A Tradwife’s Quiet Discontent

In her 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes that “in motherhood, a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings.” Cusk’s feelings of invisibility and loneliness were met with relentless criticism. “I was accused of child-hating,” Cusk recounts, “of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering, and, most often, of being too intellectual.” Many readers critiqued Cusk’s desire to make those private meanings legible, digestible, even to the extent these struggles were shared.