(New Harvest, $23)
Becoming a mother isn’t supposed to make a woman feel ambivalent, said Jenna Goudreau in Forbes.com. Yet that’s what happened to Jessica Valenti. After becoming pregnant, the founder of the feminist blog Feministing.com eagerly awaited the moment when motherhood would “complete” her. Instead, complications during delivery endangered her health, and postpartum blues blurred into a persistentfeeling that she was failing to be the mother she was supposed to be. In Why Have Kids? Valenti “exposes a growing disconnect between the fantasy and reality of modern motherhood.” We’re told that parenting is life’s most important role, yet many parents encounter more criticism than meaningful social support. For mothers, joy too often turns to guilt.
“When it comes to unpacking what it means to be a female in America right now,” Valenti is “one of the smartest minds out there,” said Jesse Ellison in TheDailyBeast.com. But the author of The Purity Myth and He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut doesn’t deliver here on the promise of her title. In the book’s first half, she provides the argument against having children—including the survey evidence indicating that parenthood makes people less happy, not more. But “she never convincingly argues the opposite point,” except to offer this baffling conclusion: “The truth about parenting is that the reality of our lives needs to be enough.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“Occasionally, Valenti offers a glimpse of what the book could have been,” said Lauren Sandler in The Boston Globe.Scattered throughout are “spot-on proclamations about motherphilia and its discontents.” And yet the author consistently fails to develop them. Early on, she claims that her book will make readers angry. But if she really cared about reforming maternity leave or child-care benefits, she would have recognized that the only way to move social policy is with “a drumbeat of carefully constructed arguments.” This book will make readers angry, “not because of what it says, but because of what it doesn’t.”
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
Not a good ideaCartoons
-
Are private schools safe from Starmer?
Today's Big Question Schools would pay VAT under Labour government but party scraps plans to remove charitable status
-
Sam Bankman-Fried: crypto on trial
Talking point The implosion of FTX may go down as one of the biggest financial frauds in American history
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-ups
feature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”