Great expectations | 12 April 2018

In a 1974 interview celebrating the quarter century since the publication of her classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir recalled a eureka moment in which she saw that ‘to change the value system of society was to destroy the concept of motherhood’. That ‘value system of society’ rested on what she saw as enforced maternity, whereby women — whether through physical, psychological or social pressure — were pressed into humiliating servitude, a world of narrowed horizons and debasing physical shame. A mother was ‘alienated in her body and her social dignity’ and, finally, complicit in propping up a violent, corrupt and tenacious system of patriarchy, as well as capitalism itself (though unlike many to follow, De Beauvoir didn’t think capitalism was unique in degrading and enslaving women).

Jacqueline Rose has followed De Beauvoir’s lead — though unlike the ‘mother’ of feminists she does not see motherhood as inherently limiting; rather as murderously misunderstood.