Sarah Menkedick in TNR:
At her English country manor, the writer Rebecca West had two jersey cows: Primrose and Patience. She delighted in the fresh milk they produced, and in canning vegetables, and in making jam. As Julia Cooke writes in Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, her triple biography of West and her contemporaries Martha Gellhorn and Mickey Hahn, “When an editor at Viking proposed [West] do an entire book on the British Empire, she wrote to him about stewing fruit … cherries simmering with red currants and raspberries, fifteen minutes before adding the sugar.”
This attitude might sound an awful lot like what we’ve come to know as a “tradwife”—a woman celebrating and righteously elevating the quintessentially feminine. A woman beatific in the awareness that life’s deepest meaning lies in kneading dough, gazed upon by the adoring faces of small children, a shaft of warm sunlight in the kitchen.
Yet this was also the woman who wrote with unapologetic frankness, “I hate domesticity.” She sent her son to boarding school when he was 3 years old, and later confessed in a letter to Hahn, a close friend, her “most passionate desire just TO GO AWAY.”
More here.
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