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As soon as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in France in 1949, it was caught up in the intellectual divisions of the Cold War. But was this the case in the rest of Europe, as translations of the book appeared? Until now, comparisons of the book’s reception and translations in different countries during the Cold War have not been attempted. Three recent historiographical turns have made it possible to approach this subject: the Cold War seen through the prism of gender, the study of the transnational circulation of The Second Sex, and feminist translation studies.