Motherload

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/01/art-children-pram-hallway What a fantastic article. I have nothing to add, except why don't WOMEN write articles like this? Could it be that they are holding the baby?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10786279 For any mother reading this, of course the answer to the question 'To have or not to have' children is that it is now a fait accompli , enjoy and/or get on with it. But I was fascinated to be sent this link on the 'Childfree Debate' by a friend the other day. I haven't even heard the Women's Hour debates yet; simply reading the comments was enthralling. (an aside: they were far more considered and polite comments than I have seen on the topic of mothers and children in the press: I wonder what made the difference?) The gist is that a woman's decision about whether to have or not to have children is all too often seen as public property. In the main it is women who are asked whether or not they want to have children, are pregnant yet, told they must have children, or told they are unwomanly if they do not yet, cannot, or choose not to. As more than one commentator pointed out, however, the converse is also true: th...

I've just finished two books that in equal and opposite ways have left their mark. One is Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson, the other Can Any Mother Help Me ? They are both social histories, aimed at exposing the state of marriage and womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century (now ripe for memorialization). Both books take unimpeachably admirable subjects as their themes: Singled Out looks at the 'Surplus Women', the some two million women left behind when all the young men died in France and Belgium in the First World War. Can Any Mother Help Me? looks at what is known as a 'correspondence magazine', a pre-email round robin between invited members, in which each adds articles dealing with subjects close to their hearts (children, husbands, work, illness, loss and so forth). From the outset then, we are prepared for a great deal of Fortitude, Dignified Suffering, and Achievement Despite (a) Housework, (b) Lack Of Housework. I did enjoy both books, an...