Beauvoir saw motherhood as a threat to a woman’s integrity

Evidence

Beauvoir does not say that a woman who decides freely to become a mother is less of a woman than the one who refuses to perform her biological task as defi ned by the species. On the contrary, she wishes that every woman who becomes a mother does so from a free authentic decision. Only then will pregnancy and motherhood be a valid ethical choice for the woman. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 120 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

And so the cult of “heroic mothers” is systematically encouraged: if society persuades mothers to surrender their sons to death, then it thinks it can claim the right to assassinate them. Because of the mother’s hold on her sons, it is useful for society to make her part of it: this is why the mother is showered with signs of respect, why she is endowed with all virtues, why a religion is created around her from which it is forbidden to stray under severe risk of sacrilege and blasphemy; she is made the guardian of morality; servant of man, servant of the powers that be, she fondly guides her children along fixed paths. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 369 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Though she may approve in principle of her son’s undertakings, she is torn by a contradiction similar to one that tortures the woman in love. To justify his life—and his mother’s—the son must surpass her toward his ends; and to attain them, he is led to risk his health and put himself in danger: but he contests the value of the gift she gave him when he places certain goals above the pure fact of living. She is shocked by this; she reigns sovereign over man only if this flesh she has engendered is for him the supreme good: he does not have the right to destroy this work she has produced through suffering. “You’ll tire yourself out, you’ll make yourself ill, you’ll be sorry,” she drones in his ears. Yet she knows very well that to live is not enough, or else procreation itself would be superfluous; she is the first to be irritated if her offspring is a loafer, a coward. She is never at rest. When he goes to war, she wants him home alive but decorated. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1724 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Beauvoir saw women’s condition as bad faith lived all day long — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 682; Authentic freedom, not biology, validates maternity in Beauvoir’s ethics — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 120; The mother’s contradiction mirrors the lover’s in Beauvoir’s analysis — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1724 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Authentic freedom, not biology, validates maternity in Beauvoir’s ethics #qualifies (0.88) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 120
• Society coopts the mother’s influence by sanctifying her as guardian of morality #corroborates (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 369
• The mother’s contradiction mirrors the lover’s in Beauvoir’s analysis #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1724