Judith Wright was an Australian poet and critic known for writing as well as her campaigns for peace, environmental conservation, and Aboriginal land rights. In "Woman to Man," published in the 1949 collection of the same name, a woman ponders the creation of life from the intimate sexual act until the labor of birth. The collection as a whole deals with land, heritage, and the cyclic heralding of new generations.
In "Woman to Man," a woman meditates on the act of creating life. Starting with the outcome of a sexual act, the woman imagines the future that is yet to come: an outline of a child who does not exist yet. Addressing her partner, the woman describes the formation of life as something intricate and incredible. Using vivid language and regular formal features, "Woman to Man" generates a rhythm that leads to the labor of birth in the final stanza.
Woman to Man was well-received, winning the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1949. A reviewer in The Age, a Melbourne publication, wrote that the collection "contains the beautiful, evocative poems which...place the idea of the creation of a child back on the plane of understanding that brought the Madonna image into being, and also such hauntingly lovely things as Dream." "Woman to Man" remains one of Wright's best-known poems.
