The Second Sex
The first French publication of "The Second Sex" sold around 22,000 copies in a week. It has since been translated into 40 languages. The Vatican placed the book on its "List of Prohibited Books". The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was critical of "The Second Sex", holding that while it was an interesting literary production, it contained no original data of interest or importance to science. In 1960, Beauvoir wrote that "The Second Sex" was an attempt to explain "why a woman's situation, still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world's basic problems." The attack on psychoanalysis in "The Second Sex" helped to inspire subsequent feminist arguments against psychoanalysis, including those of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" (1963), Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" (1969), and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" (1970). Millett commented in 1989 that she did not realize the extent to which she was indebted to Beauvoir when she wrote "Sexual Politics".