10 Things I Learned From Writing a Book on Motherhood
December 2, 2025
Once upon a time, not even in this century, in the increasingly more remote Anno Domini 1999, I was a freshman in college. And I read a book in French literature class that I somehow still remember rather well. It was the essay collection Mythologies by the twentieth-century French cultural critic and essayist Roland Barthes. In his essay “Novels and Children,” Barthes ridicules one magazine for profiling women writers as follows: every woman’s profile listed the number of novels she has written and the number of children she has. Five novels, three children. Or two novels, two children. Three novels, four children. You get the idea.
Barthes was scandalized. Why would the magazine editors have connected each woman novelist’s writerly output to her maternal productivity? Is this not insulting? It is rather ridiculous (he thought) to insinuate that women are these incredible creatures who birth novels and children in alternation. But also, doesn’t such a pairing hint that women should only be allowed to write novels so long as they continue to birth children?
