Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World - Hardcover

Roiphe, Anne Richardson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395735319 ISBN 13: 9780395735312

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996

Synopsis

The author of the best-selling novel Up the Sandbox offers a critical account of the feminist stance on marriage and motherhood, arguing for renewed support for the needs of working women trying to bring up children. 40,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

The passion Anne Roiphe feels for being a mother far outweighs any literary accolades she could achieve for her writing. She believes that if men could only learn the art of mothering, the battle between the sexes, especially in the workplace, might abate. In this humorous, yet critical analysis on what it means to be a mother, Roiphe advocates co-mothering and condemns the women's movement for its male-bashing focus. Fathers who mother, she maintains, are less threatened by their wives' successes outside the home, because the traditional gender roles are shared. Though she is adamant about protecting a woman's right to choose to be a mother, she writes that once a woman has taken that step, she must regard it as sacred and never abandon her responsibility.

From Publishers Weekly:

Motherhood hasn't been easy for the author of Up the Sandbox and six other novels and two nonfiction works. Breaking through what she considers a conspiracy of maternal silence, Roiphe wants to assign blame for the sorrows of raising children in our times. She herself has a family of six daughters, a mixture of hers, his and theirs, so has the right to be heard. Most important, she feels feminists have ignored and shortchanged mothers. Simultaneously, she is tormented by sacrifices motherhood may demand. She lists as many outstanding 19th-century female writers as she can find (Austen, Eliot, Dickinson, Wharton and others) and points out that none of them had children. "Are passion and love and beauty irreconcilable with domestic life?" she wonders. "Is maternity keeping us from destiny as creative people?" She never answers her own question but wrestles with a daunting morass of guilt about her own mothering and that of her generation born in the late 1930s. There are some moments of joy here, but they are constantly overshadowed by a sense of a generation at war with itself. Roiphe takes aim with uncanny accuracy at many painful dilemmas instantly recognizable by any mother: the effect of a working mother on her children; the sufficiency of being a "good-enough mother." She also raises vital issues about our attitudes to children as a society but confuses them by laying out a sweeping utopian agenda of desirable family and community virtues, including expecting the community to care about all of its children, bringing men into the home as a matter of course and creating nonbureaucratic day care. In the end, however, Roiphe tells us: "The only thing I know for sure is that I would rather have a child than a book, I would rather have a warm-blooded body to carry my message to the world than the most perfect of artistic creations issued in my name." The true question here is why she sees the choice as so stark. First serial to Glamour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0395735319
• ISBN 13: 9780395735312
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260