I know Jen’s pain over that tactless baby scrutiny
WILL women’s lives ever stop being dominated by the question of whether or not they have children? No matter what else we might achieve, not having children will always be scrutinised in a way that simply doesn’t apply to men.
Take the hugely successful Jennifer Aniston, who has given an impassioned interview to America’s Allure magazine addressing this very subject. She describes how for years she had to listen to people suggesting it was selfishness and ambition that prevented her from being a mother and how she regrets not freezing her eggs.
Her comments will resonate with the many women without children who find they are constantly required to defend their position.
I remember only too well that feeling when I reached my late 30s and still had no child. Day after day, I would be on the receiving end of pitying comments and people blithely making remarks such as ‘I expect you’ve just been too busy’.
These remarks would usually come from women who didn’t have full-time careers and from men of all persuasions. They had no idea whether my childlessness was through choice or circumstance.
As a magazine editor with a primarily female staff, the issue of becoming pregnant was as much part of the workplace culture as the skinny latte. The panic of those for whom it wasn’t happening, the misery of the frequent miscarriages, and the collective understanding and support for those many team members undergoing the ups and downs of IVF were the stuff of everyday life for us.
I very much wanted to have a child and fortunately was eventually in a position to become pregnant and have one, but I am well aware of many friends who have remained without children and share Aniston’s sadness.
Now with the egg-freezing option, the whole business has become even more complex. Should you freeze your eggs? When is the correct time to do so? How long do you wait to decide whether to use them? If you have frozen your eggs but don’t have a partner, should you go ahead and use them anyway?
And then there is the little discussed but very real fact that freezing your eggs is by no means a guarantee of pregnancy. Although it’s viewed as empowering, it has actually added new twists and turns to the maze of fertility questions facing women like Aniston – something that will never be understood by childless men, who, if they have not embraced family life, are largely lauded as funloving bachelors.
The women who suffered for art
THE recently opened Making Modernism at the Royal Academy features the work of female artists working in Germany early in the last century. It’s a terrific exhibition highlighting how difficult it was then for women to become professional artists.
They weren’t allowed to attend art school. Of the four primary artists featured in the show, only one, Kathe Kollwitz, had children.
Girls’ network? We were just after boys!
MY ALMA mater, St Paul’s Girls’ School, has been named number three in the top 12 girls’ schools supposedly propping up an elite old girls’ network. Number one is Cheltenham Ladies’ College, which I found fascinating, as in the 1970s we urban day-girls thought of it as a horsey non-adacemic boarding school, but what did we know?
Anyway, the idea of my gang at school being part of some bluestocking recruitment brigade, haunting private members’ clubs, marrying high-flying old boys and handing out jobs for the girls is highly entertaining.
Of course, we were hugely privileged in attending a very academic fee-paying school with high expectations.
But we were more concerned with searching out street corners where we could smoke undetected and attempt to meet boys.
We were more obsessed with this – being from a single-sex school – than in creating contacts for when we went out into the world. Once we left, few of us kept in touch, let alone formed this monstrous regiment of women hell-bent on helping each other get into Who’s Who.
Yogurt’s now a weighty issue
SOMETIMES I wonder just how useless a piece of information can be. Here’s a contender for top prize: a recent US weightgain study found that regular yogurt eaters avoided gaining a pound in weight every four years if they ate one serving a day, compared with non-yogurt eaters. Glad you asked?
Raising a glass on board HMS Wag
THE World Cup WAGs are going to be housed on a luxury cruise liner off Doha. On board, they will be outside the alcohol restrictions of Qatar and able to sample the joys of the billion-pound HMS Wag, including an 11-storey indoor slide. At the same time, the Home Office is considering such housing for migrants arriving on the South Coast of England. There will be no indoor slides in the old cruise ships officials are eyeing up, which will rock around on our challenging winter tides. I know where I’d rather be billeted.
If only BA could nail its in-f light meals
WHEN our pharmacist gave me a flu jab, I noticed he had a very glamorous manicure, with nails and tips painted in different colours. They were gel, he explained, when I asked him about them – he couldn’t wear the longer false nails because of the hygiene demands of his job.
I thought of him on reading that British Airways is letting male crew wear make-up and I’m looking forward to seeing a steward’s jazzy French manicure as he flings me my free bottle of water. But I’d much rather the airline spent its time working out how to give us back a meal on short-haul flights.
The big draw of winter snooping
IF WE close our curtains at night, we might cut £10 off our fuel bill this winter. That seems rather little in exchange for depriving people like me of the great consolation of the dark winter evenings: snooping on other people’s homes. Walking around the neighbourhood at night, I love seeing what people are watching on TV and eating for supper, and, of course, getting a sneak peak of their interior decoration. I’m afraid drawn curtains are no fun at all.