 In reflecting on The Second Sex, Beauvoir says that were she to write it again she would pay less attention to the abstract issue of consciousness and more attention to the material conditions of scarcity. Though it is impossible to say what a revised version of The Second Sex would look like, The Coming of Age gives us some idea of how it might read. There is no talk here of the aged. Reminding us that old age is our universal destiny, Beauvoir tells us that its lived meaning is specific to our historical, class and cultural situations. Where The Second Sex identifies the ways that the myth of woman hides the diversity of women and does not seem to see that the single category of the inessential Other may not capture the diverse meanings of women’s situations, The Coming of Age keeps making the point that if we speak of old age as a universal category we will miss the crucial differences among the aged that the myths and images of aging hide.