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Feminism and Motherhood: O'Brien vs Beauvoir

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Reyes Lázaro
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Abstract

I argue that both Mary O'Brien's celebratory analysis of motherhood and Simone de Beauvoir's critical one fail, due to biologism and a lack of historical sense. Both approaches, I claim, are complementary: motherhood need be analysed both as alienating—Beauvoir—and as a potential ground for feminism—O'Brien. I conclude by suggesting that feminism can only reappropriate the female reproductive experience in a critical way.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 1 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Motherhood and Sexuality , Fall 1986 , pp. 87 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Hypatia, Inc.

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References

Notes

1 Most feminist writers on motherhood can be classified along the O'Brien/Beauvoir lines: Nancy Hartsock, Sara Ruddick and Cacoline Whitebeck represent the positive approach (for Ruddick and Whitbeck, see Trebilcot ed. 1984; for Hartosock, see Harding and Hintikka ed. 1983). Shulamith Firestone (1971) offers a radical version of Beauvoir's approach.

2 Both O'Brien and Beauvoir claim to be doing something very different from what they actually do in their respective analyses. Both criticize biological determinism; however, their analyses are deterministic. This complicates an exposition of their arguments greatly.

3 In a personal communication, Christine DiStefano suggested to me a different reading of O'Brien's notion of male alienation. In her interpretation, O'Brien is not saying that men experience sexuality as disconnected from reproduction, but that male experience of reproduction itself is disconnected. If correct, this new reading would invalidate some of the criticisms to O'Brien's argument presented in this paper. I believe, however, that my interpretation is supported by textual evidence.

4 O'Brien pushes the disanalogy so far as to claim that males, not females, are doomed by biology. She says, “Men are necessarily rooted in biology, and their physiology is their fate” (O'Brien 1981, 192).

5 Most feminist thinkers who hold that there is a specifically female viewpoint/thought/consciousness give childrearing a primordial role in its development. See Ruddick and Hartsock.

6 Zillah Eisenstein (1979) provides an analysis of this sort. Martha E. Gimenez (1979) and Ann Ferguson (1984a) offer a similar approach.

7 O'Brien paraphrases Beauvoir's existentialist concept of ‘bad faith’ as follows: “… accepting the measuring of an individual existent's experience in the light of another's values” (O'Brien 1981, 76).

8 Sociologist Martha Gime'nez argues, against the Reproductive Rights movement, that speaking of reproduction as if it were a right for women obscures the fact that most women do not have freedom of choice as to whether they want to become mothers or not. Giménez quotes sociologist Judith Blake: “People make their ‘voluntary’ reproductive choices in an institutional context that severely constrains them not to choose non marriage, not to choose childlessness, not to choose only one child and even not to limit themselves solely to two children” (Gimenez 1984, 288).

9 Mary Lowenthal Felstiner points out that The Second Sex starts with an exposition of the patriarchal myths—biological, historical, literary, psychological—which surround motherhood in order to indicate that such myths precede and conform the image that women have of themselves. Felstiner (1980, 248) poses the question: “Why did she {Beauvoir] choose this sequence which emphasizes man-made myths and history before it focuses on women's experience?”; she answers that, according to Beauvoir, it is because “women imagine themselves in response to being imagined.”

10 Linda Gordon's (1979) analysis shows that contraception under patriarchy is not necessarily liberating for women.

11 It follows from Chodorow's (1978) analysis, for example, that it is much harder for females to develop an autonomous sense of self (see also Flax 1978). Dinner-stein (1976), on the other hand, suggests that children of both sexes inevitably project hostility onto the mother because she cannot meet their insatiable demands.

12 As biologist Ruth Bleier puts it: “… the historical and ethnographic reality is that the significance of woman's biology, of her reproductive capacity, is itself culturally constructed” (Bleier 1984).