Today, Women are Writing Books AND Having Children, Now What?

On Tillie Olsen, "One in Twelve," and my fear that literature is becoming a "Pink Ghetto"

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. Comments and questions and musings and suggestions are welcome, because life and feminism are messy and I love diving in with you all!

“Writing” painted by Gari Melchers, circa 1905-1909. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This was painted by a man, but would he read what she is writing? Probably not.

Let Women Write. Let Men Read.

Some people liken publishing a book to having a baby. But this is a false simile, because a book takes much longer. For many years I knew that I would have both, but I never imagined they would happen at about the same time. When my agent, Sarah, first reached out to me to ask if I was working on anything that might be a book, I was just entering my second trimester of pregnancy with my first child. When my book is published next month, it will be the same week as his sixth birthday.

By the time I was pregnant with my second, I had been through at least three full versions of a book proposal, spinning a web that wasn’t quite right, only to tear it down and start again, and again, and again.

Ten days before my second child’s due date, I worked into the evening, later than I usually do, watching my toddler and husband play outside from my office window. It was windy, a fall storm was moving in. They raked leaves and my toddler laughed and squealed when the pile was blown back up in the air by the gusts. My brain felt like it was moving a hundred miles a minute. Something inside of me knew that the writing needed out, now. I put finishing touches on my sample chapter and shut my laptop. Baby number two was born eight hours later. 

One month into my postpartum haze, the proposal was deemed finished, finally. It went to editors in January while I nursed my tiny infant near constantly. Switching between novels and Netflix while he napped. By the end of the month, I had sold my first book. I had a two month old and a three year old. I was a mother of two small children and a soon to be author, as soon as I wrote the book.¹ 

My children, in other words, feel like little dots on which I can plot out the long timeline of the life of my book  — the much longer gestational project than the two of them.

For many years it was fairly true that to be a woman writer you had to choose: books or kids. In the 1970s the majority of women writers who were considered particularly productive and distinguished from the eras prior were nearly all childless  — Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson², Susan Glaspell, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Eudora Welty, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Christina Stead, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner, Jean Stafford, Mary Sarton, Josephine Herbst, Janet Frame, Lillian Smith, Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carole Oates, Lorraine Hansberry. 

This list comes from an essay, first a lecture, delivered in 1971 by author Tillie Olsen, Women Who Are Writers In Our Century: One Out of Twelve.³ “One out of Twelve” refers to the calculation she made, that of those writers studied in literature courses, those who appeared in anthologies and best of lists and the book review sections women were woefully underrepresented. “One woman writer of achievement for every twelve men writers so ranked,” she writes. 

Olsen was a woman who’d received a contract from Random House to write a novel in 1934 at just 25-years-old (she’d been working on the book for around six years by that point). But she didn’t fulfill that contract, because she had her first child the same year, the first of four subsequent children, and she was working-class and time and money didn’t allow for her to write the book. Decades later, her children grown, she wrote a short story collection which was lauded, and she finally finished and published her novel, Yonnondio in 1974.⁴ 

At the time of the publication of Olsen’s novel, only about 20% of all books published in the U.S. were written by women. But since then, an interesting tide has turned — one you’ve probably noticed if you read books or write books or I don’t know, deliver lunches to the buildings in Manhattan — today, more than half of all books published are written by women. And today, books written by women are making more money than books written by men. And the vast majority of the book publishing industry is made up of women. 

This is an incredible societal change. A shift in the very way we shape and learn about the world around us. But there’s a catch. Claudia Goldin (yes, the Nobel-Prize winning economist)⁵ told NPR’s Planet Money last year that perhaps, the reason book-writing has become a woman’s game is because of the same societal forces that were present in the 1970s: that women still do the majority of the domestic labor, and so are looking for more “temporal flexibility” in their paid work, so they have time for the unpaid work of raising children (perhaps) or just cleaning, cooking, organizing, laundry, coordinating schedules, etc. Also, book publishing is much much worse paid these days. So, another theory goes, that fewer men go into it because they won’t get rich doing so. Women, meanwhile, likely won’t ever get rich anyway. 

I worry we’re at a tipping point that happens historically wherein when a thing is seen as masculine it is desirable, for men and women alike. But once a thing becomes feminine, it is cast aside, ghettoized, paid less, worth less, and undesirable for men for fear of seeming, well girly. See: The Color Pink. Computer Programming. Gynecology. High Heels. Etc. 

More writing by women ostensibly changes this world for the better. After all, Olsen wrote that in the late 1900s, women in college studying literature were likely overwhelmed by male versions of the world, which may have opened our eyes to other ways of life and being, but these being the only stories we had did not have a positive impact on our senses of self, our own importance, nor our own ambitions. 

Freshman texts in which women have little place, if at all; language itself, all achievement, anything to do with the human in male terms: Man in Crises; The Individual and His World. Three hundred thirteen male writers taught; seventeen women writers. That classic of adolescent rebellion: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and sagas (male) of the quest for identity (but then Erikson, the father of the concept, propounds that identity concerns girls only insofar as making themselves into attractive beings for the right kind of man). Most, not all, of the predominantly male literature studied, written by men whose understandings are not universal, but restrictively male; and in our time, as Mary Ellmann, Kate Millett, and Dolores Schmidt have pointed out, more and more surface, hostile, and stereotypic in portraying women. 

In a writer’s young years, susceptibility to the vision and style of the great is extreme. Add the aspiration-denying implication, consciously felt or not, that (as Woolf noted years ago) women writers, women’s experience, and literature written by women, are by definition minor. (Mailer will not grant even the minor: ‘the one thing a writer has to have is balls.’) 

Today, I read almost entirely women authors. And my brain has been busted open in the best way since I gave up my own previously held belief that only classic literature (meaning, mostly by white men) was good, something I had to figure out after college for myself. Today I’m in awe of how many women are writing books, and yes, how many of those women have children, and often are writing about having children. They are putting down integrally important work into the world: about the support systems we lack, yes, but also about the future we want to build for them. 

But here is where I grow concerned. Not for women writers’ paychecks (although, that too) but for society. The voracious readers I know are almost entirely women. If we are finally putting words to the stories of our lives, of other women’s lives, of girls’ lives, of what it truly means to be a caretaker and an artist or just a woman in the world, and all of these other fascinating multifaceted, complex stories that are being told today, but books and reading have becoming associated with the feminine? That is concerning. 

American boys are less likely to read for fun than American girls. Men are far more likely to read books by other men. Of the top 10 best-selling books by women authors, just 19% of the readers are men. While the top 10 bestselling books by men authors are read by 55% men. And even as the publishing gap has closed, literary awards still largely go to men: Fiction and Nonfiction. Boys today, in our post-everything gender-neutral everything society, are still far less likely to play with toys that are stereotypically feminine: dolls, kitchens, anything pink, etc. So what happens if books end up in this category, too?

I’ve been organizing and attending a feminist book club for the past seven and a half years (we don’t read books by men, and prioritize books by BIPOC women), and recently, discussing one of the many novels we’ve read wherein a mother undergoes an agonizing transition into motherhood, a few of the women in the group mentioned that they were tired of reading the as they put it, “being a mom is terrible and unfair” genre. And I get it, I do.6 Because, what’s the point in continuing to ingest how hard it is to do what we do, create life and art and truth and beauty and simply survive all of this, when we’re living it, too? As Olsen wrote in ‘71, she worried for the writing mothers, because in “motherhood as it is structured, circumstances for sustained creation are almost impossible. Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need … but the need cannot be first.” We are creating, but have our circumstances changed? How can they when no one outside of the forest is there to see the trees falling down, and falling down, and falling down?

I often tell people that one of the reasons I’m obsessed with gender is that I have four brothers. Growing up in my house opened my eyes to what it is like to be male in this world, to the vast spectrum of emotion and humanity men and boys are capable of, and how they, too, are often forced into little boxes of what is appropriate for their gender. My brothers often pushed those boundaries (and still do), and part of why they are the way they are, I think, is because of my mother. My mother, who came of age when Tillie Olsen was parenting her children instead of writing her novel, never put her art on hold for us. A textile artist, she was a weaver and sewer and lover of fabric and she was always taking us to her Weaver’s Guild meetings, or putting us to work helping her finish off the fringe of the last baby blanket she wove, or hauling us to convention centers where her small business sold imported vintage Kimono fabric. She’d wanted to go to art school when she instead got pregnant, but she kept going in the ways that she could.

In other words, although her life, and career, were definitely interrupted by the five of us, she modeled a consistently a full life that included art and beauty and doing the things you are passionate about as a woman, all while, yes, caretaking for five children. And even though textiles are considered historically feminine arts, she shared them with my brothers as much as with me. My brothers all learned to sew, and knit, and one of them was a spinner who inspired me to learn. They also never shied away from playing dolls with me. They were the ones who taught me how to french braid hair.

It is possible, in other words, to allow the stereotypically feminine to become attractive and compelling to men and boys — and in fact, it must. When my 2.5-year-old recently became obsessed with changing his baby doll’s poopy diaper (multiple times a day) I realized it was an opportunity to lean into encouraging this kind of play, even though I change enough real poopy diapers and do not really want to pretend to change more! When my almost 6-year-old wants to paint his nails, I help him, and we pick any colors he wants. And we confirm that anyone can paint their nails. And when we read books at night, I make sure that there are a mix of characters: boys and girls (and yes nonbinary or trans characters when we can find them) and moms and dads and uncles and aunts and that their books are by a mix of men and women and nonbinary people of all races and backgrounds. 

Because books are how we learn about the world. They are the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, if I were to paraphrase one of my first women writer crushes. 

Perhaps for Mother’s Day, in honor of Tillie Olsen, if you are a woman, you can suggest the men in your life read your favorite recent book that spoke to you⁶. If you’re a man or masculine-identified person, maybe ask a woman or femme in your life for a reading suggestion. Perhaps you can go to the library and pick out a smattering of books you might not normally pick for your kids (especially your boy kids) because of the internal gender code we all have to constantly fight within us. Perhaps you can let your children see you choose your art for the day, or make a commitment to allow them to see that more regularly. We all have stories to tell, and stories to read.

1. Yes, I did figure out how to do that, you can read more about it here.

2. The pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson

3. The entire essay/lecture can be read in Olsen’s book Silences, available online

4. After finishing this piece, I stumbled across Jess Grose’s New York Times piece also finding Tillie Olsen’s insights shockingly familiar (citing Maggie Doherty’s 2020 book, “The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship and Liberation in the 1960s,”), which also ran this week. Something in the air?

5. For more feminist economics, you can read the interview I did with Nancy Folbre

6. Might I suggest any of those I’ve reviewed here on this newsletter? Touched Out, and Essential Labor

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Other places you can find me this week: 

• On the Atlantic’s Instagram and TikTok accounts doing my best impression of an influencer.

• Blushing over *TWO* Starred trade pub reviews for BETTER FASTER FARTHER

• Gearing up for the opening of WNBA season — my happy place.

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Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens

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