Both genders experience the same drama of flesh and spirit, finality and transcendence. Time rocks them both, death lurks around them, and they both have the same need for each other. If they knew how to enjoy their freedom, they wouldn't be tempted to claim deceptive privileges, and then brotherhood could be born between them.
Women's emancipation does not mean the prohibition of their relationships with men, but the refusal to be trapped in those relationships.
The publication of "The Second Sex" in France in 1949 caused an unprecedented scandal. The 50,000 copies of the first edition were sold out within a week, and the Vatican included it in its "black" list. The book triumphed in America and made Beauvoir famous worldwide, and it remains one of the main theoretical pillars of the feminist movement to this day.
With "The Second Sex," her magnum opus, Beauvoir wanted to liberate women from the inferior position that forced them to be the Other of men, without giving them the right or opportunity to construct themselves as Others in turn. [...] Seventy years and more 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 laws regarding contraception and abortion has been inscribed in all the achievements of the women's movement. [...] Her thinking has managed to provoke enormous changes, which continue to transform the project of women's emancipation that is always "about to be born."