PHILOSOPHERS WITH WOMBS
Rebecca Goldstein

“Although I was married shockingly young, right after my freshman year of college, I postponed having children for some years. I was moved by large and inexplicable ambitions. No woman I knew had the ambitions I did. The woman’s movement was in its toddler phase. In the Orthodox Jewish world in which I’d been raised, we hadn’t heard a peep out of it. So where did I get off thinking that I had important things to learn before I could even contemplate duplicating my genes? I have no idea.

I’d always had the thought of motherhood tucked-away on my list of to-do’s. I loved kids, I more than looked forward to having one or two of my own someday. Yet the pressure to have children right after marriage—so universal in my family’s community as to go without saying—was as unwelcome to me as the thought of never having kids at all. I wanted to be a mother, sure, but I didn’t want to be a mother who wore housedresses.

The housedress is a garment halfway between a bathrobe and a proper dress. It allowed you to change out of your nightclothes without allowing you to leave the house. A woman could respectably answer the door in it, but she couldn’t step out of the door. Sometimes they were called “housecoats,” cruelly pouring on the irony: coats that kept you inside…”

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of five novels, including The Mind-Body Problem, Mazel, and Properties of Light, as well as a book of short stories, Strange Attractors. She is most recently the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, which is part of the Norton Series on Great Scientific Discoveries. The winner of numerous awards for her fiction and scholarship, including two National Jewish Book Awards and two Whiting awards, one for fiction and one for philosophy, in 1995 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.