ABSTRACT
A writer friend was recently asked to give a talk at a prestigious university about the politics of parenthood. She arrived be faced by a room full of clever young women ‘who had all their plans ready… they had already gured out how they were going to work for so long – then marry – then take so much time o for the rst and subsequent baby … and so on.’ My friend didn’t have the heart to tell them that no life can be sketched out on an envelope in quite that fashion, particularly not when children might be involved. Yet we both knew that these undergraduates were expressing, and placing their faith in, a set of spoken and unspoken rules that govern how successful women are supposed to live, love and work in the United Kingdom in the early twenty-rst century: a set of rules that, given the way society is organised, are bound to let them down, sooner rather than later.
