A retrospective article published in Le Monde Diplomatique reminds us of how radical Beauvoir was for her time (Chaperon 1999). A huge stir was caused by The Second Sex the moment it was first published in 1949?over 20,000 copies were sold within a week of its publication. Beauvoir, we are told, took a stand against the sacred conventions of her time. We are reminded that Beauvoir [i]n her chap ter on The mother' argued for abortion on demand, denied the exist ence of the maternal instinct and strongly criticised motherhood as a source of women's alienation. The chapters on 'Sexual initiation' and 'The lesbian' incensed a puritan society which had not yet come to terms with the notion of sex education. While, from the point of view of her contemporaries, Beauvoir might well have seemed shocking and unconventional, a more contemporary point of view might fault her on many fronts. It is worth bearing in mind that, although Beauvoir has been criticized by feminist theorists in myriad ways for not being radi cal enough?and rightly so, in my view ? The Second Sex must be cred ited with opening up the debate that has ensued, even as that debate has evolved beyond the perspective of existentialist ethics that Beauvoir embraced, in ways that have required many of us to challenge some of Beauvoir's fundamental assumptions (Beauvoir 1974, 1949). As the reassessment of Beauvoir's legacy continues, we should not forget that the territory mapped out by The Second Sex for feminist inquiry is for midable at a number of points. If the sheer breadth and scope of the book is impressive, its formative influence can also be felt in the un canny knack that Beauvoir displays for identifying what have indeed become primary areas of investigation for feminist theory. Within the broad sweep of her inquiry, she includes history, anthropology, litera ture, psychology, and philosophy, thus reflecting the interdisciplinarity