This paper focuses on the subject of Simone de Beauvoir and how she creates her view of motherhood. With help from Toril Moi’s method – which she calls personal genealogy – as a standpoint I have read Beauvoir’s autobiography Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter with and against her essay about women, The Second Sex.

The genealogy tries to understand the term ‘making’ and the idea of production or construction and the personal genealogy sees the subject – the person – as an extraordinarily complex effect of a whole network of different discourses or determinants. In order to be able to understand Beauvoir’s view on motherhood I have read her philosophy with and against the feminist philosopher Ulla M. Holm’s and the radical feminist Adrienne Richs’ theories about mothering and the institution of motherhood.

In Beauvoir’s other works I have also found keys to the patriarchal motherhood she writes about in The Second Sex. A motherhood she in her individual life dissociates herself from, and through which she creates her own self, when she ten years after The second Sex publishes the first volume in her autobiography. With help from Julia Kristeva’s theory about the abject my study also shows that the ”motherhood as slavery” that she runs away from has made engraving marks in her own body.