Wife. Mother. Other.

The outdated misnomer of 'having it all'

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As it’s Mother’s Day in the UK this Sunday, I thought I would share an old essay I wrote back when I had only a handful of subscribers.

Narratives around mothering, motherhood, and being mothered, as well as the choice not to mother, have always fascinated me. As have the lives of women writers who have attempted to combine writing and mothering, and the attitudes that persist around a woman’s creative capabilities once she becomes a mother, as well as the unequal ways they are judged for their choices around mothering (or not).

I hope you enjoy this re-run of a piece that is close to my heart. As somebody who lost their own mother before her time, I find this time of year intensely difficult, complicated further by being a mother myself and all the responsibility that brings.

As mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, child free by choice, or anything else, we all have some connection to mothering in one sense or another. I hope you enjoy reading. It is a subject that continues to fascinate me, and inspires much of the discourse within my own writing.

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English literary critic Cyril Connelly once wrote ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, giving credence to the theory that having young children negatively affects an artists’ ability to create good art.

It is a truth that many parents will acknowledge: having a young child in the house is often incompatible with getting stuff done.  Just refer back to the recent pandemic and home schooling -v- parents trying to work from home.

What I think is interesting is that Connolly’s reflections on the difficulties of creating ‘good art’ appear to have translated over the years to the difficult discourse around the working mother.

In 2023, New Zealand’s youngest (and female) prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigned, declaring that she no longer had ‘enough in the tank’.  The BBC were quick to issue a tweet asking: ‘Can women really have it all?’ Whilst they withdrew the tweet and changed the headline of the article after a huge backlash online, it does raise the ugly issue of the ways in which negative language is often used against working mothers (and women generally), particularly in positions of power.

Comparisons have been made with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for example, who resigned in 2022, citing that he was not questioned about how he perhaps found it difficult to cope with his 7 children, including 2 born during his tenure as PM.

This idea of the struggling working mother persists, particularly in the arts.  In a 2016 New York Times piece reviewing the publication of a new Shirley Jackson biography, the question was asked of why women writers and artists have always struggled with the ‘ever-pressing conflict between being an artist and being a wife and mother’.    

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As a researcher into 20^th century women writers and their works, I have often held these emblems of female creativity as heroic women who fought against patriarchal values and managed to blend their craft with raising families and living as women in the world.

But in truth, there is strong evidence that many of these women had difficult decisions to make regarding marriage and motherhood, in order to make their art.

Author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott for example had some outspoken views on motherhood and creativity.  Researching Alcott’s own life, it’s easy to see that Jo March, surely her greatest creation, is a representative of Alcott herself.  Raised in a family with financial difficulties, like Jo, Alcott had to work to help the family.  But it was writing that was always in the background for her, and Little Women is based on her life growing up with her three sisters.  

An abolitionist and feminist, Alcott, by the early 1870’s, had announced her alliance with American Women’s Suffrage Association, having long pondered issues of women’s creativity, independence and domesticity, deciding that marriage and writing were incompatible.

‘I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe’.  

She often felt that she was driven by ambitions her society coded as masculine: ‘I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body’.  She never married, nor had any children of her own.

Alcott went on to write novels exploring the tension between the domestic angel in the house and female artistic ambition.  She famously hadn’t wanted Jo, as her representative in the novel, to marry, but the demands of the publisher and public forced her to create the German professor Jo goes on to marry.

The poet Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, stated that ‘Woman’s status as child bearer has been made into a major fact of her life.  Terms like ‘barren’ or ‘childless’ have been used to negate any further identity.  The term ‘nonfather’ does not exist in any realm of social categories.’  This would certainly fit with the reporting of Ardern’s tenure as PM and her parental responsibilities, versus her male contemporaries.     

Interestingly, Rich goes on to say that:

‘Once in a while someone used to ask me, “Don’t you ever write poems about your children?”  For me, poetry was where I lived as no-one’s mother, where I existed as myself’. 

I loved this sentiment when I read it! That is was confounding to others that Rich chose not to write poetry about her children is such an interesting point to note; that she chose writing to be the one thing she did that didn’t include her identity as a mother is something that feels radical but shouldn’t be.

But this idea of conflicting demands can have a strangling effect; the guilt inherent in many women’s psyche of needing to do it all.  The social and cultural impact of guilt on women can sometimes lead to the acceptance of unfair treatment or inequality, because deep down, there is the fear that they actually deserve it. If they decide to give time to their art, it might be seen as neglect of their ‘natural’ instincts towards their offspring.  If the art is neglected in favour of the child, women can be seen as not ‘real artists’ or not fully committed to their art; merely hobbyists or domestic writers. 

In her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Freidan stated: ‘I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world,…and had children.’ Luckily, we’ve moved on a lot, but I believe women still often carry the residue of questioning themselves over their individual choices in a way that men often don’t.

Writer Margaret Atwood in her essay ‘The Curse of Eve – or What I Learned in School’, states that: ‘Writers, both male and female, have to be selfish just to get the time to write, but women are not trained to be selfish’.  Referring to female writers such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she says extreme versions of the perils of women and creativity are cited by reference to their suicides, but that there are alternatives, citing other female authors who managed to successfully combine marriage, motherhood and writing.

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There are many women writers, particularly of the early 20^th century, who chose to either remain childless – such as Simone de Beauvoir – or who chose to pursue their writing over their mothering - such as Muriel Spark and Jean Rhys, whom left their children in the care of others whilst they literally moved themselves to another country and followed their passions.  Though I wouldn’t wish to celebrate their life choices personally, I can see that they must have realised that without such separation, they didn’t feel able to combine the multiple roles demanded of them within the confines of society at the time. 

Before we jump to judge their choices, it is important to think of how many of their male contemporaries would be judged in the same way.

However, I would argue that there are also examples of some brilliant, creative women writers of the early 20th century who actually appeared to thrive from their parental responsibilities.

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Sylvia Plath, for example, had long worried over the idea that domesticity and motherhood would ruin her art, so much so that she had commented on these issues in her poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, and directly in her journals.

Plath constantly questioned whether art and motherhood could be in any way compatible. Outwardly, a golden girl of the fifties, with her bleached-blonde hair and a myriad of casual dates and boyfriends, she also enjoyed academic, artistic and athletic gifts.  But the crisis of her childhood was her father’s death in 1940 and the all-consuming relationship she shared with her own mother. Reading her journals, it’s clear she was internally driven and divided between competing desires for marriage to the perfect man, and her resolve to become an important poet and novelist.  

Following her well-documented suicide attempt, relayed in her semi-biographical novel, Plath eventually graduated summa cum laude from Smith and won a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University.  It was there that she met and married English poet Ted Hughes, but continued to ask herself: ‘Why was I so unmaternal and apart?’ fearing a conflict between maternity and creativity, and referring to married women with children as being ‘brainwashed’.

‘After I had children, I would feel different, I wouldn’t want to write poems anymore.’

Despite her fears, however, Plath turned out to be a loving mother and accomplished homemaker, writing some of her best, most prolific work after the births of her children, including her accomplished poetry collection Ariel.  Far from curtailing her creativity, in other words, Plath’s becoming a mother could be seen to have enhanced it. 

For other female writers, it was more a general sense of their thoughts gleaned from their writing, such as short story writer Grace Paley, a New York writer portraying the everyday nuances of the social, cultural and political ideology going on around her, writing from the point of view of the everyday people (mostly other mothers) she came into contact with. 

Beginning to write in the 1950’s, she had fifteen years between her first and second story collections, ‘doing the important business of raising kids’, as she famously put it, and becoming a feminist and activist.  Something which strikes me is that this choice, to put family and children first, working on writing in the background, is often seen as a negative; that perhaps the writer or artist isn’t really ‘serious’ enough.  But how much richer her writing is for the experiences she brings to her stories.

In Paley’s second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, eleven of the seventeen stories include women without husbands.  Many centre on Faith Darwin, sometimes seen as Paley’s alter ego; a reflection of Paley at different times throughout her life; but I found that Faith also represents the ‘every woman’; the conflicts often faced of unreliable male partners, children, and later, middle age and menopause.  In an interview in 1980, she described her subject as ‘the dark lives of women’.

‘I needed to speak in some inventive way about our female and male lives in those years…I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building in the second wave of the Woman’s Movement’.  

When I discovered The Millstone in my twenties, I was surprised to discover that ardent traditionalist Margaret Drabble presented her protagonist Rosamund Stacey as a PhD student who has fallen pregnant in a single sexual encounter. A particularly subversive subject when it was first published in 1965.  

Rosamund can be argued to be a truly free-thinking, modern woman.  She keeps her baby, becomes a single parent, and still completes her PhD.  She is revealed as self-disciplined and courageous.  Though she is brought to admit that she has lost control of her own destiny in the novel by her pregnancy, humbled by her own body, and making connections with the legions of other pregnant women she sees, this forces a reluctant realisation of femaleness upon her.  This is further revealed to her by the startling strength of love she feels for the child.  ‘I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn to live inside it’, she says.  

Literary critics commented that for Rosamund, a ‘Room of One’s Own’ was a place to have a baby, leading her to test her strength and resilience, and to ultimately bring clarity. Drabble appeared to find through this novel a female resolution to the feminine conflict between biological and artistic creativity.  Her portrayal of the single mother working on her PhD thesis ultimately results in her working ‘with great concentration and clarity’.  

These writers encouraged me to wonder if, conversely, motherhood can actually be a positive influence toward a woman’s art.

My own travels into motherhood, and the riches these have brought into my life, far from permanently stunting my creativity or writing ability, have enriched it. They have led me towards research into women’s myriad voices within this discourse, as well as teaching me the meaning of working within small spaces of time. This, I think, is something that is of benefit to know to anyone raising a young family with limited time resources. 

As for ‘having it all’, surely this is a culturally outdated misnomer in a world where we are all just juggling the demands of our lives in the best way we can.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, I was interviewed on Dr Kathleen Waller’s podcast over on The Matterhorn about my research and ideas into mother writers. You can still listen to it here.