The Second Sex: (Vintage Classics)

A new cover re-issue of the ground-breaking, worldwide bestselling feminist tract.

This work, by the author of Flying , shows how patriarchal bias has operated in history and culture and is reflected in mythology, religion, social mores and literature. It explores sexual theory and psychoanalysis, and analyses the writings of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer and Henry Miller.

An analysis of the position of women in Western society. When published in 1963 it met with an enormous response and led to Friedan being called the mother of the new feminist movement.

A memoir that offers a picture of the author's growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.

Searches out the most bizarre festivals in a frantic race around the world. This book embarks on a round-the-world odyssey in search of as many silly, outlandish and even staggeringly banal festivals as time, distance and severe bouts of exposure will allow.

A Harper 'Perennial Modern Classics' reissue of this examination of post-war French intellectual life, and a chronicle of love, philosophy and politics from one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, this book questions the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. It considers gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

An account of the war against women, the insidiously manipulated political and cultural backlash against the hard-won equality and independence which women achieved in the 1970s and 1980s. Using examples from all areas of public life, Faludi presents a picture of the erosion of women's status.

In the struggle for women's equality, there is one subject still shrouded in silence - women's compulsive pursuit of beauty. The author citing examples confronts the beauty industry and its advertising and uncovers the reasons why women are consumed by this destructive obsession.