ABSTRACT
The majority of feminists in France concentrated on demands for greater autonomy and control for women in relation to their fertility. Their focus was the legalization and/or increased availability of contraception and abortion. In much feminist pro-contraception and pro-abortion literature, motherhood was presented as a culturally constructed and patriarchal identity, as a burden that limited women's personal and sexual freedom. In Beauvoir's existentialist perspective, women's difficulty in liberating themselves from their oppression is aggravated by their reproductive function. The chapter entitled 'La Mere', in the second volume of Le Deuxieme Sexe, begins with a plea for the legalization of abortion. The lesbian writer and critic Monique Wittig has likewise carried out a sustained attack on the privileging of motherhood. Parallels exist between the vision of motherhood evoked in Rich's writings and that contained in the writings of French feminist Annie Leclerc. Helene Cixous seeks to overturn the binary logic that has denied or distorted feminine difference.
