Bryony Gordon
Women shouldn’t apologise for not having children
Despite having our second female leader, we’ve still not come that far since the first
Of all the things I could have predicted about this week, it would most certainly not have been that the Prime Minister’s conference speech would end up being as gripping as the finale of Doctor Foster. But given how things have turned out, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Theresa May was currently plotting some heinous act of revenge on the many men who have this week wronged her. Boris, Grant Shapps, that prankster… who could blame our Prime Minister if she had briefly fantasised about mowing the lot of them down with her ministerial car?
Party political conferences hold about as much appeal as gouging out my eyes with a rusty spoon. I’ve been to both Labour and Conservative party conferences, and let me tell you: there’s really no difference – by the end of the night both resemble a Star Wars cantina scene. Mrs May’s enemies may be saying that her speech was a disaster, but at least with her coughing, spluttering and poor choice of sign makers, she managed to engage those of us who really couldn’t give a rat’s bottom about petty party squabbling (because we’re too busy discussing Doctor Foster). At least she got us to sit up and listen. And as I listened, my big takeaway was not that a woman in her sixties has a cough in October… it was that our Prime Minister felt, or rather her people felt, that she had to qualify the fact she doesn’t have children.
Forget the preening prankster with the P45 and the fact that nobody had bothered to get the woman some Strepsils before she took to the podium. What bothered me most was that she still felt she had to apologise for her fertility. “It has always been a great sadness for me and Philip that we were never blessed with children,” she said, making me briefly wonder if I hadn’t flicked over to This Morning. “It seems some things in life are just never meant to be. But I believe in the dream that life should be better for the next generation as much as any mother.”
What was all this about? Didn’t we chuck this out when Andrea Leadsom got her marching orders last year for suggesting that being a mother would make her a better leader? Honestly, in the year 2017, why is a politician having to let the country know that a lack of offspring doesn’t also mean a lack of feelings? Had one of her team
– as well as watching too much of the West Wing – been listening to too much Whitney Houston? Had our Prime Minister not had a cough, she might have broken out into a faultless rendition of The Greatest Love of All… “I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.” Urggh, stop it Theresa! It’s bad enough having to see pictures of lashed-up MPS at late-night conference karaoke without the PM getting carried away too.
I suppose what this shows us is that despite having our second female leader, we’ve still not come that far since we had the first. Women are still, primarily, thought of as child-bearers. It is a rare woman in her thirties or forties, who is not asked whether she is going to have children (or, if she has one, if she is going to have more). A dear friend of mine who happens to be childfree by choice told me that her answer to anyone enquiring about her womb is: “children are lovely, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.” Her husband has never been asked about not being a father. “It just wouldn’t occur to anyone to be so rude,” she says.
Even when a woman is running the show, she has to spend time apologising for not having conceived almost four decades ago. Then again, in politics, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t – Mrs Thatcher seemed to spend a lot of time explaining her childcare arrangements, which is essentially apologising for having children. As Sophy Ridge writes in her excellent new book The Women Who Shaped Politics, while Thatcher was endlessly questioned about how she managed a family and a career, the same was not asked of her male equivalents who were fathers.
Ridge’s book makes for depressing reading, if only because so little seems to have changed. Female MPS are still mistaken for secretaries and told to get out of lifts reserved for members; as recently as 2015, a (male) journalist thought it appropriate to ask Liz Kendall how much she weighed. We may have a female Prime Minister, but make no mistake: as long as she has to justify the state of her ovaries, this country is still run by men.