‘Suddenly you've become somebody else’: A study of pregnancy and the creative woman

Abstract

This pilot study is a woman-centered exploration of the effects of pregnancy on a woman artist's work, asking what changes in the work occur during pregnancy or as a result of pregnancy.Conventionally, conditions for artistic creation and for reproduction have been thought to be mutually exclusive, the one requiring self-centeredness and the other, selflessness. The women in this study reported instead that their work was augmented by this change and its product, motherhood. Subject matter and imagery, use of time, attitude about the world and the self were seen in retrospect—if not always at the time—to have benefitted. Having enough time to spend on one project or the other was the most significant conflict reported.Recent theories about and explorations of women's lives and ideas, particularly regarding preparation for motherhood, support what the subjects of this study reported about the multi- layered complexity of the experience. Beauvoir, Rich, Ruddick and Gilligan provide the theoretical background: patriarchal culture's use of biology marks women off as being significantly different from men; while this bodily distinction has been used to limit women, it need not be and may instead be a source of power and growth; maternal thinking has its own previously unacknowledged structures; and women's development, particularly in the valued category of morality, has a different basis than men's, in responsibility rather than in rights.Instead of dividing art from life, motherhood, if not pregnancy specifically, allowed, demanded, or called up a vision of enlargement and unity in social, spiritual, and universal terms, a transcendent philosophy that is not an escape but an embrace.