The Daily Telegraph - Features
Feminism says women can have it all, but no one can outwit Mother Nature
Is feminism really responsible for creating a generation of unhappy, childless, middle-aged women? Last week, Petronella Wyatt wrote a brave, searing piece in these pages in which she attributed her own bleak state to the instruction she received as a clever girl to put career before marriage.
So truthfully and movingly did Petronella make the case that it may seem tactless to attempt a response. But women and work, the riddle of trying to combine career with motherhood, are my subject. And I think young women deserve the honest conversation that older feminists too often avoid.
It’s hard to pick up a magazine these days without coming across a self-congratulatory article by a writer extolling her positive decision not to have a family. (Bijoux small businesses in fashion or wellness, designer chickens and cream sofas untouched by sticky small paws). Such pieces often read like lifestyle post-rationalisations for failing to get around to falling pregnant in the narrow window of female fertility.
“Maybe I didn’t want a baby that much if I didn’t start trying till it was too late?” muses the journalist.
More likely, I think, she assumed that the mating game of Musical Chairs would go on forever and it wouldn’t be her who would be left in her early 40s without a seat (or a man) when the music stopped.
It takes courage to admit to loneliness and despair at the age of 54, as Petronella does. Regret is not a fashionable emotion. Nowadays, you are supposed to “own” your choices rather than disown them as she does with unsparing candour. She sees her predicament through the eyes of a student lodger who can’t imagine not being married with a child by the age of 30, who wants to “live like a woman”.
What does living “like a woman” mean any more? Historically, having a baby – or three – by the time you entered your fourth decade was the fate of every female mammal who hadn’t suffered the indignity of becoming an “old maid”. It always astonishes me that Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, painted as a pitiful figure because she turned down her chance at love, is only in her late 20s when the book begins. By contrast, a pregnant colleague told me she was treated as an amusing curiosity at her NCT class because she was a mere 28 years old. Having a baby at a time when your body is more likely to co-operate in that endeavour is now considered freakish, particularly among the educated middle classes. Something has definitely gone wrong when the female sex is desperately trying to outwit Mother Nature by freezing her eggs or counting on the cruel lottery of IVF.
But is feminism to blame? Certainly, women of my generation were told we could “have it all” while somehow avoiding all that tedious domestic stuff our mothers took care of. (“Life is too short to stuff a mushroom,” insisted Superwoman author Shirley Conran). In practice, having it all meant we were allowed to do our fathers’ jobs while retaining our mothers’ responsibilities. The result was a brutal double-shift in which one hand clung onto the career ladder while the other hand searched for a child’s missing trainer or syringed Calpol into a coughing, feverish small person.
With so many women enjoying “careers” instead of jobs for pin money, there was a vast, sudden change in the reproductive habits of millennia. Ambitious women postponed childbirth for as long as possible (the most ambitious and figure-conscious now outsource pregnancy to surrogates so poorer women can get the stretchmarks and the saggy pelvic floor). One study showed that 40 per cent of female graduates were still childless by the age of 35, an increase of 20 per cent in just over a decade. Like Petronella Wyatt, a third of female graduates will never have children at all.
My mother was 24 when she had me – there was only a brief period of time for herself between school and boiling Terry nappies. I waited until I was 36 to have my first – almost two decades of love affairs and selfishness – and I only did it because the alarm on my biological clock was clanging louder than Westminster Abbey on Coronation Day.
Feminism brought us unimaginable opportunities, equal (ish) pay and saw talented women soar to the top of maledominated professions. (Petronella Wyatt, for instance, would never have become the deputy editor of The Spectator without it.) It also shaped a generation of men who became excellent hands-on parents and made their wives’ working lives possible. But what feminism could never do was answer Prof Higgins’s vexed question: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
A woman could try, of course.
And, boy, did we try. But there were losses as well as gains which rather spoils that upbeat feminist story there is so much pressure to tell. If a young Petronella Wyatt asked for my advice now, what would I say?
1. The childless women I know, now in their 50s and 60s, usually spent their 30s in a passionate affair with an unsuitable (married or not looking for commitment) man. Get out of that relationship and find a kind man who is willing to be the father of your children. This is called the Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Bastard strategy.
2. Children are the sweetness in life. There’s nothing like the smell of a baby’s head or feeling a small body snuggling marsupially in your arms. But it’s a bloody hard job, up all hours, unpaid and with no prospect of promotion. If you think you’re not cut out for it, maybe you’re not. That said, even women who don’t like babies invariably love their own.
3. Be suspicious of all that “My daughter is my best friend” stuff. Lots of people have tricky kids and worry is your constant companion from the day they are born.
4. Shirley Conran was wrong. Life is not too short to stuff a mushroom. Sometimes, stuffing a mushroom, making your own bread or planting up pots on the patio affords pleasure greater than any professional success.
5. One mistake feminism made was to think that all women, given the chance, would be “career women”. Many are perfectly content to look after their young children. Our society is so screwed up, it has downgraded the very thing that guarantees the survival of our species. The birth rate is declining scarily fast.
Having a baby at a time when your body is more likely to co-operate is now considered freakish
6. Jane Austen neither married nor had children. For that we should be eternally grateful. If she had, some of the greatest novels in English would not exist. There are more ways than one to give birth.