Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World

FRUITFUL: A REAL MOTHER IN THE MODERN WORLD
by Anne Roiphe
Houghton Mifflin, $22.95

In her new book, Anne Roiphe, author of Up the Sandbox, Lovingkindness and A Season for Healing: Reflections on the Holocaust, makes a passionate case for feminists to wrest the championship of motherhood away from the Christian Coalition. In this thoughtful account, Roiphe traces her own life as a child of unhappily married parents, a young divorced mother, a stepmother, a mother again, and eventually a grandmother. Feminists, she says, need to go beyond blaming men to ensure a fundamental change in our families, so that fathers care for their children equally with mothers and both reap the glories as well as the agonies of nurturing.