Julie Phillips (1) (1943–)

I enjoyed The baby on the fire escape: creativity, motherhood, and the mind-body problem, and took my time reading it. What stands out the most for me is that it was essential for the women covered in this book (born in the firt half of the twentieth century) to gain control of their fertility. This is my mother's generation, women of childbearing age when birth control gradually became more available, when “the pill” became an option, and 2nd wave feminism came along. Most of the women featured had unplanned pregnancies, and their choices of how to handle this included abortion, legal or illegal.

Author Julie Phillips struggles to find a space to write about the intersection of motherhood and creative work. She finds that it is a negataive space, where women seem to be able to be one (mother) or the other (creative), but we seem to have no way to talk about women as both. Among the resources she looks at for assistance is Maternal encounters: the ethics of interruption by Lisa Baraitser and an article by Andrew Solomon Transition to motherhood: the acquisition of maternal identity and it's role in in a mother's attachment. Phillips states that women don't combine/resolve their roles as mothers and creatives, but looks to the improvisatioins and compromises women make between their roles as mothers and as creatives as a way to describe how they fulfill both roles. She proposes that mothers develop a relationship to children as mothers, and a relationship to themselves as mothers and as creatives.

The book is primarily descriptive, with the bulk describing various women and their relationship to children/motherhood and how the carry on their lives as creative. There are some chapters that focus on one woman and her life as a creative and a mother, and some that give shorter descriptions of a variety of creative women.

This book doesn't resolve any questions about how a women is both a mother and creative, but I enjoyed the close look at several women and their creative and mothering activities.… (more)

Julie Phillips has done a great service in writing this exhaustive biography of Alice B. Sheldon. Starting from before conception to her untimely suicide in 1987, Phillips explores Sheldon's remarkable life from African explorer, to WAC, to CIA photo analyst, to psychology PhD, to science fiction author (under 3 different names!), to suburban housewife, to feminist. She explores not only Sheldon's life but her stories and novels in detail, elucidating the themes that enlivened her writing.

Minutely researched, there are 50 pages of footnotes, there is also a chronology and two bibliographies. Despite the detail, the text is always lively and engaging, making you want to read just one more chapter before going to bed.

I would recommend this not only to fans of Tiptree and science fiction, but to anyone interested in biographies of remarkable people.

Listening to Silly Thing by Cook and Jones… (more)