It’s no surprise women are not having children
Child-rearing is kind of dull for people with educations
‘My grandmother gave birth to four children, my mother two, and I refuse to have any,” a female friend guffawed at a party the other day. “I see it as a 70-year learning curve: the ascent of woman via our species’ decline.” “My own mother had five,” I competed. “Hence my being on the pill for 25 years.”
British women are spawning fewer offspring than at any other time in recorded history, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released on Friday. Those who turned 45 last year boast an average of 1.90 children, down from 2.21 for their mothers’ generation. Of those – like me – who were born in 1971, 18per cent – like me – have no progeny at all, almost double the 11 per cent who remained child-free among our mothers’ peer group.
As Emily Knipe, of the ONS, noted: childlessness is “one of the main drivers” of falling family sizes; her colleague Richard Miles added that “education” and “work” were also “contributing factors”.
Really? D’ya think? In the wake of the ONS revelations, a colleague – and father of four blithely untrammelled by the experience – asked me why women no longer want to “invest in our collective future?” “Oh, I don’t know,” I retorted, “maybe because child-rearing is kind of dull for people with educations, and mothers are still expected to bear the brunt on their tod.” “How sad,” he sighed, before going home to kiss freshly-bathed heads and consume a supper prepared by a woman with a PHD.
Historian Lucy Worsley controversially expressed her reluctance to breed as having been “educated out of the natural reproductive function”. I prefer to fall back on the words of Brooke Magnanti, author of The Sex Myth and the artist formerly known as Belle de Jour, who once told me: “Fundamentally… I don’t feel that having a family is the best thing I have to offer.” As a euphemism for: “Yes, I am easily bored, and nothing is coming out of this vagina,” it carries me through dinner parties.
For, at 46, I assume that I can finally declare, with authority, that I won’t be reproducing. In theory, physically I still can, however, the likelihood by means of some deus ex machina appears unlikely; not least as I continue to approach sex brandishing the pill, condoms, and every other precaution short of a wetsuit.
As the ONS discovered, I am by no means alone: among those of my age group with degrees, the figure for female childlessness rises to 43per cent. The only thing that strikes me as remotely surprising about all this is that anyone is remotely surprised.
In practice – if not in polite PC theory – parenting is still regarded as women’s work. Men are commended for being “hands-on”, for sporting baby iconography on their desks and making the odd parents’ evening. Women, in contrast, remain routinely resented for such behaviour, while still having to do the lion’s share. “Having it all” turned out to be doing it all, dressed up in fancier pants.
I recently sat on a panel at which I was asked by a 22-year-old audience member where all the older women were in her office. “I can tell you,” I told her, in my capacity as Gen X Ancient Mariner, “because these are women of my cohort. They’re at home playing with bricks, bored out of their skulls.” Even now, mothers routinely insist that I really must “do it,” while deploying metaphors of war, terrorism, hostage-taking, madness, Satanic possession, and global catastrophe to describe their relationship with their charges. And that’s on a good day, pre-mumsnet wine o’clock.
The truth is, I was never completely phobic about producing offspring, merely not that bothered – and not being that bothered doesn’t strike me as a reason to do something so momentous; not least for the human dragged into being. Being the oldest of five taught me that motherhood is hard, relentless, largely thankless – and that the upsides frequently fail to outweigh the down. To take this course of action you have to want it, and I never did.
Which is why the latest tranche of ONS statistics, released yesterday, is so heartening: namely, that the number of single mothers over 45 has doubled in a decade, rising from 81 in 2006 to 193 last year. A growing number of new mothers in their late 30s are also single, with 4,146 35- to 39-year-olds registering a birth in their sole name, compared to 3,765 in 2006.
I know many such children, and they are bright, beautiful, and hotly and heavily loved. Their mothers really, really want them: one friend endured nine rounds of IVF, others sacrificing everything they own to procure donor eggs and sperm. They are old enough to be better at being people, parenting included. Doing it on their own is difficult, but less difficult than having the promise of male help without delivery. These women are very much bothered, very much making an active decision.
For that’s surely the point of all this? Women are finally exerting a choice, as men have traditionally been able to. Half a century on from the contraceptive pill taking hold, this is the natural consequence of women voting with their feet/other regions. Biology is no longer destiny, it’s a lifestyle option. Motherhood-wise, we’re either not doing it; or not doing it much; or not doing it much, but alone and with conviction. And, if men want to change this, then they’re going to have to step up and get involved – as involved as women are.