Expressed attitudes toward pregnancy mask women’s contradictory and repressed inner feelings.
Evidence
Birth control and legal abortion would allow women to control their pregnancies freely. In fact, what decides woman’s fecundity is in part a considered desire and in part chance. As long as artificial insemination is not widely practiced, a woman might desire to become pregnant but be unable to—because either she does not have relations with men, or her husband is sterile, or she is unable to conceive. And, on the other hand, she is often forced to give birth against her will. Pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in very different ways depending on whether they take place in revolt, resignation, satisfaction, or enthusiasm. One must keep in mind that the decisions and feelings the young mother expresses do not always correspond to her deep desires. An unwed mother can be overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her, be openly distressed by it, and yet find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams; inversely, a young married woman who joyfully and proudly welcomes her pregnancy can fear it in silence, hate it with obsessions, fantasies, and infantile memories that she herself refuses to recognize. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1433
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to psychoanalytic notions of repression and to contemporary discussions of postpartum ambivalence; resonates with Adrienne Rich’s later work on motherhood. — connects to: Factual knowledge about birth cannot override visceral dread for girls; Mistrust of adults about sexuality magnifies a girl’s fear of childbirth — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 717; Pregnant women can feel masochistic pleasure from pain that threatens a miscarriage (+7 more)
- QUESTION: Beauvoir’s evidence for the gap between expressed and deep maternal feelings is largely anecdotal — worth chasing the clinical literature on ambivalent pregnancy.
Broader Connections
- Women’s silence about pregnancy stems from their own unrecognized inner conflicts.
#corroborates(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1433