"Why, women are people who have babies," and I had to practically rush her out of the building in a plain wrapper, so great was the outrage. And then I wrote a novel called
Puffball,
which was a kind of gynecological textbook as well as a novel, in which I suggested women were at the mercy of their hormones, their instincts, and became almost as suspect for my views as Beryl Bainbridge was for hers. "Liffey," I wroteshe being my heroine"Liffey, like most other women, never cared to think too much about what was going on inside her body. She regarded the inner, pounding, pulsating Liffey with distaste, seeing it as something formless and messy and uncontrollable, better unacknowledged. She would rather think about and identify with the outer Liffey. Pale and pretty and nice."
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Later, I'm pleased to say, the world caught up with me. Feminists began to take up the Mother Goddess, earth magic; fecundity became an okay word. To be part of nature, nearer to nature, to hear the rhythms of the seasonsand so forth. I remain pretty skeptical about this part of it. I have always seen "nature" as inimical to women; nature kills you. Left to her own instinctive devices, a woman has babies, more and more babies, and is dead by thirty. And as Marie Stopes pointed outin a world without medicine, our way of supervising naturewith every pregnancy your chances of dying from it double.
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And with the having of babies, what's more, comes helplessness. Liffey, in her book, loses her money, through sheer little-girl inattention, and begins to understand that
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 | | She was not, as she had thought, a free spirit, and nor was he: that they were bound together by necessity. That he could come and go as he pleased; love her, leave her as he pleased: hand over as much or as little of his earnings as he pleased; and that domestic power is to do with economics. And that Richard, by virtue of being powerful, being also good, would no doubt look after her and her child, and not insist upon doing so solely upon his terms. But he could and he might: so Liffey had better behave, charm, lure, love and render herself necessary by means of the sexual and caring comforts she provided.
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| | Wash socks, iron shirts. Love.
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And perhaps on the whole it is not so terrible a fate to wash socks, iron shirts, love. Though I do say to women nowwith a clear eye on the statistics of our societyif you have a baby the bottom line is this: you must be prepared to raise it single-handed and support it single-handed. Anything else is an optional extra, a bonus.
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I don't think I could write
Puffball
now. The world moves on. Magic and childbirth are not what they were. My latest novel,
The Cloning of Joanna May,
is about a woman who manages to be not just in two places at once, like Superwoman, but fivethanks to the male technology of re-
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