Feminist ideology on fertility is a fail. By Belle de Jour.
For reference, I’m a Gen Z girl living in a large coastal city in the United States. Most of the other girls my age that I know are not even in committed relationships, let alone married with a kid like me. A majority of them seem to languish in the depths of the dreaded ‘situationship’.
The wounds seem to be self-inflicted, though. Only about 45% of women in the USA aged 18 to 34 say that they want children, whereas just less than two-thirds of men that age do. Around 30% of Gen Z women specifically don’t want kids. Of the Gen Z girls that I know, those who do say they want kids are really vague about when they want that to happen. …
f you live on a farm, kids are cheap labor, so you have as many of them as you can. When a nation industrializes, people move to cities and live in apartments and work in factories. Children become expensive luxuries, so people naturally have fewer of them.
I think that he is broadly correct, but the picture is a bit more nuanced. There are certainly cultural factors at play. …
Dr. Henderson writes about “Girlboss Gatekeeping“, where encouraging other women to forgo having children and focus on their careers may be an evolutionary strategy to keep the number of children low so that there are more resources available for one’s own.
I can relate to this since when I was in college, everyone talked about what they wanted their careers to be, but it seemed almost verboten to mention starting a family. … Women who identify as conservative are more likely to desire or have children. …
I’ve come to realize that so many of the things that we were told or that I used to believe ended up being untrue. That people are born as a “blank slate”. That men and women are the same. That human beings, and by extension, societies are perfectible. That variation in outcomes must be the result of oppression.
If you had talked to me in college, I would have said that I had no interest in marriage or a family. I was all about my career. Things change, though. I met a guy, fell in love, got married, and soon enough, had a baby. I thought that dropping out of my PhD program would have felt more traumatic, but I actually didn’t stress about it all that much. I guess technically I’m on sabbatical, and I could go back eventually, but I probably won’t. I’ve come to realize that lack of ambition doesn’t make me a bad person. I simply have different priorities now. The fact that I’ll never have the word “doctor” in front of my name doesn’t sting that much. …
A brief return to the “girlboss gatekeeping” — I’m really glad my boss is a man. Indeed, I work in STEM, and the majority of people that I work with and in my field in general are men. Of course, things tend to get much shittier when women take them over.
A final thought on fertility has to do with the fact that for a significant portion of young women, it would be embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom. Choosing motherhood many times means not choosing status. At least not in the way that current society defines it. If you’re wealthy and don’t have to work, then having lots of kids can be a flex, but most people aren’t in that situation. I don’t think that having working parents is bad for kids. In addition to my father working full time, my mother worked a full-time job throughout most of my childhood. It’s probably more important that kids grow up in an intact family with both a mother and a father in the household.