Rachel Cusk’s twelfth novel is strange, compelling and ferociously intelligent. It explores artists, mothers and daughters, and the ‘blankness of spirituality’ on the other side of gender.
As a child protection worker, psychologist Ariane Beeston had taken babies away from their mothers. Then she had a baby, experiencing bouts of mental illness. Her memoir of this time is compelling.
This fever-dream Swedish novella demonstrates an incomparable ability to give name to the things we feel but have been unable to find the right words for.
In Splinters, Leslie Jamison confronts the expectations placed on women, especially mothers – including the dangers of making art, and being more successful at it than the man in their life.
Holly High, Ed Annand and baby Gadsby.
Photo: Sheryl Sidery
A parenting expert shares tips on how to celebrate moms and promote family well-being.
The U.S. fertility rate is the lowest it’s been since the government started tracking it in the 1930s.
Mohssen Assanimoghaddam/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Low birth rates aren’t just a potential economic crisis. They can tell a deeply personal story about women failing to reach their goals for motherhood.
Mothers are smudged out and poorly cloaked beneath drapes in these 19th century portraits. But these photos are not so much relics of shoddy photography than an ode to childhood.
Helena Bonham Carter in the film Suffragette.
Steffan Hill/Focus Features/AAP
A novel about first-wave feminists cleverly critiques the movement’s privilege. The first fiction from Nakkiah Lui’s imprint highlights uncomfortable truths. And a debut about teen girls is ‘too naive’.
With the pressure of China’s “three-child policy”, many women are motivated to achieve work-life harmony by merging the identities of motherhood and business ownership.
The birth of children results in large earnings losses that are not equally distributed within heterosexual couples.
(Shutterstock)
New research shows that women’s earnings are negatively impacted by having children, while men’s aren’t. The effects can be long-lasting and contribute to the gender pay gap.
Surrogacy can exploit women, but others may choose to be involved for altruistic reasons. A scholar points out that surrogacy’s ethical value is dependent upon the people and systems who use it.
I have wondered if women are really free to make truly autonomous reproductive decisions.
Artificial womb technology could eventually make it possible to grow a foetus from conception to “birth” wholly outside the human body.
Marko Aliaksandr/ Shutterstock
Anna Goldsworthy’s lively writing deftly captures the joy and wilful naivety of a first pregnancy, followed by the overwhelming love and sleep-deprivation-induced anxiety of the first months.
Almost half the study’s respondents found breastfeeding to be a positive experience most or all of the time.
Lolostock/Shutterstock