I'm interested in creativity and gender: specifically why the discussion of women writers seems to get extraordinarily fraught when one throws in the idea of motherhood. I have seen young female writers write long manifestos about why they'll never be mothers because motherhood will interfere with their work; I've seen how mostly women who are granted bona fide "genius" status are childless (Austen, Dickinson, Eliot, Wharton, O'Connor, Welty). It is less severe today, but still exists: our only universally recognized feminine "geniuses" seem to be the non-mothers Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, and, of the six female Nobel laureates in literature in the past twenty years, only one half--Morrison, Lessing, and Gordimer--had children, which can't be representative of either the population of women in toto, or that of women who are writers. Worse, and this may simply be an assumption on my part, but oftentimes women don't get judged as "important" as their male counterparts until they are beyond the age of fertility. What's terrible is that I, a woman and feminist, find myself making the same shameful assumption of "lessening" when I know a female writer's biography. Why does this not happen to men who are fathers? Is there a mind-body prejudice that's happening? Is it entirely a perceived effect, or can there be argued that there's a real lessening in ability--not merely based on societal gender roles--but one based in the body itself? Or in language: see, for instance the ingrained judgment involved between a "seminal" writer and a "prolific" writer. Is there such a thing as "creativity" studies? Where can I go to read more? Thank you.