Seventy Years of The Second Sex: A conversation between Sophie Berrebi and Helena Reckitt

The conversation took place during the exhibition ‘Seventy Years of The Second Sex – A Conversation between Works and Words’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich. At the dawn of the seventieth anniversary of the book’s first English translation (1953), the exhibition included works by Louise Bourgeois, Geta Brătescu, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Lee Lozano, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson and that converse with Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas and their legacy. ‘The Second Sex’ dissects the ways in which, through history and through stages of personal life, woman is defined within patriarchy, as other. Steeped in existentialism and phenomenology, and drawing on sources from fiction, literary testimonies, sociology and psychoanalysis, the book enacted a dialogue with the civil rights movement, set the stage for the second wave of feminism, and laid the ground for theorisations of gender. Some aspects are inevitably dated, but Beauvoir’s persuasive and implacable exposé of woman’s alienation through mechanisms of social, economic, and psychological domination, remains ultimately a formidable call to action and transformation of society.