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. ( )