Motherhood Deferred - Hardcover

The desperate quest to conceive, by a middle-aged, fadingly fertile woman who had nurtured her freelance writing career until the brink of too late. At 35 Fleming suddenly realized that she did want a baby after all. She ditched her diaphragm and tried to conceive with her nearly 60-year-old husband in the privacy of their bedroom. When that failed, the game moved to high-tech hospital wards. Time, money, and the odds of becoming pregnant slipped away as Fleming tried a barrage of procedures: GIFT, ZIFT, FET and other sterile acronyms. Between hormone shots and bumpy rides in the stirrups, Fleming bitterly remembers why she waited so long to have children- -the women's movement. And so begins her course in Feminism 101. The 50s: Sitcom-perfect marriage is a myth; her own parents divorce. The 60s: Fleming turns from budding high-schooler to sassy coed brandishing birth control pills. The 70s: She discovers kindred spirits de Beauvoir, Friedan, Greer, and husband; begins journalism career. The 80s: Reagan and Robert Bly rule. The 90s: Baby boomers reclaim America and get serious about raising families. This 40-year recap is interesting if you missed it the first time, but also highly subjective. Fleming reaches for answers using slipshod reasoning, drawing conclusions she presents as universal. But she is not the Everyfeminist she thinks she is; her theories are marked by the biases of a wrenching personal struggle. Read this more for the personal details of Fleming's quest to conceive than for the larger picture; then you'll see the power and poetry of her writing. Her question is ``How did feminism steer me wrong?'' The reader's is ``Will she get pregnant? How? What if she doesn't?'' We care about Fleming's well-being, not Gloria Steinem's bad advice. Manipulative yet effectively moving and very personal--a diary written with the benefit of hindsight. (First serial to the New York Times Magazine) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.