Beauvoir Motherhood

When we think about the word “Motherhood”, many different definitions come in our minds. Some person might say that motherhood is a female object who has a child and raise him or her just like a caregiver. For others might connects motherhood more to mother’s quality or spirit. Those meanings can be different by person to person. Because, we all have different past experiences and relationships with our own mothers. Just because each individual was heavily affected and influenced by his or her mother, his or her uniqueness is created. It is a word empowering women. The reality of maternal must be distinguished from the possibility or feminist mothering. Particularly, motherhood as an institution is a male-defined site of oppression

Women in transformed into the second sex by social and cultural conditioning. It may be unfortunate to women compared to men as they are born to reproduce in terms of biology without freedom: “The transcendence of the artisan, of the man of action…passive instrument” (Beauvoir, 538). Beauvoir utilizes existentialist to devastate any common, instinctual fulfillment that women may take from the achievement. The conversation of this topic for Beauvoir is somewhat negative. She completely perceives that as women age they may well turn out to be more angry of their role as women in the society and this belligerent could change the connection with female family members. In addition, Beauvoir argued that motherhood can be seen when a mother confront with her own daughter as she may take her position one day in the family. In contradiction to her postulation of serene benevolence, she also argues “the feelings of the grandmother toward her grandchildren are extensions of those she feels toward her daughter, and she frequently transfers her hostility to them”

To remain in control of reproduction and associated power by the male, patriarchy restricts the latter potential within the former. Reproduction is an action of social situation of the institution of motherhood for Rich. Being mother without giving birth will be eliminated as expected to be “mothers”, their physical death in labor can be replaced by a figurative one: Yet, even in a place and time where maternal mortality is low, a woman’s fantasies of her own death in childbirth have the accuracy of metaphor. The birth of a child is an arrangement of the life transaction with mother under patriarchy; her self-rule as a different being appears to be destined to strife with infant. By the time of giving birth, it means women are risking their womanhood as a women's role in the patriarchal society in the view of motherhood. However, motherhood is not destroyed in the case of grandmother-grandchild relationships. It is because elderly women need not abandon their identity to gain any more social value. A grandmother’s life is rarely exchanged for the child’s. Mothers were originally only women with real physical body and genuine personalities as Rich perceive the social division of motherhood from the physical when women became mothers. In any case, however ideological parenthood as an institution may get