Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott: what do all of these female writers have in common besides a predilection for neurosis and high collars? They didn’t have children. While many of these women married late, didn’t marry at all, or were, in Woolf’s case, not overly fond of sperm, the primary reason they resisted the maternal path was because being a female writer in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was really hard. Being a mother and writer was well near impossible.
In the intervening years, things have changed—slightly. Although many female business leaders, financial analysts, and Supreme Court justices remain childless, it’s not uncommon to run into a female writer juggling a MacBook and a BabyBjörn. But as Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, points out, you’ll usually find that the BabyBjörn is built for one—and only one. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Sandler notes that Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Margaret Atwood and Ellen Willis are all renowned contemporary authors and are all the mothers of one. Continue reading “One and Done”