My mother says that, with feminism, each generation has to reinvent the wheel. I see this as her generous way of saying that, essentially, there are no new struggles, just as they say that there are really only seven kinds of plot in fiction. Finding your feminism can make you temporarily evangelical; it certainly did me, in the aftermath of an assault. The world burned with injustice that I wanted to correct, and though my mother knew these injustices well, just as many women had before her, she gave me the space to draw my own conclusions, to find my own model of social justice. She passed on the baton, but then she let me run with it.
The fourth wave of feminism has been eventful, and as a political ideology it has become mainstream like never before. As would be expected in a world governed by corporate interests, its commodification has caused many of us to feel conflicted. It This latest incarnation of feminism, led by young women who use technology to mobilise around the issue of female equality, began when I was a student and I am now in my early 30s. It maybe came too late for many of my peers, who had babies as teenagers or in their very early 20s; perhaps because of the class demographic that tends to have the education and resources to invest its time in doing feminism, this generation is only now really beginning to concern itself with the prospect of motherhood.
There’s a criticism I’ve seen levelled at younger women sometimes, particularly those who speak or write about pregnancy: “She thinks she’s the first woman in history to have a baby.” The claim irritates me because it stifles creativity and openness: of course a woman knows she is not the first to have a baby, but observing my friends has taught me that pregnancy is a process of discovery. It can make the scales fall from your eyes about all kind of things – the division of domestic labour, patriarchy, work, art and sleep. Sleep is a big one. And love. Eva Wiseman has written beautifully of a love “that is two centimetres from grief”.
People seem interested in motherhood again. Publishers, especially. As more and more millennial women start to weigh up the prospect of having children, the books follow. And while it is fair to say that there are no new struggles, it is also fair to say that, for this generation of women, things are different. We have environmental catastrophe to consider, of a much more imminent nature than our mothers had to face; a much greater degree of financial instability, compounded by yet another recession; a global pandemic. On the plus side, we also have more freedom to articulate why we might choose to remain child-free.
Two novels, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (up for this year’s Booker prize) and Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh, examine some of these questions, both in subtle, intelligent ways. Burnt Sugar looks at the relationship between a young Indian woman and her mother whose faculties are declining. It’s about what it means to have a bad mother, or rather, a mother who didn’t have the option not to be a mother, and who, had she not been compelled, maybe should not have become one. While confronting that fact, the protagonist must also contemplate the ambivalence she feels about her own role as a new mother: “I have become an assembly line,” Doshi writes. “Each part is incidental, only important if it can do its job. Milk drips when my daughter cries, staining my clothes. In my mirror, I see my stomach, dark and shrivelled as a date.” And: “I’ve never been a stickler for manners, but this baby doesn’t stand on ceremony. She’s a rude little bitch if ever I met one.”
There is something thrilling about Doshi’s visceral honesty. On the other side of the coin, Mackintosh explores longing. Blue Ticket takes place in a world where a lottery decides whether or not a woman is to give birth. Those who are not are fitted with IUDs, and Mackintosh’s protagonist rips hers out and goes on the run. Lots of women I know have felt a deep longing to have a child but also a profound fear of the instability in which they find themselves. Blue Ticket does not take place in our world, but it asks questions that are relevant to it: what does it mean to feel that desperate desire to have a child in a society that is doing its best to make it impossible?
That biological, hormonal, emotional desire to reproduce is not a sensation I’ve seen explored much by my generation, at least not yet. There’s a sense that it is somehow unfashionable to admit to these “desires so alien I could only assume they had been inside me for a long time, like splinters or shrapnel waiting to be pushed to the surface”, as Mackintosh writes. “Desires I had never encountered. Like: holding a soft thing with large eyes, or humming a song without words. In the supermarket I cradled a hemp bag of sugar, six pounds in weight, then put it back immediately.”
I am grateful for this new generation of books exploring “that whole wild fucking queendom”, as the poet Liz Berry has it, for a new generation. No doubt there will be more to follow. The best of them, like their forebears, will explore difficult emotions, and will say unsaid things.
When my mother had me, she said she experienced a kind of euphoria that was rooted in the knowledge that millions upon millions of women had in some way shared the experience that she had just had, stretching back for thousands of years through history. Childbirth as communion. I’m eager to hear what my own generation of women writers makes of it all, whether they enter into motherhood, or not.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
