de la perception". So when Beauvoir wrote "Le Deuxieme Sexe", she was writing not as Sartre's pupil, but as a scholar in the tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.