Older women without children create maternal bonds with younger people to reclaim identity.

Evidence

It may be that the woman has no descendants or is not interested in posterity; lacking natural bonds with children or grandchildren, she sometimes tries to create them artificially with counterparts. She offers maternal tenderness to young people; whether or not her affection remains platonic, it is not necessarily hypocrisy that makes her declare that she loves her young protégé “like a son”: the mother’s feelings, inversely, are love feelings. It is true that Mme de Warens’s competitors take pleasure in generously satisfying, helping, and shaping a man: they want to be the source, the necessary condition, and the foundation of an existence that has passed them by; they become mothers and find their identity in their lovers far more in this role than in the role of mistress. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1731

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the mechanism by which maternal love for a protégé can be loving rather than merely erotic — a reshaping of love that the reader tracking Beauvoir’s analysis of femininity will want.
• XREF: connects to: Group solidarity and identity fade or persist through intergenerational transmission practices. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 64
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Group solidarity and identity fade or persist through intergenerational transmission practices. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 64