Motherhood
Anne Bradstreet and her husband had eight children. Now that’s a lot of kids, for sure. Since motherhood was such a big part of her life, Bradstreet wrote a lot about it. That makes sense, right? Just to prove it to you, here are the names of a few other Bradstreet poems: “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “In Reference to Her Children,” “In Memory of my Dear Grand-Child, Elizabeth Bradstreet” (grandchildren are children too!).
Okay so Bradstreet clearly talks a lot about motherhood. This is true even in poems that don’t have some reference to children and motherhood in the title. Thus in “A Letter to her Husband, Absent on Publick Employment,” she mentions the “fruits which through thy heat I bore” (i.e., her children), while in “The Author to Her Book” she compares her relationship to her book as one between mother and child.