In both sexes, the same drama of flesh and spirit, finality and transcendence is played out; time gnaws at both, death lurks for both, and both have the same need for each other. They can draw the same glory from their freedom; if they knew how to enjoy it, they would not be tempted to claim deceptive privileges, and then fraternity could be born between them.
Women's emancipation does not mean prohibiting their relationships with men, but refusing to be trapped in these relationships.
The circulation of The Second Sex in France in 1949 caused an unprecedented scandal; the 50,000 copies of the first edition sold out within a week, while the Vatican included it on its "black" list. The book, which was a triumph in America and made Beauvoir famous worldwide, remains to this day one of the fundamental theoretical pillars of the feminist movement.
With The Second Sex, her opus magnum, Beauvoir wanted to liberate women from the position of inferiority that forced them to be the Other of men, without giving them the right or the opportunity to structure themselves as the Other in turn. [...] Seventy-plus years after the first edition of The Second Sex, Beauvoir's critique of the sexual, economic, and political alienation of women, of bourgeois marriage, and of oppressive contraception and abortion laws has been inscribed in all the achievements of the women's movement. [...] Her thought managed to provoke enormous changes, which have continuously transformed the agenda of women's emancipation that is always "yet to be born."