This article is based on a paper given at the 1998 Women's Studies Conference 'Gendered Space: Women's Choices and Constraints' and argues that subjectivity of the French feminist kind needs to inform discussions about women and the social, where assumptions of 'choice' are made. This notion is called into question by Kristeva (and Lacan) who insists that the subject is formed in and through language. I also discuss private and public 'spaces', arguing that the private is based upon the mother-child relation characterised, for Kristeva, by 'abjection' (filth, disorder, confusion, sin, etc.) as the child begins to separate and to move into the symbolic order. This process, however, is never done once and for all. According to the four interviews analysed here, strong abjection of the mother seems to be characteristic of aspiring, intellectual daughters, born shortly after the second world war, who demand gifts from, but are haunted by their debt to, the mother and the sphere of reproduction. Intellectual production is necessary to their psychic survival in the face of this haunting but through their own analysis, therapy or the arts they struggle to become 'subjects in process', attempting to articulate the maternal within the symbolic.