Motherhood Deferred

About this book

Here is a passionate, gutsy exploration of the generation of women who came of age during the women's movement, coupled with the author's very personal story of her later-in-life attempts to have a baby. Unable to conceive naturally, and heading toward forty, journalist Anne Taylor Fleming availed herself of a veritable alphabet soup of the latest, cutting-edge fertility procedures: GIFT, ZIFT, IVF... Spurred by her present consuming desire to bear a child, Fleming's thoughts return to the past - her heady college days, her 1950s youth - in an effort to discover how she has arrived at this juncture in her life. Alternating between an insightful probe of those volatile years when the personal became political, and a harrowing account of her often surreal forays into extrasexual procreation, Motherhood Deferred is an unsparing portrait of a generation of women born to one set of gender-inspired expectations, who were then expected to flourish under an entirely different set. The result is a braid of powerful and telling testimonies - the author's and those of her contemporaries - chronicling the vicissitudes in opportunities, dreams, and realities for women whose lives were movement-forged. With understanding, sensitivity, and self-deprecating humor, Anne Taylor Fleming has written a tour de force: a sometimes irreverent account of what it has meant to be female in the last half of the twentieth century.