I don’t like sharing things like this by public intellectuals for a few reason, like: so many other people do, which gives it a ‘performative’ edge, and that in turn creates a kind of veil of piety. Basically, if we take the ‘filter bubble’ metaphor seriously, even bubbles are dynamic systems, right? But sometimes a sentence jumps out that’s right on, like this one: “A mother may be treated like a criminal for leaving her child alone for five minutes, even if that child’s father has left it alone for several years.”

Rebecca Solnit May 10, 2021

One more bit about women and maternity, from the title essay here:

A decade ago, during a conversation that was supposed to be about a book I had written on politics, the British man interviewing me insisted that instead of talking about the products of my mind, we should talk about the fruit of my loins, or the lack thereof. Onstage, he hounded me about why I didn’t have children. No answer I gave could satisfy him. His position seemed to be that I must have children, that it was incomprehensible that I did not, and so we had to talk about why I didn’t, rather than about the books I did have.

When I got off stage, my Scottish publisher’s publicist — slight, twenty-something, wearing pink ballet slippers and a pretty engagement ring, was scowling in fury. “He would never ask a man that,” she spat. She was right. (I use that now, framed as a question, to stymie some of the questioners: “Would you ask a man that?”) Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. At their heart these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individuals, charting our own courses, are wrong. Brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation…

Some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. The interviewer’s question to me was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.

But even to say that there’s one proper way may be putting the case too optimistically, given that mothers are consistently found wanting, too. A mother may be treated like a criminal for leaving her child alone for five minutes, even if that child’s father has left it alone for several years. Some mothers have told me that having children caused them to be treated as bovine nonintellects who should be disregarded. A lot of women I know have been told that they cannot be taken seriously professionally because they will go off and reproduce at some point. And many mothers who do succeed professionally are presumed to be neglecting someone. There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.