Liberty, Equality, Maternity

Motherhood is fundamental in debates concerning French individual and national identity. While France's obsession with its falling population led to a long-standing glorification of the 'mere au foyer', motherhood has also been a highly contentious issue for French feminists. In this interdisciplinary study, Fell examines twentieth-century women's writing in the light of contemporaneous debates about women's reproductive function. Through close textual readings of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc and Annie Ernaux, she uncovers fascinating tensions at the heart of women's literary evocations of mothers and motherhood, revealing how the extent to which writing about motherhood, whether in the 1940s or 1990s, remains an inherently ambiguous enterprise.