Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey [Paperback]

Anne Taylor Fleming (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 1995

A respected journalist describes her journey into the physically and emotionally challenging world of fertility procedures encountered by millions of women who have deferred pregnancy and are agonizing over whether they want children or are able to have them. Reprint.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When journalist Fleming finally felt ready to have a baby at the age of 37, she discovered that she was unable to conceive. Her desire to become pregnant was strong, so she ultimately tried the various fixes modern fertility experts offer. As she pursued this elusive quest, she found herself reviewing the events of her life that had led her to postpone childbearing until it was too late. Each chapter alternates between Fleming's earlier years, which were shaped by the feminist writings of the 1960s, and her later experiences with various medical procedures. Although the author's stream-of-consciousness style does not do justice to her interesting journey, many women will undoubtedly recognize themselves in this book. Recommended for medium to large public libraries.
January Adams, ODSI Research Lib., Raritan, N.J.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (May 16, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449983641
• ISBN-13: 978-0449983645
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,747,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Half very good; half so-so, August 25, 1998

By 

Mary (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey (Paperback)

Reading this was like reading two different books. One was a retrospective of the women's movement from the '50s to the '90s. It didn't capture my interest, and in fact I sped through several chapters only half paying attention. The other, and far more compelling book within a book, was Ms. Fleming's late-in-life quest to become a mother. I felt her anguish with each failed procedure and rooted her on even though I knew the outcome. I wish she had stuck to that instead of more or less blaming feminism for her delayed maternal instincts. All in all, a good read, but not great for that reason.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Motherhood Deferred, April 6, 2009

By 

Gerard Reed - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey (Hardcover)

Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey by Anne Taylor Fleming (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, c. 1994) eloquently discusses some of the most crucial cultural issues Americans confront. A former columnist for The New York Times, an essayist for The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Fleming enjoys a well-deserved reputation for skilled social analysis. In this book she helps us grasp a bit about what it's like to be a woman in our day.

Fleming's work weaves together several significant themes: 1) her desperate, late-in-life quest for motherhood; 2) her love/hate relationship with gender feminism; 3) her questions concerning the nature of marriage; and, 4) her unacknowledged hunger for transcendence, something beyond herself which makes life meaningful.

She's the daughter of Hollywood actors---her mother co-starred on The Ray Milland Show---who divorced when she was five. She breezed through school, absorbing on the way the sexual mores of the '60's, embracing the new-found freedoms espoused by prominent feminists of that era such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. Following a cohabiting period with him, at the age of 22 she married Karl Fleming, a journalist 22 years her senior, to whom she remains married.

Determined to succeed as a writer, she did. But vocational success failed to satisfy the hungers of her heart. Motherhood Deferred tells her story. For she believed (and continues to believe I suppose) that she needed a child to make life complete. Her husband brought two step-sons to their marriage, but step-mothering has its built-in, less-than-fulfilling limitations. At 38, Fleming found herself overwhelmed with the desire for con¬ceive a child of her own. In her words, she was: "giddy, hopeful, lonesome, a baby¬less baby boomer now com¬pletely consumed by a long¬ing for a baby, a feeling akin to heartbreak when you can't breathe but for the sensation of loss" (p. 13).

Alternating chapters tell the medical details of the assorted treatments she tried in the failing endeavor to get pregnant. These chapters, journal-like in composition, enable us to feel the roller-coaster emotions of hope and despair, of medical promises and failures. Fleming tried everything--GIFT, ZIFT, IUI, ITI, IVF. She had the money, and L.A.'s fertility clinics had the programs, so every route was explored. Whether she was simply too old or just cursed with infertility no one knows. We do know she failed to conceive a child.

The ethicist in me has grave reservations about some of the medical techniques employed in Fleming's quest. Discarding fertilized eggs, unneeded for a given procedure, raises serious questions concerning the sanctity of human life. Yet my heart feels compassion for Fleming, so desperately desiring a fundamentally natural good. And with her I discount the worldly wisdom of our gurus and experts who encourage women to place professional success ahead of motherhood.

While undergoing various fertility procedures, Fleming revisited the feminist literature which had shaped her convictions as a young woman. In her college days she'd eagerly embraced the architects of gender feminism (Simone de Beauvoir; Betty Friedan; Germaine Greer) as well as revolutionary social philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx and Marcuse. Their words, their ideas, were heady stuff!

Enthralled with it all, "The world was coming deliciously unglued and I was part and parcel of it there on my wooded campus [U.C. Santa Cruz]. Armed with my contraceptives and my fledgling feminism, I was on the cusp of a fabulous journey. My sisters and I were the best and the brightest. The luckiest young women on earth. Everything was before us. With our birth control pills and the exhortations of the feminist foremothers to urge us on, what could stop us? Who could? We were the golden girls of the brave new world, ready, willing and able to lay our contraceptively endowed bodies across the chasm between the feminine mystique and the world the femi¬nists envisioned. Strong, smart, educated, we were the beneficiaries of unique historical timing when the doors were opening, the old male-female roles were falling and the world was ours to conquer, to be part of, to matter in, the world of men, of lawyers and doctors, astronauts and poets. I wanted in that world. I wanted to matter. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to send dazzling words out into that world. Babies didn't cross my mind, there in my sweaty aerie among the redwoods" (p. 15).

So she lived out the fondest fantasies of her feminist leaders. She made it in a man's world. She rose to the top. She resisted having children, even when her husband suggested it. "So after all those years of sex without procreation," she wrote while in a fertility clinic, "here I lie, engaged in this procreation without sex. It is a stunning reversal, a cosmic joke. It contains my history, that arc--all that sex to no sex, a lifetime of trying to be somebody, my whole own woman in the latter half of twentieth-century America, a lifetime of holding motherhood at bay" (p. 16.). In her current frustration, she questions the truthfulness of feminist rhetoric. She's been one of the most articulate advocates of "women's liberation." She still supports the "movement." Yet she wonders if it's told the truth. She wonders if she's championed an illusion. Her honest struggle with the ideology which had structured her life makes Motherhood Deferred a trenchant treatise: a feminist testing the truth-claims of feminism, her "faith," (p. 254) as she calls it.

However admirable its goals, however just its claims, "What we lost right there, in the schism between the sexual revolution and the women's revolution, was the notion of a friendship between the sexes, of tenderness between men and women, in bed and out . . . ." (p. 154). Indeed, "In the name of equality we forfeited a certain protective kindness from men, courtesies that were a lot more fundamental than opening a door and yet, in hindsight, not unlinked" (p. 155). What Fleming finally discovered surprised her: "I didn't want equality; I wanted something more, some delighted mutuality between men and women. . . . . I wanted to be reconciled to my sex, to revel in it" (p. 155). That's what she failed to find in her professional success. That's also what, despite its stability, she failed to fully find in her marriage with Karl Fleming. The book ends with unfulfilled longings. Though "reconciled to my faith" (feminism) and to marriage (which had somehow land lost its lustre), she vows to go on with life.

Now and then Fleming drops hints as to her heart's deepest hunger, a covertly religious longing in an overtly irreligious woman. Early on, while furiously determined to have a baby, she noted that what she and others like her feel, as they approach 40, is not the steady ticking of "our biological clocks" but, instead, the darkening face of "the mortality clock" (p. 31). Beginning to sense the reality of death, she wanted something on earth to outlive her. That her step-sons cannot do. She longs to leave some of her genes, trademarking a child, when she dies. She wants "to put a foot in the future by having a baby" (p. 180). She hungers, clearly, for a tiny bit of immortality, not of her soul but of her genes.

Now and then, in her discussions of feminism, she acknowledges its religious nature. She suspects that she "had pasted feminism over my soul-sickness like a Band-Aid and that what was under there---the childhood, the angry nights and mixed signals--had not yet been dealt with and would have to be sooner or later" (p. 119). Her intellectual dual with feminism in this book, however, is a feint, leaving her without solace for her soul-sickness, unsuccessful in her search for salvation. I closed the book persuaded a child would not have satisfied Anne Taylor Fleming, though it would have fulfilled her motherly instincts. What she failed to find in feminism, we Christians would say, can be found only in Christ. The hunger for immortality she hoped to satisfy with a child can finally be found in the Risen Lord Jesus.