A Life's Work

Product Information

I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.

She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag, undetected. David Licata (DL):I began editing the film myself for financial reasons, but I knew I wasn’t doing the idea and the footage justice. Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life.

I had been asked many times - am still asked - by journalists barely able to contain their excitement lest I say "yes", whether I regretted having my children. David Licata (DL):I became excited by the idea in 2004, Wolfgang and I began shooting in 2005, Andy and I shot the final interview in 2017. If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to hire Cabot to edit the full film, but I used his work as a template. Today, a woman in a Range Rover pulled up at a junction where we had stopped, and rolled down her window.

At other times, finding she misses her daughter while she is sleeping, she lies down beside her cradle. I hired an editor, Cabot Philbrick, to edit a 30-minute sample of the film, and he really brought my ideas into focus. I was four or five months pregnant with my second child when I began, and when I reached the end, that child existed, an ardent 10-month-old baby whose power of love has ever since been fused in my mind with the risks and rewards of self-exposure. Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work. Sometimes all the marketing in the world won’t make things like that happen, and sometimes dumb luck will.

It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. If we do away with the notion that the personal is political, as feminism-lite is wont to do, who gets left holding the baby?