Many women feel strongly that children are an obstacle to their success. A fresh wave of proposed government handouts promise to once-and-for-all absolve mothers of the wretched task of caring for babies. Sufficient tax credits and subsidies will ensure that premier daycare establishments will welcome children while their mothers can join the ranks of unencumbered men and claim their birthright as autonomous workers.
We are led to believe that if only there were the right distribution of tasks and large blocks of uninterrupted hours, women would climb the heights of corporate and artistic achievement.
This is to misunderstand how many women work and to misunderstand what motivates mothers. Many women who are remembered for their work (Tasha Tudor, Elsa Beskow, Alice Thomas Ellis, Phyllis Schlafly, and Sigrid Undset, to name a few), were first and foremost housewives. They may have had the assistance of nannies and domestic help at times. Sometimes they did not. Accounts strongly suggest none of these women had husbands dutifully picking up 50% of the dishwashing, every other day with the kiddos, and being every bit as obsequious as we are told the husband of a successful woman should be.
Another example comes in children’s book author Katherine Paterson’s book of reflections Gates of Excellence: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. In it, Paterson describes her reluctance to become an author, afraid of her mediocrity. It was only when put forward by a former professor for a position writing a curriculum that Paterson entered what would become her career. She explained, “I became a writer, then, in 1964 without ever really formulating the ambition to become one.” By this time, Paterson was already pregnant with her first son and working to adopt her first daughter. Within a few short years, she would give birth to a second son and adopt a second daughter.
Paterson describes the progress of her writing thus: “I had no study in those days, not even a desk or file or bookcase to call mine alone. I was, I must admit, doing a lot of mediocre work, but with the encouragement, not to say nagging, of my husband, I was writing—learning and growing along with the children—until eventually I was writing fiction worthy of publication.” Absent the miraculously perfect childcare scenario, absent the long stretches of dedicated work time, Paterson was on the way.
She notes, “It might have happened sooner had I had a room of my own and fewer children, but somehow I doubt it. For as I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.” Years of “writing in ten-minute cracks of time” was not a distraction from her work but the substance of it.
Other women artists, such as Cicely Mary Barker and Christina Rossetti, were not mothers, but they filled a maternal role in their families caring for ailing relatives and managing households. While the post-modern age is obsessed with removing women from the prison of the domestic sphere, we ignore the joy of making pies that gives mothers—and women generally—the rhythms of life which their work can meaningfully punctuate with the slowly accumulating substance of a life’s work.
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