In fiction, we have Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group, in which the fragile Priss has a nervous breakdown because her husband insists she breastfeed their newborn. Priss doesn't have enough milk; the perpetually hungry baby never stops crying; Priss never stops feeling like a failure. She comes to dislike her husband. ("Up to now [his politics] had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans... But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby.") She comes to dislike her baby. ("She felt, to her shame, that he was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away.") Obsessive devotion to child-care advice, inadequacy, and shame, the child-induced dissolution of marriage, even Priss's annoying desire to be assured that "higher-income" parents really do have it harder than the earthy, procreative lower classes ("middle- and upper-income families," Senior's article tells us, are most affected by the stresses of child-rearing; one woman longs drippily for the privileged, ankle-beading ease of a Namibian mother): Nearly all the talking points of the article are covered here, in the pages of a novel published 47 years ago.

In fact, one imagines that Senior—full of maternal euphoria shortly before being pelted by garage parts, and "guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol" afterward—would sympathize with Rich's excruciating ambivalence. And that Lori Leibovitch—the executive editor of parenting site Babble who confesses to some jealousy regarding childless women ("there was a richness and texture to their work lives that was so, so enviable")—would be unsurprised by Rich's confession that "I envy the barren woman who has the luxury of her regrets, but lives a life of privacy and freedom." It would appear that having a child has never been fun. In fact, it would seem to have been non-fun in the same ways for the better part of the last century, at least.

But there is one crucial difference between these mid-century women and Jennifer Senior: Neither Rich, de Beauvoir, nor McCarthy wrote about parenthood per se. They wrote about motherhood. Which makes sense, given that in their era, women were expected to do nearly all of the parenting. Rich, de Beauvoir, and countless other feminists blamed the torturous nature of child-rearing on the uneven distribution of labor; in their view, the discontents of parenting would end with the liberation of women. Rich wrote of a "new fatherhood," including "redefinitions of fatherhood which would require a more active, continuous presence with the child." De Beauvoir advocated for giving women more purpose in life: Get them out of the house, give them something to live for apart from motherhood, and they wouldn't fixate on their children quite so much or find them quite so disappointing. These were persuasive arguments—so persuasive, in fact, that the world we live in now is basically the one they wished for.