Desiring No Children

This is a really interesting and enlightening article written by the daughter of Alice Walker who wrote the book "The Color Purple."

I find it not only heartbreaking, but amazing and surprising that Alice Walker did indeed seem to live up to her beliefs and standards...going so far as to write a poem comparing having her daughter to other catastrophic events in other great writer's lives.

Why did she even have a child if she felt that way? No wonder she and her husband ended up divorced. He remarried a woman whom Walker's daughter describes as far more maternal and loving than her own mother. I suppose living with a woman who completely embraced the "freedom" of feminism truly was impossible for her father to do. In fact, I'd be surprised if any man could live all his days with a woman who ran down the dark and spiralled path of feminism.

My father wrote this poem in his early years of teaching (some 25 years ago now) when one of his students one day announced she never wanted to have kids. His meditation on what that meant for her gave birth to this:

Of Her Who Desired No Children