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Jessica Grose

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

“Parenthood and the care of children is now a highly self-conscious affair in which the maintenance of a high standard is insisted upon, and the pitfalls are forever being exposed,” wrote the sociologist Hannah Gavron. The situation for parents, Gavron explained, is made more difficult because “The family today is an isolated unit unable and unwilling to seek assistance in its distress from wider circles of kin (as it has always done in the past).”

As a result, many of the 96 working and middle-class mothers Gavron surveyed for her book, “The Captive Wife,” felt like failures. “I felt that I was a failure as a person, too,” said one middle-class English mother about her early days raising children, and that the sense of flailing made her “feel lonely and displaced.”

This book was not written recently. Gavron, a young mother herself, died by suicide in 1965. I had never heard of her before reading a biography of Sylvia Plath, “Red Comet,” which made comparisons between the lives of the two women. Gavron was married to a successful publisher, and even after the two were estranged, she was comfortable enough to afford a nanny to watch her children while she taught and finished her book. Both Plath and Gavron died by the same brutal method: gassing themselves in ovens. Plath died just a few years........

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