In the previous chapter it was argued that in Pyrrhus et Cinéas and Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté Beauvoir explored how subjectivity is always already situated from childhood. She focused on the role of the Other in the self's situation and examined specific ways of relating to others, through relationships of oppression, reciprocity or solidarity. She also had begun to draw parallels between different forms of oppression, such as anti-Semitism, sexism and racism. In Le Deuxième Sexe she develops this earlier work in the context of gender relations and offers an explanation of female (and to a limited extent, male) subjectivity. She analyses the mechanisms of oppression which can operate within gender relations to construct woman's subjectivity as relative to the universal (male) subject. In this chapter, Le Deuxième Sexe will be examined particularly for its account of female subjectivity, focusing on Beauvoir's description of power relations, gender construction and sexuality. The text will initially be briefly positioned within the various intersecting histories of the situation of French women in the twentieth century, the Second World War and its aftermath and Beauvoir's personal trajectory in the late 1940s.

In terms of its role within Western feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe is a groundbreaking text. It was published in 1949, five years after women gained the right to vote in France. It has been described as ‘the most important feminist book of this century’.