When Susan Sontag had an abortion in the early 1950s, the abortion providers used no anesthetic and had to turn up the radio to smother her screams. When Audre Lorde had breakup sex with her boyfriend and later realized she’d gotten pregnant, she cobbled together two weeks’ pay and gave it to a nurse for a painful and terrifying procedure that she later wrote “was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation”. When Ursula Le Guin got pregnant by her Harvard boyfriend, who had assured her that you didn’t need to use a condom the second time in a night, her progressive parents paid what amounted to a full year’s tuition at Radcliffe to get her a professional, safe and clean abortion, one she didn’t speak about for decades. And Alice Walker opted for illegal abortion because, in the unsparing words of biographer Julie Phillips, “her alternative was suicide”.
“Reproductive rights – including access to abortion, contraception, fertility treatment and healthcare – are a necessary part of creative mothering,” Phillips writes in her illuminating new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, which features the stories of all of these creative women, and more, in a quest to understand that overlap in the Venn diagram of motherhood and creativity. “All of them saw control over the timing and material circumstances of their pregnancies, whether they were able to achieve it or not, as essential to the practice of their art.”
I devoured the book over the course of 36 hours, as alerts about trigger laws blew up my phone, toppling states’ abortion rights one by one, and the specter of a surveillance state rose up around me. Phillips intersperses lively, chapter-length biographies of important “creator-mothers”, who go on what she characterizes to be a hero’s journey, and essays that tackle throughlines in these women’s lives. When she was conceiving, writing and putting the finishing touches on the book that took her a decade to write, America was moving ever closer to the seismic shift that took place on 24 June, shaking the country to its very core and boomeranging us backwards some 50 years, though it might as well be to the times of King Arthur.
“If anything is a hero’s journey, it’s getting an abortion in a place where it’s illegal,” she told me when we spoke recently. “If that’s not a trip to the underworld and back, what is? It’s a claiming of a sense of power and autonomy and self-determination that of course girls should have all along.”
I was initially drawn in by the book’s cover, which features Alice Neel’s Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), a portrait of Neel’s daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter, both looking beseechingly at the viewer with a sense of frank overwhelm at their new states, one taking in the world for the first time, the other newly understanding a world upheaved. Inside, Phillips takes on the question of how women have carved out the time to create, and how a creative mother’s life unfolds over the long arc of parenthood.
This question is of the most pressing importance to yours truly, whose third child, almost a year old, will no doubt wake up from his morning nap in a few minutes, his babbling through the monitor cleaving me from this more cerebral work and into the work of soothing, cooing, changing, wiping Goldfish crumbs from pillowy cheeks. Even before I had my children, the tension between motherhood and professionalism was unavoidable.
“Wait to have kids, wait as long as you can,” one female editor told me during a job interview, during which I was, unbeknownst to her due to the help of an oversized button-down shirt, already four months pregnant. “It’s the only way to establish the career you’ll want.” I left the meeting shaken, irate and petrified that my professional fate had been sealed by the growing person in my stomach, who would later go on to form the seed of my first book.
For parents who are not creative, the messages will still resonate. “It’s the permission to set limits on what your kids and your partner and your life demand of you,” Phillips told me. “It’s permission to hang on to a part of yourself, to keep some corner of it that is yours alone.”
Creative mothers must have two things in order to succeed, Phillips concludes. The first is time. Poet Diane Di Prima wrote in a letter to Audre Lorde that she was “waiting for the next rift in the curtain of days – days of driving kids to school, to dentist, doing laundry, groceries, garbage”. We mother-creators all seek that rift in the curtain, even if it’s just the daily half hour that the sculptor Barbara Hepworth insisted each creative woman carve out for themselves, but when we find it, we often become racked with self-doubt and guilt. Which is why Phillips insists that secondly, the creative mother needs a sense of self, the conviction that the time she spends with her art warrants time away from her child, that she has a right to create.
It’s a tension starkly described by Alice Walker, who worked with her daughter ever present “at the back of my mind / the lonely sucking of her thumb / a giant stopper in my throat”.
There have been strides towards allowing the creator and the mother, the mother and the “other”, to exist in harmony, Phillips reminded me. Way back in the years directly after the second world war, there were proposals for universal childcare, but then the conservative wave hit and they didn’t go anywhere.
“It’s a fight that keeps going and going,” she said. “I hope that at some point there’s a tipping point where we say, Women’s time matters, mothers’ time matters, children are a community responsibility.”
And so we hope for that tipping point, and as we do, trigger laws fire, the American map gets redrawn, period tracker apps become a potential liability, and it’s impossible not to see the brilliant work of the next Le Guin, Walker, Sontag or Lorde being cut off at the knees.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
