cover image Motherhood Deferred

Motherhood Deferred

Anne Taylor Fleming, Leigh Haber. Putnam Publishing Group, $23.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13740-2

Fleming, a journalist and contributor to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour , describes her unsuccessful attempts to conceive a baby in her late 30s and considers the social upheaval that led so many women of her generation (she is now 44) to postpone childbearing. Arguing that the women's liberation movement in its early years was hostile towards families, she also recalls the childhood experiences that led her and her friends to recoil from ``the often strained arrangement of our parents' lives and marriages.'' These women sought professional success and financial independence previously denied to women, often skirmished with husbands and lovers still unwilling to help out around the house and found the prospect of assuming the responsibility for children overwhelming. When they felt ready to have children, many of these women discovered they had waited too long. While some readers may find Fleming's anguished reaction to high-tech fertility procedures a bit overwrought, most will appreciate her hard-won insights. ``I had made my choices, sometimes with fierce deliberation, sometimes inadvertently, and I would live with them,'' she writes--a conclusion that will resonate with those who lived through the past quarter-century's painful quest to redefine gender roles. First serial to the New York Times Magazine. (June)