Books or babies? It's a choice that has presented itself to women writers for centuries. And it was a favourite theme of Ursula K. Le Guin who struggled, successfully, to balance the two. In her lecture, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”, published in 1988, she takes an optimistic view. “The Victorian script calls for a clear choice — either books or babies for a woman, but not both." She chose both. She had had, in her own words, “three kids and written about 20 books, and thank God it wasn’t the other way round”.
This was a joke I often used to make in my own ever-evolving lecture about women and writing. I used to say, “I wrote my first three novels while expecting my first three babies,” and would then outline the challenge I had writing my fourth novel without being pregnant. Eventually, I got tired of this attempted witticism and dropped it, but it did no more than record a fact. Men might have thought it an impertinent fact, but it meant a lot to me, as pregnancy and childbirth seemed so intimately connected with my career and writing life.
In her lecture, Le Guin discusses an episode in my third novel, The Millstone, in which the narrator, Rosamund, describes how her baby has chewed up quite a lot of her flatmate's novel-in-progress. Le Guin makes the point that the tone of this scene is comic and accepting rather than bitter or tragic. Both women survive it without acrimony: babies do eat books, and, as she says, and it is terrible, “but not very terrible”, because a book can be Sellotaped together again. And the babies “are only babies for a couple of years, while writers lived for decades”. I loved that description; she keenly understood the minor hazards of the writing mother’s life, the interweaving of books and babies.
I so well remember the birth of my son Joe in 1965: as I lay in bed with this very new baby I received a proof of The Millstone’s enchanting dust jacket by Quentin Blake. The two events are closely linked in my memory and will ever remain so. No choices, no contradictions there.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Mary Harrington"]https://staging.unherd.com/2019/10/how-motherhood-put-an-end-to-my-liberalism/[/su_unherd_related]
And yet. And yet. During the Sixties and Seventies, my speeches about Women and the Novel often included long lists of female predecessors who had had no children, and who did indeed seem to "sublimate" their creative activity into writing (partly because no other professions were open to them): Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, Dorothy Richardson, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf (whose 1931 talk on “Professions for Women” gave Le Guin her eponymous fisherwoman’s daughter). My interest here was largely sociological. I was interested in pointing out the changing demographic of women writers, as authors such as Fay Weldon, Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and I began to emerge in the Sixties.
I, like Le Guin, sought for women in history who wrote about domestic experience. I was particularly pleased when I found, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters, advice to a correspondent asking how best to organise her time if she wished to become a professional writer. Gaskell, who raised four children and lost two, replies that it is very useful to soak the washing overnight, as this lessens the time spent in the morning. In that moment she felt very close, as though she lived in the same world as I did, though I assume she had servants to help her.
Another successful writer who appealed was George Sand, immensely prolific, sexually adventurous, and a loving mother: she said that of the three main components of her life, she put her children first, her books second, and her lovers third. That seemed to me an admirable attitude. She didn’t go in for self-restraint, but she had her priorities.
[su_events_insert]
In her lecture, Le Guin quotes extensively from Tillie Olsen’s influential study of marginalised writers, Silences, which I had not read until The Fisherwoman’s Daughter prompted me. I had been afraid it would silence me. I assumed its thesis was that women had been largely silenced by domesticity, a thesis that I obscurely but strongly felt would have negated my life’s endeavour. I feared that if I were to read that I had been silenced, I would be tempted to become silent.
Perhaps it illustrates how precarious my sense of self was, how lacking I was in what some might call ontological security. I suspected, quite wrongly, that Olsen took an adversarial view of literature — men triumphant and oppressive, women passive and oppressed. I had assumed that she shared the aggressive views of some of the early feminist critics of that period, whom I found disturbing — Kate Millett on the patriarchy and the faults of the family in Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone, who memorably and to me offensively compared childbirth to “shitting a pumpkin”. I didn’t want to be part of that ill-tempered debate, and I had thought Olsen might drag me into it.
How wrong I was about this open-minded and inclusive survey not only of women’s silences but of men’s. Olsen writes movingly of the silences and struggles of Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and G. M. Hopkins, marginalised by penury, censorship and the demands of a religious vocation respectively. She also sympathises with Joseph Conrad. But Le Guin takes her to task on this: she concedes that Conrad may have “wrestled with the Lord for my creation…a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world” but all this while, food was being put before him and life was being made easy for him by “a silent, watchful, tireless affection”. His wife, presumably, although she is not named. Is that better or worse, more selfish or more unselfish, than Henry James’s dream of the Great Good Place, where invisible hands would wait upon him in a kind of country house or club — “a vision of soundless, simple service”? James was much coddled and liked to eat three coddled eggs for breakfast. Would I have written more and better if somebody had coddled me?
I suspect not. Domesticity was my subject, it was what I had in common with other women, it was what gave me a sense of the lives of others. Writing at the kitchen table kept Harriet Beecher Stowe in touch with daily realities, although it gave her little free time for work. Le Guin embraces the values of the domestic life, repudiating Nina Auerbach’s view (which she had once accepted) that Jane Austen was able to write because she had “created round her a ‘child-free’ space”. We know, as Le Guin points out, that Austen was very important to her nephews and nieces, with whom she played happily, and whom she comforted when they suffered loss.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Victoria Smith"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/06/the-battle-over-breastfeedingwhy-do-women-breastfeed/[/su_unherd_related]
Le Guin’s reasons for trying to accept Auerbach when she was younger are interesting: she had been taught that her own experience “was faulty, not right — that it was wrong. So I was probably wrong to keep on writing in what was then a fully child-filled space.” Maybe it was something like this that prevented me from reading Olsen when she first appeared.
Yet Olsen mentions Doris Lessing several times: one of my own inspirations partly because, as she wrote, “Whole areas of me are made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before.” I felt the same. She wrote about sexual freedom, loneliness, independence, standing alone and taking control of one’s own life. She valued the domestic as a subject, motherhood as a subject. She was a good friend of mine, and although we talked about books, we also talked about kitchen matters: she it was who pointed out to me that my kitchen shelving was in the wrong place. How she knew this I do not know, as her own domestic life was chaotic. Generous and sociable, but chaotic. But Lessing and I shared the belief that women’s lives were important. And that was one of the reasons why people wanted to read us. Had we been honorary men, disguising ourselves under male pseudonyms or gender-free initials, what new things would we have had to say?
Lessing, of course, is a problematic example of motherhood, but so are we all. None of us gets it right, just as most of us feel we haven’t got our novels right. But Lessing didn’t shy away from it or consider it of secondary importance. Le Guin, quoting Alice Ostriker, summons up the possibility of “the advantage of motherhood for an artist” and continues with Ostriker’s words: “we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years…” I feel that this culture is almost with us.
Almost, but not quite: it is easier to cite women who have written openly about sex, sexual orientation, menstruation and abortion than those who have written positively about childbirth. Some, like Sarah Moss, write intensely and brilliantly about the anxieties of parenthood, and Sylvia Plath wrote poems about breast feeding, which I used to quote in my lecture. But I continue to be surprised by the fact that “the Nursing Madonna” was considered a wholly suitable subject for art, while breastfeeding is still hardly ever mentioned in literature. We continue to inhabit a world of paradoxical values, one in which books and babies are not yet entirely compatible.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHere is an example of how men and women write differently: two novels, both great works of literature in their own way, concerned, at least in part, with the same event, written forty years apart–Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. The Battle of Gettysburg forms almost the entirety of Shaara’s narrative; he covers the tactics, the strategy, the close combat, in depth. The focus is on masculine values: bravery under fire, personal honor, patriotism, comradery with one’s fellow soldiers, the duty a commander owes to his troops. If there is a female character in the book, I am not aware of it, save for (absent) wives and sweethearts. Gone With The Wind, by contrast, relegates Gettysburg to a paragraph. Nothing is the battle is reported, because the point of view is that of a young woman far from the front lines in Atlanta. Only the aftermath is shown. The values emphasized in that book are feminine: personal safety, rearing of children, romance and the finding of suitable domestic partners, continuity of the family, creating a pleasant and homey atmosphere, fashion, where one ranks in the social hierarchy. The male characters, with the exception of Gerald O’Hara, are largely ciphers to the female protagonist.
These books have very different agendas and very different attitudes on virtually every subject, yet neither is somehow “inferior” because of it. Both sides of the equation are necessary: without Joshua Chamberlain holding Little Round Top, then a freer, more equal nation may never come into being, and without Scarlett O’Hara shooting a Yankee looter stone dead in her entry hall, no woman would be safe to raise the next generation of Americans in peace. Chamberlain’s patriotism is the grand, abstract patriotism of the nation-state, while O’Hara’s patriotism is the small, humble patriotism of the hearth and home, yet both are necessary if a nation is to thrive. And art, all art, is impoverished whenever a point of view is silenced, whether out of some masculine chauvinism or out of a misguided “feminism” that, ironically, prioritizes “modern” pseudo-masculinity over traditional femininity.
Very well written, if i might say so. Perhaps more so than the article itself, which, whilst as a whole made some important points (and which prompted your contribution), at times seemed to lose itself in a series of literary names and references, as if seeking to cover every major female contributor in addition to some male writers. The spirit of inclusivity, perhaps.
Excellent comment.
And what you realise is that the patriotism of the nation can be churned into patriotism of the hearth, but the other way round is not so simple or a given.
HaHa so I think you are saying that the ‘male’ form of patriotism is thus “better” since it can be churned into patriotism of the hearth… how silly! No! You have missed the point of Margaret Drabble’s article I think… male and female are yin and yang and make a whole, the whole of the human experience, and so the ‘patriotism’ of the hearth is just as vital in its own way as the patriotism of the nation…. but maybe I’ve misunderstood you?
I don’t disagree that men and women complement each other.
But I would still say, someone willing to charge cannons and risk certain mutilation or death, all for the sake of country and his fellow soldiers, would also be happy to change nappies and cook food for his child.
The other way round, is rather more difficult, as the rather small number of women paying alimony, or demanding to be drafted in Ukraine, point out rather clearly.
That being said, taking care of the home and hearth is as critical as fighting for country, and I would suggest women are definitely better at the former. When I take my daughter to the doctor, female GPs are way better at dealing with her than male GPs.
The real problem is that the former role has been denigrated and treated as worthless, largely by modern women.
I’ll be honest, I prefer a male author’s take on historical novels. It doesn’t mean that writing is feminine or masculine
Hilary Mantel?
Me too. I’ll take George MacDonald Fraser and Bernard Cornwell over Hilary Mantel and Helle Haasse any day.
“Creating a pleasant and homey atmosphere” where the Blacks worked her land.
I am an inveterate reader and, now that I am retired, am able to indulge my habit. I have moved to an e-reader to save my marriage by stopping filling the house with books. This makes it very easy to get new books and I am tempted every day with offers from Amazon, BookBub, Penguin, etc. Being the male philistine that I am, I have adopted a filtering process whereby I skip over female authors unless I either know them already or their topic particularly appeals. This really does save a lot of time because it seems to me that the publishing industry is now vastly skewed female e.g. today’s Amazon offer 1 male author, 7 female.
My niece was visiting (very progressive and ‘woke’) and I told her this. She was horrified and expressed her disapproval. I asked her what male authors she had read in the last six months and she admitted that they were all female. So I continue to read history or popular science or detective fiction by males while she continues with Jane Austen. Each to his own.
This is exactly why I only read novels by White men, and am very open about doing so.
The curse of identity politics
Ainsi soit-il.
Oh, I’m a total reading w***e – I’ll take any author to bed with me! (Or their work anyway.)
I must admit I have been doing the same thing. It has meant I basically avoid fiction published in the past two decades and most new non-fiction books that aren’t history or philosophy. Men with a similar ‘lived experience’ to me i.e. white ‘cis’ straight and English have essentially vanished from publishing. At least I can still bear Barbara Tuchman.
There are plenty of decent self-published books on Kindle. You don’t have to feed the publishing industry these days.
“today’s Amazon offer 1 male author, 7 female.”
And yet the ladies will find a way to complain how they are oppressed.
I find books by women to be one long series of complaints.
I was brought up on Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton, but the current list of titles on a Waterstones store front does seem to agree with you, it just seems like the quality and content of writing has deteriorated, become more consumed by angst and regret.
Whinged the man… manfully. Unlike those complainy women. Professor Henry Higgins whinged about it best: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
Whinging about someone whinging too much is also whinging, agreed.
But I do feel a typical man like myself is able to deal with 80%female teachers or GPs writers with a lot more stoicism than certain women, who apparently feel oppressed EVEN when faced with situations where they are treated favourably, it seems.
Totally agree about skewed reviewing in papers. It’s yet another dreary, predictable exercise in box-ticking, all about ‘my experience of being a (usually black woman but LGBTREFUGEES also prominent) all screaming about underrepresentation no less.
I’m a ‘G’ in fact but long since stopped reading based on identity as it’s obviously no guarantee of quality or even interest. Nowadays it usually makes me less likely to read it.
A little bit of identity politics goes a very long way.
Dreary Drabble was OK in her time but the last book of hers that I read was ruined at the end when it suddenly morphed into sociopolitical waffle of the most embarrassing sort worthy of a Labour think-tank. I’ve never read anything by her since.
Too true. To me, writing a novel is a bit like acting, the less we can tell about the author’s private life or politics, the better it is. It doesn’t mean they can’t bring their experience to bear, but the story should stand independently of the author.
I’m hetero but I’ve enjoyed 3 books by Sarah Waters, where expression of her sexual identity was either absent (The Little Stranger) or treated lightly (Fingersmith) or used to devastating effect (Affinity). In the other books where it was unnecessary and became a tiresome distraction, I confess I gave up. I felt there was something self-indulgent there.
‘it seems to me that the publishing industry is now vastly skewed female e.g. today’s Amazon offer 1 male author, 7 female.’
I wrote about this for Quillette. The last few decades have seen a tremendous reversal in gender disparities in the publishing world, but no one talks about it.
That was an interesting piece, and the most interesting and unsurprising bit was what you pointed out a out the attitude and response of some of the female authors there. A mix if victimhood, misandry and aggression which is so typical.
I really fear for my daughter’s future. Both because she might turn into one of them, but more so because the men she meets would be the product of this culture.
I think there’s a victimhood mentality among a lot of women which is, in most areas, completely justified. But in certain sectors, such as publishing, women now undeniably hold the advantage.
One of the women I quoted in the piece who picked up on this early on was A.S. Byatt – Margaret Drabble’s sister.
I’m given to understand that they’re estranged from one another.
Maybe there’ll be a fightback like at the end of the 19th Century when it seemed women authors had captured the novel. This led to self-consciously non-feminine styles and subject matter from Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Erskine Childers, John Buchan etc.
You might want to become just a little more inveterate and repeat the aphorism correctly: “to each his own.”
This article focuses on the question of whether women have been held back in their creativity by domesticity and the inescapable biological fact of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding – and also on the value of these aspects of life in literature.
I think this is an important question, but a bit of a narrow view. Perhaps domesticity and biological necessity weren’t the biggest issue when it came to how women’s work was viewed – if it was viewed at all. Even in the 20th century, women’s work has still been seen as second best, inferior – a quaint pastime rather than an equally valuable contributions to literature and art. Regardless of whether the artist/writer was single and childless or married with children or what the subject matter of the work was.
Recently, I discovered the Austrian artist Isolde Maria Joham. She started out working with glass but then moved onto massive paintings which pitted humans against machines and cartoon characters in fantastical urban landscapes – a sort of statement on modernity which reminded me somehow of the “human vs. machine” work of Fernand Léger. For years and years, she was pretty much ignored by the Austrian art scene, until someone realised: “ooo, you know what, her work was actually a sort of painting prophecy of the future”.
Joham was married (to a sculptor, about 15 years her junior – how controversial) but did not have any children. She was free to create and had a loving, supportive spouse. And yet her work was still passed over for decades. That was nothing to do with domesticity and everything to do with a lingering suspicion about female creativity in general.
The happy ending: Joham’s paintings were finally given the publicity and the exhibition they deserved last year, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ-A_4urM20
Joham died on the final day of the exhibition – as if she knew now that her life’s purpose was achieved.
Everybody should know about her!
Years (and years) spent in the Art Student’s League in NYC, and similar spaces, have shown me that there are vast numbers of truly talented artists out there. And some of them have something significant to say. But almost none of them have ever had a show. This is true across the spectrum of the many different identities they represented; gay, straight, Jewish, deaf, female, etc. To ever get a show and find any success is a bit of fortune that very few artists get to experience.
There are innumerable reasons that could explain Joham’s earlier lack of recognition. “A lingering suspicion about female creativity…” isn’t neccessarily the most important one.
I googled her paintings. They’re not my cup of tea but they are something much more compelling; they look like she had a wonderful time painting them. That joy is better than any opinion.
Oh dear, Margaret. You were one of my Northern grammar school heroines. Someone who was going to show me how to escape.
I’m sure it’s entirely possible to be a housewife-writer in North London. Less so in a tower block in Sheffield.
Social class and economics are the barriers to achievement. Not sex and most definitely not ‘gender’.
Something obscure from my adopted country. I bought a book by a Bulgarian female author: Victoria Beshliiska, called ‘Clay’. The starting point for the book was that ostensibly, in the 17th century, while Bulgaria was occupied by the Ottomans, potters in the village of Tran (west of Sofia) were given a permit (signed by the Sultan) to travel all over Ottoman lands to sell their wares. I was excited by the concept, however, the book was overwhelmingly about some romantic entanglement between a girl and two boys in a village. I had to wait until page 110 to see a first mention of the pottery workshop, but by page 150, all there was of the travel was that the village got word that the potters had reached Plovdiv (a city in central Bulgaria). I had hoped to find out about the region at that time when mucht was happening such as the advent of the ‘prophet’ Sabbatai Zevi; the Ottoman empire’s worst defeat outside Vienna; Istanbul’s huge fire in 1660, etc… However, the book was just a dreary romance that involved no research and could have happened at any time in history. I couldn’t help but feel that a man would have handled it differently and I know I’d have preferred the alternative.
Since criticising is not good enough, I’m now working on potters from the same village in the same period but my first chapter will be devoted to a small group of villagers preparing to set out into Ottoman lands and their adventures will cover various encounters and the stories of people and places. The research so far is fascinating so even if it never comes about, I’m having a great time working through it.
Good luck.
The best work (in any medium) transcends the time and place to tell us something universal about the human experience, but it must have a base to start from.
Because of the legacy publishing industry’s misandrist anti-White racism, I only read novels by White men.
Without being as broadly political about it, I tend to prefer novels written by men.
I don’t particularly. Two of my favourite authors are Jane Austen and George Eliot, and I would very much like to read more of Edith Wharton’s work. Among non-White authors, I have in the past read and liked Zadie Smith, and suspect that I would like Wole Soyinka and Chimanonda Adichie. But this is a matter of conscience for me.
The burgeoning of childbearing as a popular theme in literature seems to coincide, paradoxically, with a declining fertility rate. I wonder if more positive portrayals of parenthood in the broader culture might go some ways towards counteracting the prevailing myth that having children is a ‘bad thing’.
I’m a reader. I’m not a writer. Joe Swift was my late Mums favourite TV gardener. I like domestic things. I became a young adult at the very worst time to be that sort of person. The overwhelming media message of that day that they trumpeted from it’s source in a number of fake fraud so called feminists was that cooking,cleaning all that was drudgery so if you liked it you were branding yourself a moronic drudge. I don’t think having to work 12 hour shifts most days each week until you are 70 is an exhilarating vision of the life path before any young woman. And you dont even get to be rescued by Prince Charming any more. You both HAVE TO WORK to keep the roof on the chateau over your head. And once women had listened,got a job in Tesco and stopped cooking then men took it up and amazed us all with their.Art,became TV stars,and it wasnt drudgery after all.
Of the different issues and problems affecting society today, I’d put this one pretty close to the bottom. No fu*ks to give today or tomorrow.
If there is one thing that is problematic about women it is that they take themselves too seriously.
Men, on the other hand, know they are expendable.