Is it possible to be free and also a mother? Sort of. Virginia Woolf famously called in 1928 for women to have “a room of one’s own” in which to pursue the life of the mind. But for bookishly inclined women, it’s less essential to have your own physical room than time and space — both of which are in short supply when you have young children.
Mothers do all sorts of things to solve this dilemma: I start work by 5am most days. In earlier times, women in search of “a room of one’s own” adopted even more extreme measures in pursuit of peace and quiet. Many opted to give sex the swerve altogether by joining a monastic community: in the Middle Ages there were some 138 nunneries in England.
Over the millennia, doubtless many more women have felt ambivalent about motherhood than is recorded. My grandmother, who worked as a doctor before World War II, told me once that she wasn’t that bothered. But having married, as she put it, “it was rather expected of one”.
Certainly, many of the women who wrote to early birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger found their fertility burdensome. In 1928, Sanger published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of these letters which describe grinding poverty, struggles with physical health, multiple miscarriages, malnourished children and constant money worries. Frustrated, impoverished and still stubbornly fertile, women pleaded for greater control over their own reproductive biology. One wrote:
“I have been married six years, at the age of seventeen. Am twenty-three now. It seems I can’t keep out of the family way. Have had six children, four living and two dead… every year there is another arrival. I don’t have any enjoyment out of life, staying at home all the while. I will not have anything out of life but worry, children and cares.”
Sanger saw her cause as a progressive one, and reproductive healthcare remains cast in the same light. Recent celebrations in Argentina over the legalisation of abortion, and protests against its restriction in Poland, were led by feminists who understand the constraints imposed on women by our reproductive biology. As Sanger put it: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
Thus control over fertility has been a central plank of women’s emancipation, more or less from the moment it became medically feasible to do so. Having fewer children really does afford women greater freedom — and as a culture we really do place a premium on freedom. As Mick Jagger sang in 1965: “I’m free to do what I want, any old time”.
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