Grappling with this narrative in 2018, for example, the narrator of Sheila Heti's novelMotherhood wonders whether a baby would destroy her career as a novelist, asking whether "the universe lets women who make art but don't make babies, off the hook?"
Given the cultural prominence of this idea that you can't be a mother and a writer, it is surprising to learn that, across history, at least in Woolf's Britain, roughly half of women writers have in fact had children.
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There is a popular idea that you'll lose a book, or maybe two, for every child you have.
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Journalist Hadley Freeman reports that a writer friend told her it's two books for every child.This turns out not to be true, at least not for the writers in our database....
Rather than every child causing a woman writer to lose a book, it might be more accurate to say that every child delayed a book by a year.
#years #information #possibility #independent #increasingly #dramatically #historically #young-children #autobiography #birth-control
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