Moving Mothers of Women: Virginia Woolf Simone de Beauvoir, and Motherhood in Motion

Abstract

This article builds and expands on the notion that Virgin-ia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir are the ‘mothers’ of sec-ond-wave feminisms. It comprises three interrelated move-ments. First, Simone de Beauvoir’s paraphrase of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is explored, in particular through the ‘myth’ of Judith Shakespeare. This movement naturally leads to a discussion of the women’s literature anthologies of the 1970s and 80s in the United States. An intermezzo attempts to show the inherent plurality of the category of ‘second-wave feminism’ by mapping Beauvoir’s trajectory in France, the United States, and Britain, beyond the rather long shadow of a feminism of difference. The third and final movement investigates the reception of Woolf and Beauvoir among second-wave feminist critics and activists through the notion of ‘feminist Bible’ and through that of matrilin-earity.By adopting an overtly transnational perspective, this article shows how the very idea of (intellectual) motherhood ought to be understood in its border-crossings and its movements across time, space, languages, and disciplines.