Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Childless By Whose Choice

No man can become sexually aroused through an act of will. Augustine noted it a very long time ago. It ought to be well enough understood by now.

At some point men figured out that women had the power to provoke sexual arousal. Relations between the sexes have never been the same.

Similarly, no woman can become pregnant through an act of will. A woman may choose when and where to have a child, but her options, as many women have discovered, are constricted by biology.

Women have always exercised some level of free choice in the matter of having children, but the ultimate decision is out of their control. For that reason many people have considered conception or lack of same to be an expression of God’s will.

Nature always has a say in when, where and how a woman conceived.

Some women, caught up in the fervor of second wave feminism, seemed to believe that they had overcome the restrictions imposed by human biology.  Liberated from nature they could be free to choose when to have children.

They saw reproductive endocrinology as a godsend that would help them overcome natural law. In some cases, it has. In many other cases it has not.

The result, a significant number of women today end their childbearing years childless. In some cases they have never wanted to have children. In other cases they have been happy to have been liberated from the burden of childrearing and motherhood.

The feminist argument for reproductive freedom, for freedom to choose tells women that they should not have children until they are fully established in their careers. It does not tell them that delay creates a risk of not having children at all.

As contemporary feminists have redefined the issue, conception is no longer a blessing. It is a curse imposed by the culture to prevent women from being all that they can be, from fulfilling their human potential and from attaining the highest level of career success.

Childless by choice is not a new thing. In prior days women who did not want to be housewives could choose the life of a celibate nun or the life of a courtesan.

For both nun and courtesan pregnancy is bad news. That does not mean that it has never happened, but it was not a matter of choice. We would note that courtesans led the world in the practice of birth control.

Today’s feminist is unlikely either to want to become a nun or a courtesan. Both roles require far too much concern for other people.

Nuns do not have children, but their lives are devoted to caring for others. Courtesans have children more often than nuns do, but their role is defined by their ability to please a man.

An independent, autonomous feminist is only in it for herself. She seeks to realize her own desires, regardless of what anyone thinks. She might even take the disapproval of others as a sign that she is fully attuned with her desire.

Today’s young women are more likely to be stigmatized for wanting to be wives and mothers than for sacrificing their childbearing potential to fulfill themselves in their careers.

Some feminists believe that the fault lies with a patriarchal society that forces women, for no discernible reason, to mother their children. They tend to see motherhood, whatever its biological basis, as a socially constructed conspiracy to oppress women.

They have bemoaned the pressure that women feel to have children and chalk it up to patriarch oppression rather than, say, a biological imperative.

Obviously, the future of your genes, your community and the species depends on whether or not you decide to procreate. It’s a choice, if you will, but you are not the only one affected by your choice.

One feels compelled to point out that, for most young women, the individuals who pressure them the most about having children are… their MOTHERS.

It feels like a Darwinian wish to see one’s genes survive.

On this score, feminism has succeeded. Over the past four decades we have seen a massive increase in the number of women who reach their mid-forties childless.

Kate Bolick explains it in a review of a new anthology, Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed, edited  by Meghan Daum:

Today 19 percent of American women reach their mid-40s without ever having a child — a figure that has nearly doubled in four decades, a truly staggering statistic. The sheer velocity of its emergence suggests a unity of intent, as if an army of Gen Xers came of age razing day care centers and burning diapers, and continues to march steadily into the future, attracting new recruits by the minute.

She continues:

A 2012 Centers for Disease Control report shows that among women in the 40-44 age bracket — the final reckoning, according to such surveys — 22 percent were “childless by choice,” compared with 35 percent who felt they didn’t have any say in the matter. Far from being a unified front, this growing demographic tilts toward women who had a wish about how their lives would turn out that didn’t come true.

Feminism persuaded women that becoming wives and mothers would force them to sacrifice their humanity. The concept is so pervasive that Bolick throws it in without thinking about how strange it is:

Our societal conviction that women are mothers foremost, people second, is so pervasive that the possibility of debunking it can seem its own kind of wish.

We should mention that ours is not the only society that assigns to women the role of mother. All societies do so. Some primitive societies have defined the division of labor differently, but, ask yourself: do you really want to live in a primitive society?

In her review Bolick does not mention feminism. She seems not to want to give feminism the credit or the blame for her own childlessness.

A writer who was an early second wave feminist rectifies and clarifies the situation.

Vivian Gornick analyzes the concept of childless by choice:

FORTY YEARS AGO, when the second wave of the American feminist movement was young, and its signature phrase, “the personal is political,” was electrifying, many of the movement’s radicals (this reviewer among them) went to war with the age-old conviction that marriage and motherhood were the deepest necessities of every woman’s life. If we looked honestly at what many of us really wanted, as we were doing in the 1970s and ’80s, it was not marriage and motherhood at all; it was rather the freedom to discover for ourselves the lives we might actually want to pursue.

Second wave feminism persuaded women that they did not want marriage and motherhood. What women really, really wanted was a freedom to self-actualize as individuals who can make their own rules.

Gornick continues:

As we moved inexorably toward the moment when we were bound to see that we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater, nearly every one of us became a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which we were to find ourselves time and again.

In this cultural maelstrom the freedom to choose was transformed. It was no longer the freedom to choose when to have children. It was the freedom to choose between motherhood and career. The women who embrace or regret that decision have been speaking out about it. Naturally, they resent men for not having to make the choice:

Essentially, and collectively, they are all saying: “I have found that I must make a choice between having children and working full out and, given my particular temperament, not only have I chosen the latter, I have never regretted it.”…

Men have almost never had to entertain the question of whether to work or have children. In fact, for them a definition of self never even included having to face squarely whether or not they wanted children. For women, obviously, it has been otherwise. It has always been assumed that every woman not only wanted children but would make any sacrifice necessary to have them.

Of course, this also demonstrates that a man can only have a successful career if he devotes himself to it. He cannot do so if he is sharing household chores or being a stay-at-home parent.

Q. E. D.

4 comments:

Soviet of Washington said...

I believe Oswald Spengler saw this coming:

The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free" - free, that is, as intellegences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself". The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself" - they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.

- The Decline of the West (1918) pg 105

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Thanks for the reference. As far as I can tell, the proposal dates to Friedrich Engels' book, The Origin of the Family... published in the 1880s.

Ares Olympus said...

re: The feminist argument for reproductive freedom, for freedom to choose tells women that they should not have children until they are fully established in their careers. It does not tell them that delay creates a risk of not having children at all.

I find this argument tiresome, even if there's some truth to it.

Yes, women are like children, and not capable of thinking for themselves, and when women listen to uppity women, they become uppity themselves, and become deluded, if it wasn't for the benevolent conservative men telling women they don't have a right to aspire to equality, not because of tyrannical men, but mere biology afterall. We're on your side, just looking out for your best interest you know.

And more:
re: Some feminists believe that the fault lies with a patriarchal society that forces women, for no discernible reason, to mother their children. They tend to see motherhood, whatever its biological basis, as a socially constructed conspiracy to oppress women.

Again these uppity second wave feminists can't be trusted to tell the truth, to acknowledge honest risks of various "life choices".

And
Vivian Gornick: Second wave feminism persuaded women that they did not want marriage and motherhood. What women really, really wanted was a freedom to self-actualize as individuals who can make their own rules.

Is this really true, or is it a stawman argument again? Is it possible to consider SOME women might want to aspire first to family, and SOME women might want to aspire first to career, and they could get along with their divergent costs and benefits?

It would seem to me that feminism if it had any purpose at all is that it enabled women to have MORE THAN ONE model for their self-esteem - wife and mother.

But besides bashing feminism and family planning, there are certainly many interesting questions here to consider. The first and primary one is what makes for a meaningful life for people who never "choose" to have children, men or women.

One difficult problem for young women can be mothers, who eventually want to be grandmothers, and I've seen this, and I've also seen two sisters, where as soon as one got married and had a child, the pressure went off and later the other one stayed unmarried and felt a calling to go into the ministry.

So that make me think about the problems of "single children", maybe especially daughters, if they feel pressured by their parents to follow a certain life path.

I don't know what fraction of women would, knowing there are plenty of children in the world, decide willingly to not have their own, but it looks like a higher fraction than you might guess. So if feminism gives these women a sense of freedom and self-directed purpose, that would seem a good thing.

And it also made me think of China's ill-conceived one-child policy, how much pressure there is for a single child to succeed, and how easy it is to spoil that child, all because of an assumption that all women should have children, and one is better than none.

While I've thought the reverse. Let the women who really want to be mothers have 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 children, and after 2 or 3 she'll probably be pretty good at the job, and each child will have fractionally less pressure to conform to the values of his or her parents, and find their own path.

But again, that means we need serious consideration, for the diverent needs of the childless are to find a place in society that has honor and meaning and all that. So they don't have to have regrets at the end of their lives, even if we all might need some process to grief for the "road not taken", whether the mother who could have been an astronaut, or the astronaut who could have been a mother.

So let the experiment continue, eyes wide open, and personal responsibility intact.

sestamibi said...

And before Kate Bolick there was Ann Taylor Fleming:

http://www.amazon.com/Motherhood-Deferred-A-Womans-Journey/dp/0788165585