This quote is from Julia Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’, in the context of the changing attitudes towards the desire to be a mother among feminists:

. . . love for another. Not for herself, nor for an identical human being, and still less for another person with whom ‘I’ fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual and professional personality – such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. (Kristeva, 1981, p. 206)

• Kristeva, J. (1981). Women’s Time. In Moi, T. (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. Oxford. pp. 187–213.

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