Hailed 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 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 the concept of "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 makes a valuable contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously significant text for a new generation of feminist readers. The contributors provide 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 women of this age.