Can liberal morality work in reality?

I've presented the following quote from Dr Leslie Cannold, an Australian ethicist, a few times now:

Defining our own good, and living our lives in pursuit of it, is at the heart of a moral life.

It captures an aspect of the liberal attitude to morality, namely that objective goods either don't exist or can't be known to us, and that therefore what matters is a freedom to subjectively define our own good, and not to interfere in others doing the same.

But can this liberal approach work in real life? I'd like to present some evidence that it's not likely to be held to consistently, not even by Dr Cannold herself.

Back in 2005 Dr Cannold had a book published called What, no baby? She herself was married with children at the time, but the book was about the large numbers of Western women of my generation who missed out on marriage and children.

An interesting review of the book, by novelist Joanna Murray-Smith, begins:

"What most women want is actually quite simple. What they want is men. And babies." So writes Leslie Cannold, a researcher and ethicist from Melbourne University, whose book explores why so many women desirous of children fail to have them. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says up to 25 per cent of Australian women of reproductive age will fail to have children, some by choice, others by "circumstance".

So what happened to "defining our own good"? Dr Cannold is suggesting here that there is a good that can be known, i.e. that most women will identify marriage and motherhood as significant goods. Already, Dr Cannold's liberal formula is failing.

It gets worse, because Dr Cannold goes on to recognise that once we identify this good, that a purely individual pursuit of it won't work. There are some goods that require a certain larger context to make them available or achievable: many women, for instance, won't be able to pursue marriage if there aren't sufficient numbers of men willing to marry; the opportunity to marry might also be affected by other values or lifestyles embedded in a culture or society.

Cannold's premise is that the declining fertility rates in Western countries are not due to a lack of desire to reproduce, but rather to circumstances unconducive to baby-having.

Cannold takes a left-wing approach to making society more family friendly, arguing that women didn't marry and have children, despite wanting to, because they would have had to give up professional status, income and security in the workplace in order to do so.

I don't believe that's the best answer (nor does Joanna Murray-Smith), but the point remans that Cannold has been forced to recognise that there are some goods we can know as an aspect of human nature, and that we have to think through the impact of culture and social organisation in upholding these goods (that the framework of society has to be so ordered to allow the most significant goods to be widely achievable).

If we were to stick resolutely to 'self-defining our own good and living our life in pursuit of it' then the possible range of goods would have to be narrowed to those things that can be achieved at a purely individual level, and these things tend to be relatively trivial aims.

Back, though, to Cannold recognising that the framework of society matters. Joanna Murray-Smith doesn't think it adequate to blame women not marrying on workplace organisation alone:

Cannold makes many valid points, but I don't know any woman who allows the unfriendly workplace to win over her maternal desire.

Joanna Murray-Smith thinks the negative effects of feminism should be acknowledged:

While Cannold energetically cites many hazardous influences to (fertile) women's desire to procreate, feminism is the only thing that is excused...

"Waiters and watchers are women who saw when they were young - often in their own mothers - that children threatened all they were being taught to value in life: financial independence, romantic relationships, high-powered careers." Was feminism no part of this?

Which brings me to a comment that any younger female readers should pay particular attention to. In 2003 an Australian journalist, Virginia Haussegger, lamented that she had followed the advice of older feminists in single-mindedly pursuing the goals of a career and independence, but that this had left her childless and unfulfilled.

Dr Cannold's response to Virginia Haussegger is this:

"It is true that feminists urged all women to shed their domestic shackles and seek fulfilment and financial independence outside the home. But what is Haussegger? A brainless puppet? A mindless drone?"

It's another dismissive response to women who were negatively affected by feminism. It's a reminder, too, of the way that some feminists simply expect to make "unprincipled exceptions" to their own beliefs and consider other feminists who don't do this as lacking social skills (it's like they're saying "you should follow path x, that's the belief, but don't blame us if it goes belly up, you really ought to think for yourself").

Finally, notice the phrase that Dr Cannold uses "shed their domestic shackles". That makes it sound as if hearth and home is a kind of prison to escape from. In saying this, Dr Cannold is once again establishing a culture or influence that is likely to discourage young women from committing to motherhood until it's too late.

Joanna Murray-Smith notices the same thing:

There seems to be a complete lack of awareness that her own attitudes may be part of the problem. The author's commitment to mothers is always in tandem with their ability and desire to work. And while there's absolutely nothing wrong with advocating a world that serves both interests, what is missing is acknowledgement of women (and men) of all "classes" who want to parent full-time; choice rather patronisingly described as "misplaced social nostalgia about white picket fences".

The war to make sex distinctions not matter rolls on

Laura Wood has found an interesting story about an American woman, Karla Erickson.

Karla Erickson is very keen to push forward with the liberal aim of making sex distinctions not matter. She admits that women have a biological connection to babies that men do not, first by carrying the baby and then by breastfeeding. She even writes about how special this connection is. Nonetheless, she doesn't think it right that mothers should have such a connection because it sets up an "inequality" (by which she means a difference) in the position of men and women in raising children. She therefore concludes that her role should be to "disrupt" the special connection that exists between mothers and babies and that part of the way she can do this is to refuse to breastfeed any future children.

Here she is on the special bond between mother and child:

For birth moms, we have this physically grounded centrality to the baby-making process that carries through birth. If we breastfeed we deepen rather than disrupt that primacy.

In my case, I was pregnant and carried our son to term. As a result, I was deeply connected to that little guy before he ever came into the world. His heartbeat and mine were connected, as were our digestion and sleep patterns.

...My little son already knew my smell, my voice, and my heartbeat. It was perhaps the moment when my gender was the most salient it has ever been in my marriage: these things that my husband literally could not do, I had done.

And then I breastfed.

Every time I got to breast feed him I was holding my son, singing, whispering, touching, and loving on my sweet little boy.

If I had not breastfed I would have missed all those beautiful quiet times with my son...I had never known what it was like to be that close to another human.

Despite all of this, she concludes with the idea that women shouldn't breastfeed, precisely because it attaches a baby more closely to the mother than to the father - and this then produces "social differences" between men and women:

If we really want to address and redress the ongoing inequalities around the work of making life — the work of raising the next generation — then we have to look at breastfeeding. It’s one thing our bodies do that reinforces the social differences between men and women, moms and dads, and boys and girls.

...Over the years, my husband and I will work to unwind this preliminary advantage, but we could have avoided solidifying it if we had decided to use formula, or to pump and bottle feed our son.

So in a pro-breastfeeding era, I say, “I’m out.” Not because I don’t benefit everyday from that “special connection” to my son, but because I do.

...Sometimes we have to do a runaround our bodies to ensure equity. Sometimes we have to do some social engineering to help dislodge our social aspirations from the dictates of our glands and gonads.

Sometimes, to make sure that the next generation has more wiggle room around the gendered division of labor, we have to tuck away those breasts and reach for a bottle instead.

Why do liberals want to make sex distinctions not matter? Because their aim is to maximise individual autonomy. This means that our life is supposed to be self-determining, which then means that predetermined qualities like our sex aren't supposed to matter.

You might think that Karla Erickson is a crazy lady for thinking the way she does, but she is following through with a philosophy that is widely accepted in society. There are young people today being brought up with the idea that parenting should be strictly unisex and that it is unjust for a mother to spend more time with her child than the father does. Karla Erickson is just pushing that unisex ideal a little further along and with a little more honesty. She admits that there are reasons grounded in biology for a close relationship between mother and child, and that this relationship can be a fulfilling one for a woman, but she wants us to overcome this natural connection in the name of a social ideal.

That's what happens when you adopt the wrong principles for deciding social ideals.

The good side to this for traditionalists is that liberalism is advancing so radically along the lines of its principles that it must inevitably leave behind a good many people. Liberals like Karla Erickson want to suppress important aspects of human nature. That puts us in a good position to defend these positive aspects of human nature and to rally those whose strength of instinct puts them in opposition to a liberal culture.

Spicer on motherhood

Kate Spicer has written of her regret at not having children. She points out that there are an increasing number of women in her position:

Where a decade ago, just one in nine women remained childless at 45 and were considered rather peculiar at that, now that figure is closer to one in four. For women with a university education, like me, that figure rises to 43 per cent - an extraordinary figure which signifies a seismic social change.

Why does this trend exist? Kate Spicer suggests that there are women who focus their efforts on career and who just assume that family will happen along the way. She herself also seems to fall into the category of women who leave things to their 30s but who can't break out of the pattern of dating unsuitable men:

from the age of 35 my relationships became even more unsuitable: a married man, a boyish party animal, a confirmed bachelor.

She ends her piece by talking about how special the parent/child relationship is. We live in a culture that is focused on the unrelated other and this blinds us perhaps to the significance of the bonds that are closest to us:

I sometimes lie awake full of dread about the time approaching when my parents are no longer around. To give or to receive unconditional love is a deeply rare thing.

As a rule, flawed as all parties may be, the parent-child bond is the commonest and most reliable form of that love. Sitting writing this at my mother's desk, surrounded by my grandmother and great-grandmother's things, I feel acute awareness that as my life enters its final half, it is with a diminishing circle of love.

Motherhood role no longer a source of value?

I watched an episode of Can of Worms last night. The three female panel members were asked if their child was better off in day care or at home.

I don't think a woman should lightly answer "in day care" because that then undercuts the role and the status of motherhood. It's like saying "my child is better off not being with me, his mother".

But two of the three women did answer "in day care" and the reasons they gave concerned me. They preferred day care for their children not because they had to work for financial reasons and not even for career reasons. They found spending time with their children boring and stressful, they tended to be angry and lazy with their kids and so they found they were happier not being with their children and they thought their children were happier not being with them.

Let me say that I acknowledge that looking after young children can sometimes be tedious (though toddlers can also be funny and cute). It's important for mothers to have time for themselves and it's also true that some toddlers can enjoy the playgroup experience. I'm not an absolutist when it comes to formal care, particularly not for older children.

But I do find it difficult to accept a mother saying about her children "I'm better off not being with them, they're better off not being with me, let someone else have them". That is abandoning a very large portion of a distinct womanhood. In my view, too, it is abandoning what you might call a transcendent social role: a role that connects women to a larger value or good than her own merely personal or immediate wants and desires. In that sense it is denatured: it represents a loss of a finer natural impulse in women.

For men, the transcendent social role is to be a provider, a protector and a mentor. To perform this role well requires a man to accept that he will have to do things that are stressful or tedious, but an awareness of the larger value of the role makes that worthwhile. It is like an institutional commitment, rather than a commitment that relies on a day to day calculation of feelings or wants.

I'm not sure if you can make a society work in the long-run without such institutional commitments, not only to parenthood, but to marriage, to moral codes, to communal loyalty and so on. If we were all just to follow a personal "I'll do whatever makes me feel OK right now" mentality, then much is going to fall in society and not just a commitment to motherhood.

I suppose the reality is that some women have been persuaded that motherhood doesn't have the transcendent value as a social role that it has been believed to have in most societies; but if that's the case, then it's likely the same thing will happen to fatherhood and to the family as an institution.

One final point. The two women I'm referring to are Meshel Laurie and Yumi Stynes. I visited Meshel (pronounced Michelle) Laurie's website and couldn't help but notice how keen she is to dedicate herself to Aborigines:

I’ve been trying for years to get involved in a meaningful way with the Aboriginal community, but to no avail really. I’m either rejected immediately because I’m non-Indigenous, or politely told I’m of no use, but to keep donating money. There must be a time and a place for non-Aboriginal people to connect in a meaningful way with Aboriginal people, mustn’t there?

And this:

This is my passion at the moment – The Gap. It has been for about 3 years actually, but it’s taken this long for me to find someone to help me enter the world of Aboriginal Australia. I know that sounds ridiculous but honestly, it’s so much harder than I ever thought it would be to meet and engage with Aboriginal people. It feels like there’s disinterest and mistrust from the Aboriginal side, and I don’t blame them. You can’t just rock up to an Aboriginal person and tell them you want to get to know them and engage meaningfully with their community.
 

So she finds meaning not in being a mother to her own children who presumably love and need her but in an entirely different ethnic group who aren't even interested in her involvement. It's emblematic of what has gone wrong with the Anglo political class as a whole: they don't see the value in securing a common heritage for their own children, the meaning instead is derived from a commitment to those they consider most "other".

Wendy Tuohy on motherhood

I'll begin with a positive. Wendy Tuohy, a blogger for Melbourne's Herald Sun, has once again defended the experience of motherhood:

...I never realised that being such a family person would be so thrilling. I knew I wanted it, but I didn't realise it would be so exciting. It's exciting because...I am happy enough in my own skin to find the minute-to-minute experience of average family life feels like the home my spirit should be living in.

The women whose blogs I read are, in hundreds of little ways, talking about this very thing; the fact that when they're bathing a child, or brushing one's hair, or reading with one, they're in the act of being the person they always should have been. (16/02/13)
 

That's a fine description of a woman finding her better and truer self in the experience of family life and motherhood.

So what's the negative? Wendy Tuohy does not politically support the traditional family of husband, wife and kids. On her blog, she advocates instead for alternative family arrangements, particularly those in which there's no father around. Her political focus too is on women doing paid work and for men to take on the motherhood role.

I don't think she realises what's at stake and how easy it is for a culture of family life to unravel. If she finds traditional family life so fulfilling, then she ought to be amongst those who are willing to defend it, rather than joining ranks with those who seek to dissolve it.

Feminist scientist: "If some animals can have babies without males, why can't humans?"

Arathi Prasad was born in Trinidad but now lives in London. She has written a book about artificial reproduction called Like a Virgin: The Science of a Sexless Future.

She takes a very positive view of the possibility that one day soon people will be able to have a baby by themselves using artificial wombs.

Why does this appeal to her? There seem to be two reasons. First, although she had a daughter as a single mother in her mid-20s, she is a career woman in her 30s with no man in sight and she would like to have a larger number of children and time is running out. She hopes that with artificial womb and fertilisation technology that women like herself could have children at any time and at any age:

I remember waking up one Saturday morning, on a bed with my daughter in my mum's loft, thinking, well, if some animals can have babies without males, why can't humans? So many women are like me, in their 30s, we do want our careers ... and we're looking for the right partner. And then you get older and it looks less likely to happen.

Why not try to get family formation right instead? Why not bring family formation back to people's mid-20s instead of leaving it so late?

I suspect one reason Arathi Prasad doesn't consider this possibility is that liberalism assumes that each person will pursue their own individual goals and respect or not interfere with other persons pursuing their own individual goals. That's OK when it comes to things like career or hobbies or travel. But it means that we can't make claims on others when it comes to relationships. We can't have expectations of how the opposite sex might behave in order to make timely family formation possible. So if that is ruled out, then the solution has to be something within our own individual control - such as using artificial reproduction techniques.

Here's another possible explanation. There are women who chafe at the idea of forming a family with an "ordinary" man they consider beneath them. They would rather operate solo, outside of marriage, in a less regulated sexual marketplace (which I think is one reason why feminists pushed for the sexual revolution). The advent of artificial wombs and new fertilisation techniques would widen the possibilities for such women to procreate outside of a relationship with a man.

The second reason why Arathi Prasad welcomes the new technology is that it would break down sex distinctions within the family. Motherhood would no longer be associated with womanhood:

If babies are gestated outside the human body, it would immediately disrupt all our notions about who should be the primary parent, and about male and female roles as a whole. "It would get away from that question of mother and father," says Prasad, "and instead become: what is a parent?"

...Someone pointed out to Prasad that men can produce milk too: "They've got mammary glands, and I haven't looked into this, but say that was possible, then you're really asking who is the mother, and who is the father? If you unhinge all of these things from their very basis, you'd have to rethink who does what."

And this:

"Why can’t a man be a mother?" she asks. "Why do we care so much about what it means to be a 'mother' rather than to be a 'parent'?

"By all reasonable estimates, in the near future we will conquer the tyranny of the womb."

She is so keen to collapse the distinction between fatherhood and motherhood that she looks forward to men breastfeeding and she talks about the "tyranny of the womb". The positive connotations that are normally associated with the womb, as the site of fertility and new life, are replaced with the idea of the womb as an agent of tyranny. It's another case of feminists degrading what is distinctly female, rather than celebrating it.

Why is Arathi Prasad so keen to collapse distinct sex roles in the family? It could be that she sees the motherhood role as an inferior one - an impediment to career - and so she wants the "hindrance" of it to be shared equally between men and women. Or perhaps she regards motherhood negatively as a biologically based role which conflicts with the liberal insistence that whatever is self-determined is superior to whatever is predetermined. Therefore, she doesn't like family roles to be associated with the predetermined fact of being biologically male or female.

Wendy Tuohy: the gift of children

An interesting reflection on motherhood by Melbourne writer Wendy Tuohy:

Quite often, you hear a mother say "I can't imagine life without my kids", and I'm well and truly in that camp. I can't imagine not having their blessed, sun-shiny presence, minute to minute, day by day.

As Mother's Day rolls around again and women around the country prepare for their tea and toast in bed, and get ready to beam when they open that candle, purple notebook or hand cream from the school stall, I find myself thinking about how motherhood has changed me - almost down to the DNA.

It has certainly made me a better person. And it has made me want to keep striving to be even "better" for myself, the kids and other people.

I don't want to sound too evangelical about motherhood, the social significance and status of which has been endlessly raked over in the past year or so, but in my experience it is transformational.

That's not to say that you can't transform through other experiences. It's just that in my life the single biggest thing to have shifted my perspective, priorities and self-image has been becoming a mum.

It's a cliche that motherhood makes you selfless - and not quite correct either, because most people see in their children some faint glimmer of themselves.

But I would like to think all that limitless loving has made me more humble. I am certainly a less selfish, more reliable, open, and thankfully even more confident person since the gift of kids.

New model vs old model

Alicia Geddes is an Australian woman who looked forward to motherhood ("The Sum of Us" Melbourne's Child, June 2012):

I dreamt about being home with my baby full-time ... when the two red lines appeared on the pregnancy test we were ecstatic.

But there was a major hitch. Her husband wasn't able to afford the mortgage repayments on his salary. She was going to have to go back to work not just part-time but full-time:

My dreams of full-time motherhood were shattered.

She wasn't alone in her situation:

I asked my mothers' group how they met financial demands. Some were lucky enough to have plenty of money, while others had saved up before becoming pregnant to take a year off work. None said they planned to stay at home full-time after their child turned one. Would they if they were able to financially? Surprisingly, most said yes.

Things didn't go well when the time came to leave her young child for paid work:

As I doted over my newborn son, the end of paid parental leave loomed and the prospect of missing many firsts - first crawl, first step, first word - was heart-rending. How would I be able to concentrate on work when I would be missing my son so much?

Jealousy brewed towards more affluent friends ... I found myself resenting my husband, my parents and anyone else I thought could have saved me from returning to work but didn't. I became teary, angry and anxious. I hated myself for these feelings and stopped enjoying my son.

She did eventually find a solution. She and her husband moved back in with her parents, which allowed them to rent their house and meet their mortgage repayments. She is, for the time being, happy to be able to spend time with her son.

Alicia Geddes's story illustrates the problems with the new liberal model of family life. This new model of family life is based on the following logic:

i) The highest good is to be an independent, autonomous, self-determining individual.

ii) Therefore individuals cannot be defined in terms of family; our predetermined sex must be made not to matter; and women must be made independent of men.

iii) Therefore women are oppressed in the role of motherhood and liberated in the role of careerist. A career gives women an identity outside of family; it makes her financially independent of men; and it is an androgynous role in which our sex doesn't matter.

iv) Therefore women's lives should be organised around careers and not family. If women do stay at home after having children, they should be supported to do so by the state or by their employers rather than by their families; it should be for a limited time only; and as an ultimate aim men should take just as much of the paid leave as women.

The new model assumes that motherhood is at the heart of women's oppression. Paid parental leave was established not so much to allow women to be mothers but to organise women's lives around the workplace rather than the family.

In Australia, for instance, the argument for paid parental leave was set out by Elizabeth Kath back in 2003. She held that the oppression of women:

derives from their traditional reproductive role and that the introduction of paid maternity leave should be introduced as a means to transform this traditional role.

... Feminists have long recognised that the traditional view of women's role in society is an oppressive one. Shulasmith Firestone's declaration that "the heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles" expresses a commonly held view amongst women's liberationist advocates.

Alicia Geddes did not find the motherhood role oppressive but fulfilling. But in the new model of family life, there is no family support for her to stay at home to look after her children. There is only the paid parental leave provided by the employer or state. And this is only intended to allow her to be at home for a limited time before she returns to her "proper" role of careerist.

If women do want to have a real choice to be full-time at home, then they need to turn toward a more traditional model in which there is family support for them to do so. This would mean, amongst other things:

a) Arguing for a living wage for men, i.e. a wage on which a family can be supported.

b) Not being triumphalist about the decline of men in education and employment. After all, the men who are declining in these spheres are no longer going to be able to support a family on their wage.

c) Not supporting an open borders policy, which excludes some men from the professions (as overseas students are able to buy their way into courses and then dominate the professions) and which tends to drive down the wages of unskilled men.

d) Encouraging men to commit to careers, as good for their future families, rather than discouraging them from doing so by suggesting that a high male wage is oppressive to women.

e) Rejecting the idea that an individualistic, self-determining lifestyle is an overriding good; instead, permitting people to accept that we are social creatures and naturally interdependent.

In Australia, too, we need to address the issue of housing costs. Our economy has been geared, in part, to speculative investment in housing. Although there were some winners from this, there's a point beyond which prices can't rise any further and in the meantime many families do find it harder to meet mortgage repayments.

Anna Smajdor: pregnancy is unjust

Dr Anna Smajdor lectures in ethics at the University of East Anglia. She has written a paper ("The moral imperative for ectogenesis") on the issue of fertility. She begins by observing that fertility rates are declining in Western societies due to many women delaying family formation until well into their 30s. She recognises that "the obvious response to this is to persuade women to reproduce earlier." But she cannot endorse this obvious response:

Encouraging women to curb their other interests and aspirations in order to have children at biologically and socially optimal times reemphasizes that it is women who take on the risks, whereas society in general profits from these sacrifices. This, I suggest, is a prima facie injustice.

She believes that pregnancy is unjust, because it might impede women's "other interests and aspirations". So, rather than encouraging women to have children in their 20s, she believes a more just solution would be for scientists to develop "ectogenesis" - childbirth through artificial wombs:

In short, what is required is ectogenesis: the development of artificial wombs that can sustain fetuses to term without the need for women’s bodies. Only by thus remedying the natural or physical injustices involved in the unequal gender roles of reproduction can we alleviate the social injustices that arise from them.

And again:

The fact that women have to gestate and give birth in order to have children, whereas men do not, is a prima facie injustice that should be addressed by the development of ectogenesis.

Having gotten this far, Anna Smajdor then lets loose on pregnancy itself:

Pregnancy is barbaric

There has been a conceptual failure in medical and social and ethical terms to address the pathological nature of gestation and childbirth

Inevitably, part of her argument against pregnancy is the loss of autonomy experienced by women in having to consider the well-being of the foetus:

The final point to make here is the well-known one that, for expectant mothers, the fact of encompassing another life in their bodies often takes a serious toll on their autonomy. Pregnant women are routinely expected to subsume their appetites and desires into those that would be in keeping with the well-being of the fetus. ...Respect for one’s bodily integrity, something that most men may take for granted at least in a medical setting, is by no means assured for women even in societies that pride themselves on concern for ethics and autonomy.

But don't women choose to have children? Yes, concedes Anna Smajdor, but men who choose to have children don't suffer this loss of autonomy and therefore there is inequality and injustice. Anna Smajdor is realistic enough to recognise that her call for ectogenesis won't get much public support right now. But she thinks it is a justice issue that will one day prevail:

People need to be persuaded. Probably the “yuck factor” will be too strong for it to prevail as yet. But just as it was thought absurd that women should vote or ride horses astride, so it may come to seem absurd that they were chained to the degrading and dangerous processes of pregnancy and childbirth simply because of our inability to get our heads round the possibility of an alternative.

I was curious after reading Anna Smajdor's article what my wife had thought about her two pregnancies. So I asked her and she replied "They were the best years of my life".

So there is a vast gulf between how my wife experienced pregnancy and what Anna Smajdor holds it to be.

How did Anna Smajdor arrive at such a negative view of childbearing? Clearly, she looks on pregnancy more as a threatening impediment to female aspirations than as a fulfilment of them. If you take autonomy as your standard, that can make sense. There have been liberals who have criticised motherhood as a merely "biological" rather than self-determined destiny. They see careers as offering more autonomy to women as careers can be uniquely chosen and can bring financial independence.

If you accept the above, then you'll probably think of men as being advantaged in life, as men have traditionally focused on careers, whilst women had children and focused more on home life. So justice comes to mean equalising the opportunity for career, by having men and women adopt the same work and family roles.

Anna Smajdor has taken this one step further, by objecting even to the biological distinction that it is women who bear children (and who therefore potentially might have their careers interrupted) rather than men.

Alternatively it could just be that pregnancy is an unbearable reminder to Anna Smajdor of the reality of sex distinctions that are given to us as part of our nature rather than self-determined.

Lawrence Auster wrote recently:

As I and other traditionalist conservatives often point out (though our respective ways of putting it may differ slightly), the highest thing according to liberalism is the self and its desires. Only that which we personally choose has moral validity. That which is given to us by God, nature, and society without our personal choice and desire--our upbringing, our culture (along with the transcendent moral order it represents), our genetic inheritance, our race, even our very bodies and our sex--has no reality or value and should have no power over us.

But look what that liberal approach leads to. It leads to the idea that a woman bearing a child, nurturing a child within her, is barbaric, pathological, degrading and unjust. The moral thing becomes the artificial womb.

Dead stream, live stream

Sorry, but this is another "symptom of decline" post.

There's a website called "Corporette" which describes itself as "a fashion and lifestyle blog for overachieving chicks". There's a post up there about how a woman can go about freezing her eggs:

Ever considered freezing your eggs, either because you wanted to postpone kids for your career or because the right partner seems to be in hiding?

So that's what "overachieving" women do? They freeze their eggs because they want to postpone kids for their careers?

Anyway, the corporette author discovered that it's considered more viable to have embryos rather than eggs frozen. So her plan is to follow up having her eggs frozen by later on freezing some embryos fertilised with donor sperm:

I’m still considering freezing embryos in a few months, because I think that would be the right decision for me. I do want to have children (ideally, one biological and one adoptive). On the whole, I am comfortable with donating unused embryos to research.

What an attitude. She has decided already that her family will consist of one child conceived with donor sperm and another child adopted presumably from overseas. Has she wondered if her future husband will be OK with this? Or that he might prefer to have a say in whose children he ends up raising? And doesn't kinship matter at all anymore? (A point made by Laura Wood in her comments on this story.)

Why has it all come to this for Ms Corporette? Why hasn't she already found a man to marry and have a family with? That's difficult to know from a distance, but she does tell us that "I pride myself on being an Independent Woman," which is not exactly likely to attract the most traditionally oriented of men. She tells us too that she is not

going to have (yet another) years-long relationship without any concrete direction; I am 34...At this age I feel better about knowing what I want...

Which makes it sound as if she is one of those women who couldn't bring herself to admit openly and definitely to wanting marriage and children and so who drifted along in relationships with unsuitable men.

Some of the comments are also noteworthy:

Anon woman: This is something I’ve always considered. I’m only 26, but my mom struggled with fertility at 24. I’m married, but I’m just starting out (I’m a 3L) and I don’t want to have children for another 10+ years. I am considering freezing embryos as soon as I begin Biglaw next year.

So this woman is married but refuses to consider motherhood until she's about 35 (i.e. until just the time when her natural fertility begins to plummet). Her priority in life is not her children but "Biglaw".

Other commenters revealed that they took the option when reaching their early 30s of becoming single mothers by choice:

Anon: I was 33 when I decided I was not going to wait any longer. I didn’t want to be in the situation where I needed to think about fertility treatments or being pregnant at an older age or being a parent at an older age. I went to fertility doctor and chose an anonymous donor.

a: I’m seriously considering doing the single-parenting thing (it’s crazy, but is it worse than never having kids when I really want them?)

Always a NYer: My point is that not having the biological father around shouldn’t deter or make you feel less as a parent.

AFT: from the time I was teenager, my mom always said that if I wanted children I should just have them and I didn’t need to be married and I shouldn’t wait around for a husband. She thought that it was important that I could have my own choices and that I did not have to bend my life around whether a man would be around.

My point is, you are definitely not crazy for wanting a child/children and considering doing it solo if the time is right for you and no guy is around.

Someone needs to tell these women that there are easier solutions, the main one of which is to be oriented to marriage and motherhood at a younger age. The current life script for this type of woman is not viable. It goes like this:

a) Deliberately push off family formation until the magical age of 30. Focus on career, travel, partying and casual relationships instead.

b) Get to 30 and find it more difficult to find the right man than you expected.

c) Get to 32 or 33 and recognise that there is only a small window of opportunity left to have children.

d) Take desperate measures that will make it even more difficult to marry, e.g. freeze some donor fertilised embryos or have a child as a single mother.

I can't help but think that society is bifurcating. Those following along the modernist path are sinking deeper into a nihilism in which kinship no longer matters as much, in which fatherhood is optional, in which a paralysing question mark is placed next to motherhood, and in which women home in on the most demoralised of men.

But there is also an ongoing, more traditional stream in society, one that is more determined to arrive at positive family outcomes. There do exist women who are part of this stream (e.g. two beautiful, kind-hearted women in my office in their mid-20s who married good men and have just recently had their first child).

Which stream will prove to be the more powerful? Time will tell.

The family - motherhood

(Another instalment of my booklet, hence the length)

What liberalism asks men to accept is that they are to be liberated from being fathers – at least fathers with a distinctly paternal role.

This explains the attitude of Sara Maitland who associates fatherhood negatively with authority. She has confessed her desire to,

...cast out the Father in my head who rules and controls me ...This frightens me; I want to protect my father and my love for him. I do not want to kill him, to see him dead. I want to set the man free from having to be a father.

That is an anti-paternal understanding of what freedom means. It is freedom from fatherhood, rather than freedom to be fathers.

You might think that motherhood would fare better. After all, the new unisex parental role is drawn from the traditional motherhood role.

But unfortunately there is a logic to liberalism by which motherhood is also reduced in status.

In part this is simply because the maternal role, just like the paternal one, is based on something predetermined rather than self-determined, namely our sex. Therefore, there are liberals like Alison Croggon who view the maternal role negatively as a restriction on the individual:

the role - rather than the task - of motherhood is an iron cage

There are liberals too who dislike the connection between motherhood and a woman’s biology.

After all, the liberal theory is that we become human through self-defining or self-determining acts.

But motherhood is something common to all females, human and non-human, as a matter of inherited biology. So it is dismissed harshly by many liberals as a mere “biological destiny”.

Motherhood also offends some liberals because it leaves women relatively dependent on others for support; rather than enhancing a woman’s autonomy it tends to reduce it.

Here is Kate Millett putting the full-blown liberal view:

In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male.

If you really believed the theory, you would not want as a woman to prioritise motherhood. It loses its place at the centre of life and becomes instead a limiting and non-human activity.

What are women expected to prioritise instead? There is a simple answer: careers. Careers fit in better with autonomy theory because they can be individually chosen (i.e. they can be thought of as a uniquely chosen life path in contrast to the predetermined role of motherhood) and because they are thought to leave women less financially dependent on men.

Fiona Stewart gave voice to such liberal attitudes in 2004 when a baby bonus was introduced in Australia. She was concerned that some young women might not prioritise education and careers over motherhood:

Everyone in the youth sector was - and still is - committed to encouraging girls to see motherhood as one of many choices. To move away from the historical model of "the baby maketh the woman"...This strategy of encouraging choice over biological destiny was aimed particularly at girls from non-English-speaking backgrounds... If we have to pay women to have children...it should be done in a way that ensures that education and career still come first.

And there’s this from American professor Laura Kipnis:

For the first time in history, women are relatively free from traditional fetters. No longer is womanhood synonymous with motherhood...

...with more control over maternity, record numbers of women are now participating in the workforce, meaning that womanhood is no longer synonymous with dependency. In fact, women can now be entirely free from men should they so choose.

The language used here is typical of liberalism: motherhood is thought of as closing off choice and therefore as being a “fetter.” And it is associated negatively with dependency. What is thought to matter to women is not the freedom to marry well and have children but the freedom to live apart from men.

Australian newspaper columnist Alan Howe is another liberal who belittles motherhood as being a preordained role:

It used to be that your early 20s were an ideal time to have children. Newly married and generally expected to do little more than care for little nappy-clad economic stimulation packages, women's lives were often predetermined events.

But as educated, ambitious waves of women entered the workforce...things changed

Mothers “do little more” than care for babies complains Alan Howe. He does not, as a liberal, accord motherhood a high status.

Kasey Edwards is a Melbourne woman who was brought up to be career ambitious. She rose high in the corporate world but at age 30 ditched her career because she felt the corporate drudgery to be unfulfilling. What was she to do instead? She felt the urge to have children but resisted it on these grounds:

I'm prepared to accept that having kids could be one answer to being thirty-something and over it, but I don't want to accept that it is the answer. It seems so stiflingly predetermined to think that it doesn't matter who we are or what we have done with our lives up until now, we all have to breed in the end.

Motherhood has lost prestige in her eyes because it is not a uniquely self-created life path.

Here is a more radical interpretation of autonomy theory by an American feminist blogger:

Women, however, particularly women with children, don’t have access to the full menu of choices. In our culture “motherhood” is a kind of prison...

As for freedom from biology... there can be little argument against the notion that females bear a disproportionate burden, biology-wise...That women have to do the pregnancy is not a “cultural construct.” What Firestone and others have postulated is that until women are liberated from this burden, their personal autonomy will always be compromised...by the actual physiological process of hosting a parasite for nine months.

If the point of life really is to maximise autonomy then it makes sense to treat motherhood negatively as a limitation (a “prison” is the term used above) and pregnancy as a biological burden from which women are to be liberated.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clarke, took this negative view of motherhood. She once justified her childlessness on the grounds that,

You’ve got better things to do with your time, unimpeded.

The seeds of this anti-maternal attitude were sown early. In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a speech to a U.S. senate committee. She told the committee that the aim of life was the “self-dependence of every soul” and that women had a “birthright to self-sovereignty.” Woman, she declared, “as an individual...must rely on herself.”

This female autonomy was to be achieved through education and careers. And, predictably, family relationships were radically reduced in status. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described them as “incidental” to life:

...it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties...

In the introduction to a book Elizabeth Cady Stanton edited in 1881 there is a longer treatment of the same theme. She wrote of her own sex that:

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations...Custom and philosophy, in regard to woman's happiness, are alike based on the idea that her strongest social sentiment is love of children...But the love of offspring, common to all orders of women and all forms of animal life...calls out only the negative virtues that belong to apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance, self-sacrifice...

Maternal love isn’t seen as being as meaningful when you believe that independence and self-assertion are what really matter in life.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was very radically individualistic. She thought that society should be structured around “the isolation of every human soul”.

But most of us don’t share that view. Most of us do want a degree of independence, but we also want to be fulfilled in our relationships with others and we don’t care if those relationships are preordained – they still matter.

Take Lori Gottlieb. She and a friend decided “in a fit of self-empowerment” to have their children as single mothers. In doing so she went further than most women in the pursuit of a life independent of men.

But even in her case “self-empowerment” was not what she most valued. She has described a moment when she and her friend were having a picnic in a park and watching their children play:

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist — vehemently, even — that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.

For Lori Gottlieb, being a wife and mother are not “incidental” relationships. They were once part of her dreams and longings. And yet they don’t fit in well with the ruling ideology of our society. It’s not easy for liberal intellectuals to view motherhood as promoting female autonomy and so the maternal role, just like the paternal one, has lost status in the modern West.

So why put it last on the list?

Wendy Tuohy

Wendy Tuohy is an Australian journalist, early 40s, something of a lefty, and a mother of three. She recently found out that a friend had finally fallen pregnant:

I have a friend, about my age, who recently told me she's pregnant. She looked so happy on the morning she told me that I guessed - and when she got the words out I was almost shaking with glee. Tears sprang into my eyes for about a dozen reasons.

The emotion closest to the top was pure relief; she has never had a baby and I had assumed she had decided that motherhood was not for her...When she told me the happy news my first thought was,

"Thank God, you are not going to miss out".

Tears, relief, joy:

I feel boundlessly joyous for my friend and, as I said to her, I am already picturing myself holding her precious baby - and smelling that heavenly, sweet, so-addictive baby's head smell.

But amid all the joy and the relief ... I felt another wave of emotion. I didn't tell her, but it was a faint echo of grief. Grief that I will never again have that intoxicating happiness of seeing the blue lines on the pregnancy test, hearing the tiny baby's heartbeat on the monitor, feeling its first few kicks - whining about it kicking me up under the ribs in the last month or so - and bringing home a brand-new angel.

She misses deeply the experience of having a baby, despite the work involved:

I'm through the breast-feeding, sleep deprivation, the nappies, and the potties, the hours and hours of Gymbaroo, the toddler music classes, the get-in-the-water-with-them swimming lessons, the kinder years midnight carpet-vomits and snot festivals that spread to everyone around us, and the transitions into school...

But still I dream of babies. For the couple of years after our third was born - with help as I had turned 35 and become a fertility statistic - I hoped there may really be a fourth.

She was sensible to have begun having children earlier than many other middle-class women, as she was one of those women whose natural fertility ended at about age 35. Even so, she regrets that could not have a fourth child.

Wendy Tuohy finishes by acknowledging that she still has a case of baby lust:

I was reminded only last week, when changing the sheets on my 13 year-old's bed, that I'm still not over baby lust. "Where is your cot?" I found myself thinking, "and where's your stroller gone?"

I'm not a huge nostalgic - I like to live in the now - but that physical sensation of holding the tiny body in my arms is one thing that has stayed with me, and a memory that still stops me in my tracks (with gratitude).

I ride past the three kids' kinder every day on the way to work, and if I'm a bit tired or emotional, I do feel a tiny bit wistful when I hear the chirpy children behind the fence.

Perhaps we're just programmed to still look at babies and melt, right up until the time when nature intends for it to be physically impossible to have another. Though talking to my mother who is 70, it sounds like baby love is more often a lifelong thing. I will gratefully live with that.

It's refreshing in this last quote to read someone from the left expressing gratitude for the way her life has been blessed with children. It is strikingly unnihilistic.

But her column raises an important issue. If having children is so important for women, then why is it put so low down on the list of priorities? Why is it that the most important thing is left perilously till last?

How does Professor Lewin think women step up to personhood? A clue: not through heterosexual marriage

Professor Ellen Lewin

Laura Wood at The Thinking Housewife has posted an item about an American academic, Dr Ellen Lewin. Dr Lewin, a professor of women's studies, was so outraged at receiving a batch email from a Republican students group that she fired off a reply telling them to "f-off".

Anyway, I did a little search on Dr Lewin. It turns out that she is a very orthodox liberal. She has written a book titled Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture. The basic argument she runs in the book is that divorced single mothers and lesbian mothers have something significant in common: by raising children without husbands they both have achieved the good of motherhood without a loss of autonomy through dependency on men.

The message is that divorce can be good for heterosexual women because it liberates women to be autonomous.

I have to say that there's a contradiction in Professor Lewin's argument, but I'll get to that a little later.

It's interesting to see how liberal autonomy theory plays out in Professor Lewin's book. For instance, she argues that there is a difference between being a good mother in a marriage and in a divorce. Being a good mother in a marriage is not so good because it is merely a "natural attribute" (not something self-determined). But if a mother gets custody in the courts, that is a "self-conscious achievement" and "evidence of skill" in "protecting the integrity" of her family:

Mothers who face actual or potential custody challenges use strategies of appeasement, support, and autonomy in the course of protecting the integrity of their families. The claim to being a "good mother," a key element of feminine gender identity in American culture, is transformed from a natural attribute into the product of self-conscious achievement...

In this situation a competent mother is one who accedes to enough of her husband's demands to discourage a custody challenge but not so much that her concessions can be turned against her. Being a "good mother" is thus transformed from a state of being, a natural attribute, into evidence of skill, rewarded by the father's failure to gain custody or, better yet, by his failure to pursue it at all. [pp.177-178]

As for divorce being a step up for women, this is how Professor Lewin puts it:

These convergences between lesbian mothers' coming-out stories and the divorce stories of both lesbians and heterosexual mothers point to a telling contradiction in American culture. Marriage is seen as a special kind of success for women, but it also imposes a loss of autonomy and personhood that threatens to compromise the individual's quest for accomplishment and individuality. As observers of American culture have noted since Alexis de Tocqueville described his impressions in the mid-nineteenth century, individuality and the related concept of privacy are such core dimensions of American culture that conditions or behavior that might be interpreted as dependency seem questionable if not shameful...

... Both coming out and divorce shift women's status downward in the eyes of the society as a whole, yet the women who experience them view them in many respects as steps up. At the core of both coming-out and divorce stories is the theme of increasing autonomy and competence, and both kinds of accounts tend to focus on discovery of one's "true" self. In these respects, as Kath Weston has observed, they constitute odysseys of self-discovery; at the same time, they demonstrate a concern with achieving adulthood and autonomy which is a particular consequence of the infantilization that both marriage and heterosexuality can impose on women. [pp.43, 45]

The logic of the argument is that in a marriage women are dependent on a man, that this makes married heterosexual women infantile, so that divorce and/or lesbianism represent a step forward toward an adult, autonomous life.

The fact that the conclusion is so odd, that it suggests that being a lesbian or a divorced woman is more adult than being a married mother, should suggest to us that there is something wrong with the premises of the argument.

My own view is that the mistake is to think of autonomy as a single, overriding good. In practice, we don't do this. We marry despite the fact that we thereby limit our autonomy, because there are other important goods associated with marriage, including those of marital love and parenthood.

As it happens, Professor Lewin finds it difficult to maintain the consistency of her argument. She argues for divorce and lesbianism in terms of autonomy, but when it comes to justifying motherhood she is at a loss – becoming a mother does not increase a woman's autonomy, so it has to be justified on other grounds, but these same grounds could then just as easily justify a commitment to heterosexual marriage:

Lesbians who are not mothers share with other childless women a feeling of distance not only from the kinds of things "ordinary" women do but from the special relationship to the spiritual world women can derive from their connection to children. By becoming a mother, a woman can experience a moment of transcendent unity with mystical forces; by being a mother, she makes continuing contact with her inner goodness, a goodness that is activated by altruism and nurtured by participation in a child's growth and development.

By becoming a mother, a lesbian can negotiate the formation of herself: she can bring something good into her life without having to sacrifice autonomy or control. Thus the intentional single mother (whether she is lesbian or heterosexual) can achieve a central personal goal – the goodness that comes from putting the needs of a dependent being first. By becoming a mother through her own agency, she avoids the central paradox that motherhood represents to married women – a loss of autonomy and therefore of basic personhood in a culture that valorizes individualism and autonomy. Like ending a marriage, having a baby on her own allows a woman to meet her basic personal goals, and she may see it as a critical part of establishing a satisfying identity in a culture that often blocks women's efforts to be separate individuals. [p.73]

She is running with two very different sets of principles here. When it comes to motherhood, what matters to her is not autonomy but feeling connected and the good of altruistic care for another. The very close, dependent relationship of mother and child is seen as a good. But when it comes to heterosexual marriage, personhood is defined solely in terms of being a separate, autonomous individual.

She could just as easily have defined the good of marriage in the way she defined the good of motherhood: in terms of the closeness of the relationship, of finding inner goodness in the giving of oneself altruistically to one's spouse, of the spiritual fulfilment of marital love, and of the completion of a feminine identity in being a wife.

I'll finish with one more inconsistency in Professor Lewin's position. She justifies motherhood in terms of participating in a child's growth and development. But what if that child is a boy? What is that boy growing and developing toward?

If Professor Lewin had her way, that boy would not have much of a future role in society. He would grow up in a society in which women aimed either at intentional single motherhood or else at divorce as a pathway to autonomy, adulthood and self-discovery.

It's not much for a boy to grow and develop toward. So what would be the point of a woman committing herself to participating in his development? What mothers need to justify their role are young women in society who are willing to make a life together with their sons. Professor Lewin doesn't like the idea of this life together and so is no true friend of motherhood.

Suddenly 50

One of the faults of the liberal life script is that it leaves out motherhood. According to this script, women are to spend their 20s as single girls, with motherhood being left to the last moment in their 30s or even 40s.

That's why otherwise intelligent women can seem to have very unrealistic expectations about family life. Take, for instance, Michelle Bridges, who is a fitness guru on Australian TV. This is how her life is described in a recent edition of Who:

Now, after finishing her home and turning 40 in October, she is ready for her next chapter – enjoying her happy balance of work and domestic life. She is also contemplating motherhood, which has "just been one of those things that you think you'll get around to at some point," says Bridges.

Amazing. She is turning 40 and only now "contemplating" motherhood. She apparently has little idea of the biological realities of life, let alone the social consequences of treating family formation in such a cavalier manner.

She is not alone. A 50-year-old Melbourne woman, Meagan Callaghan, wants to use IVF to have a child. Why do this at age 50? She told the Herald Sun:

Life passes by so quickly, one minute you are 20 and the next you are 50.

Having babies did not occur to her, in her busy life, until she hit 50. So now she is going to deliberately create a fatherless family as a very old mother and raise a child to whom she is not biologically related. Hardly ideal.

You would think that liberals would recognise the flaw in their life script. But listen to the reaction of columnist Alan Howe. He believes that it is a sign of liberal progress for women to leave motherhood so late:

Like so many women her age, Ms Callaghan has either been too busy, or has never met the right partner, to start a family.

We can hardly encourage women to complete their educations, enter the workforce, smash through all but the most reinforced glass ceilings, and expect otherwise.

That's not our Western way. In less tolerant lands - Afghanistan springs to mind - women are often seen as chattels and baby factories...

Mrs Smug from suburbia may well say that leaving things late is Ms Callaghan's fault and she should have been aware of her fertility.

That's nonsense; until very recently, most women have commonly been unaware of the vertiginous decline, from around their mid-30s, in their ability to have children.

Alan Howe associates motherhood with the oppression of women and careerism with their liberation. No wonder he is such a defender of the liberal life script in which motherhood is left till last. As for his claim that women have only recently been aware that fertility declines from the mid-30s, that just shows how little interest liberals have in such matters.

Clarissa: motherhood castrates women

I found Clarissa just a couple of days ago. She's an American academic who teaches Hispanic literature courses. She's also very earnestly liberal.

If you remember, Clarissa was the one who claimed that modernity was worth its steep price because it liberates people from inherited norms, which then opens the way to a more self-defining life based on one's own choices.

To understand what is wrong with this liberal way of looking at modernity, consider a post that Clarissa wrote just a few days ago. The post is about the Katy Read story in Salon. Katy Read is a middle-aged, recently divorced American woman who has expressed regret that she spent years working part-time to be with her children rather than remaining full-time at work.

Clarissa, it turns out, doesn't like the idea of women choosing to stay at home with their children. She thinks that one positive effect of the economic downturn in the US is that fewer women will give up full-time work:

As with everything else in life, however, the crisis has brought about some positive things as well. Less and less women will be "choosing" to abandon economic independence and professional realization now that they see how costly such a decision is turning out to be to many former housewives. The fear of finding themselves indigent and with no way of proving their worth socially, professionally or financially will finally convince many women that the self-infantilization of housewifery is not worth the risk.

So already we have the career option praised as leading to economic independence and professional realization, whereas the stay at home option leaves women with no way to "prove their worth" and is merely a form of "self-infantilization".

There's more:

Katy Read, the author of the article, tries to suggest that she had given up on working for fourteen years for the sake of her sons. Nobody, however, needs a parent to be constantly at home until one is 14 ... Like many other women, Read simply didn't want to make the effort of going to work every single day ... It's much easier to pretend that you are a little girl who needs to be provided with everything by a big, strong man.

The traditionally male career role is associated here with independence and adulthood. Therefore motherhood gets turned on its head. It no longer marks a transition to adult womanhood but a regression to girlhood. All those women in centuries past who gave much of their adult lives to the care of their children were, in Clarissa's eyes, just pretending to be "little girls".

As evidence for her theory she calls in the testimony of her sister, who works as a recruiter:

During preliminary interviews with housewives she saw that they had one thing in common: an extremely infantilized mode of behavior. Whenever the conversation didn't go exactly as they wanted, they would become highly emotional, raise their voices, become irritable, cry, make unreasonable demands.

The insults peak in the final paragraph:

Read's advice to women is not to fall into the same trap of the patriarchal discourse that keeps suggesting to us that women are somehow not fully human and should be fulfilled with less than what men need to be happy. I hope many people read this article and abstain from castrating their lives in the same way as Read did.

Charming. Clarissa is suggesting here that it's the traditional male career role which makes people fully human and fully happy. Stay at home mothers are therefore accepting a less than fully human life. In fact, they are "castrating" their lives by looking after their own children (echoes here of Greer's "female eunuch").

I know some of my readers will immediately dismiss Clarissa as a mad lefty, not worth the time of day. But I think there's more to it than this. Clarissa is adopting one of the possible liberal options open to her.

Remember, the point of liberalism is to maximise individual autonomy. But this aim has an inbuilt contradiction.

One way that you maximise autonomy is by giving people greater choice. But if you do this, people are likely to choose goods other than autonomy. They are likely to choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy for some other good, such as motherhood. So autonomy is not maximised.

Another way to maximise autonomy is to rule out the choice of non-autonomous goods. In other words, you only allow people to prefer goods that maximise independence, such as the financial independence that comes with careers. But the problem with this option is that it cuts back on the degree to which people can choose for themselves. So this option also fails to maximise autonomy.

The only way the contradiction might be resolved is if people, when given maximum free choice, were to naturally choose autonomy as the highest, overriding good. And therefore it's understandable that many liberals prefer to believe that people really would choose this way. For instance, in another post Clarissa approvingly quotes this opinion:

The natural desire for freedom and autonomy exists in women, and has always been nearly impossible to smother with bribery (the carrot of the wedding and the family and the home) alone. The stick also has to come out, and that's where the pervasive threat of rape comes into play.

The suggestion here is that women would in a non-patriarchal society naturally choose "freedom and autonomy" as the highest goods; that this natural preference cannot be smothered with other false and inferior goods such as marriage, children and home; that the patriarchy therefore has to force women to deny their natural desires coercively with the "pervasive threat of rape".

But that's a fantasy. Even after decades of feminist indoctrination, the majority of women still express a desire to spend time at home with their children (a recent survey put the percentage of women preferring to stay at home at 69%).

What this means is that in a liberal society there is likely to be a continuing conflict in how people attempt to resolve the contradiction. If some take the "choice" option, then others like Clarissa will point out that this does not, in fact, create maximum autonomy as it leads people to choose goods other than autonomy.

So Clarissa is carrying through logically with an aspect of liberal politics. She cannot just be dismissed as a one off.

Having said that, we should take the time to register exactly where Clarissa's liberalism has led her. It has committed her to the idea that the mothering of children, the core role played by women since the dawn of time, is a less than human option because it involves interdependence with a man.

It has led her to characterise motherhood not as a fulfilment of adult womanhood but as infantile. Motherhood is no longer associated in Clarissa's mind with fertility or fecundity but with sterility - with female castration.

Is it any wonder that in a liberal society young women so often defer a serious commitment to marriage and motherhood? Particularly those most exposed in higher education to liberal academics like Clarissa?

Finally, it's important to underline the fault I am pointing to in Clarissa's liberalism. In one post she tells us that liberalism frees us to self-define and to make our own choices. But a few days later she savages the idea of women choosing to be stay at home mothers. She leaves women with only one legitimate choice, that of being a full-time careerist. In fact, she establishes careerism as the only way for both men and women to be fully human and self-realizing adults.

Liberalism doesn't work out the way it is supposed to. Clarissa wants women to have a self-defining life, but she then rules out the life that the majority of women want to have. And along the way she manages to grossly distort a basic human good such as motherhood.

Setting a great example?

Katherine Heigl, an actress from Grey's Anatomy, is adopting a special needs child from Korea. But is she ready for motherhood? Sharon Lawrence, who co-stars with Katherine Heigl, has no doubt that she'll be a great mother. Why? Because she's an autonomous, unimpeded modern woman:

Katie is a modern woman who will pursue her passions and not feel limited by anything, and that bodes well for motherhood. She is smart and happy and free of constraints of "Oh, I should do this, I shouldn't do this." She'll [set] a great example for the little girl. [Who 28 Sep 2009]

What's going on here? Sharon Lawrence wants to praise Katherine Heigl. She therefore needs to know what defines a good person in a modern liberal society. She gets it right: the highest attribute for a liberal modern is to be an autonomous individual. Therefore, Katherine Heigl is described as not feeling limited by anything and being free of constraints in what she should or shouldn't do.

But it doesn't end up sounding like a serious account of virtue. A person who does not feel limited by anything has been watching too much Oprah. In reality we are limited in countless ways: it would be difficult to operate in the world without an honest coming to terms with this fact.

And would anyone really want to live with, or be dependent on, a person who did not recognise constraints on what they should or shouldn't do? And would such a person really be a positive role model for a child?

I don't believe that Katherine Heigl is really the person that Sharon Lawrence describes her as being. It's difficult to accept that she really believes herself to be free of any limitations in life or constraints on her behaviour.

But the liberal account of good motherhood can't be helping much as an ideal.

Any justification will do

Alan Howe writes a column for the Melbourne Herald Sun. On Monday he considered the issue of women in their 60s having children. He took as an example the case of Spanish woman Maria Carmen del Bousada, who gave birth to twins two years ago when she was aged 66.

Most people, I imagine, would think this a less than ideal arrangement for motherhood. It would not be easy for a woman of that age to meet the demands of motherhood; the child would never know a more youthful mother; the child would have no chance of knowing grandparents; and the child would most likely be orphaned when still young.

It seems so much more reasonable to secure the conditions for women to form families and have children when in their 20s.

Maria del Bousado died this month, so her twin children have been left motherless at the age of two. You might think that her death would be a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of leaving motherhood to such an age. But the liberal Alan Howe remains enthusiastic:

Del Bousada made headlines two years ago when she gave birth to healthy and deeply loved twin sons Pau and Christian.

She was 66 at the time -- the world's oldest mother.

... Tragically, it seems the drugs she bought so expensively to deliver her dream may also have encouraged the breast cancer that claimed her life this month.

... Women should be allowed to have the children they want when they want. The rash of suddenly fulfilled 60-something mums should be joyous news.

Of course, mum's time on earth with them will be limited. Kids often lose parents early.

Really? I wouldn't have said that children "often" lose their mums when they're only two. Nor would I accept so casually the idea that a mum's time on earth with her kids will be limited to two years.

But Alan Howe is a liberal who wants, above all, for people to be liberated from impediments to their will. This is what matters to him. So women electing to become mothers in their 60s is "joyous" for him. The human cost is brushed aside.

Nor is Alan Howe the only liberal to take such a view. Jacob Appel wrote a along very similar lines in the Huffington Post:

Our own concerns about later-life mothering may reflect our heightened expectation that children know their parents, and even grandparents, into adulthood, rather than any universal or socially-essential norm.

Parenting is among the most personal choices anyone ever makes. At the same time, no other individual decision has as significant a societal impact. Finding a careful balance between personal autonomy and the public welfare is often a considerable challenge. Fortunately, in the cases of sexagenarian and septuagenarian mothers, the private benefit is obvious - and the social harm, if any, is rather hazy. In some cases, women like Ms. Bousada will live to be 101. In others, tragedy may strike - much as tragedies also strike twenty-five year-old moms.

In order to make it seem reasonable for 60 something and 70 something women to have children, Jacob Appel:

a) Claims that it's not so important for children to know their parents and grandparents.

b) Claims that there is only an obvious private benefit and no private harm.

c) Claims not to be able to think of any clear social harm.

d) Claims that it is a "tragedy" (something that could not be foreseen) if a woman in her late 60s or 70s dies.

e) Suggests that women in their 20s are just as prone to leaving their children motherless as women four or five decades older.

There is no "careful balance" here in measuring the limits of personal autonomy. Jacob Appel is intent on justifying the idea of no limits. Just like Alan Howe, he is willing both to recast reality to make this possible and to brush aside the potential human cost of much older women having children.

Personally, I think it would be far more "joyous" if we took seriously again the idea of women having children in their 20s. The freedom to have children in your late 60s or 70s is a relatively trivial one. The much greater freedom is to be able to secure a good marriage and to have children in your youth. We don't have to kick against reality or natural constraints to secure this greater freedom. It's more a question of getting the culture right.

Writing off mothers

Alan Howe is not exactly a supporter of stay-at-home mums. This is how he describes the era when most women were in their early 20s when they had children:

It used to be that your early 20s were an ideal time to have children. Newly married and generally expected to do little more than care for little nappy-clad economic stimulation packages, women's lives were often predetermined events.

They had "little more to do" than to care for their children. This is, obviously, a put-down of stay-at-home mothers.

Why would Alan Howe so undervalue the motherhood role of women? Perhaps, as someone imbued with commercial values, he believes that it's our participation in the economy which matters.

Or perhaps it's his commitment to liberal autonomy theory. His attachment to this theory is given away when he objects to women's lives being "predetermined events". According to liberal autonomy theory we are supposed to lead self-determined, rather than predetermined, lives. Motherhood fails this test as it's thought to be an unchosen "biological destiny" for women, in contrast to a self-chosen career path.

The problem for liberals like Howe is that marriage and motherhood continue to be central to women's lives. That's because autonomy is not the one good which outranks all other goods. Men and women still choose to marry and have kids even if this means giving up a certain amount of autonomy.

In other words, the fact that motherhood is "predetermined" doesn't make it any less significant in the lives of women.

There's a beautiful TV presenter in Australia called Suzie Wilks. She's sacrificed relationships for her career, but now says that she's been left feeling lonely and depressed.

If you read what she says, in an article about her quest for a husband and child, she portrays the motherhood role in much more significant terms than Alan Howe:

She says she hopes the relationship she has with her own children will mirror that with her beloved mum.

"We were best friends - incredibly close. All the love and support that I had came from her," she says. "I've never known a woman so capable of loving."

Wilks says she doesn't have any major career ambitions left. It is the prospect of love and having children that fire her these days.

"I've had to battle. Look where I've come from. Look what I've done," she says.

"Now I want the real things in life."

It's not just all about the economy. The love of mothers for their children matters - a great deal.

By the way, there's one other consequence of Alan Howe's prioritising of careers. He supports an increase in the retirement age not just from 65 to 67 but into the 70s:

The Rudd Government acted in last month's Budget ... just look at the publicity generated by the proposed incremental increase of the retiring age from 65 to 67.

Don't listen to the lies of politicians. That was just a start. Late baby boomers can put plans for retirement on the back burner.

Their pensionable age will start with a "7"

... we need to keep ourselves working productively for much longer than 65

Kasey's metaphorical baby

Kasey Edwards is thirty something and going through an existential crisis. She no longer finds her career fulfilling and she is looking for something more meaningful to commit to.

What about motherhood and family? This is not something she would have committed to as a younger woman. She was brought up, in a liberal, feminist society, to believe that motherhood was an inferior option, a "character flaw" as she describes it.

Which explains this passage in Kasey's book:

On the last day of high school my teacher asked everyone in the class what we saw ourselves doing in ten to fifteen years' time. When she came around to me I said, "Married with kids and a stay-at-home mother." The teacher and the class burst into laughter and so did I. It was obvious to everyone I was just being a smartarse ...

Later, a classmate confessed to me that she did actually want to be 'just' a mother. She looked ashamed and I looked indignant.

Not a good platform from which to launch into motherhood. However, Kasey does appear to gradually change her attitude. After meeting a woman who is dismissive of mothers, she writes,

I am shocked and slightly outraged at Karen's low opinion of motherhood, which makes me realise just how much I've changed in the last few months. I am ashamed to admit this, but twelve months ago I would have agreed with Karen's view on motherhood - a cop-out from the workforce, the loss of identity and the betrayal of the sisterhood ... I used to think that a pram was a symbol of no ambition, no status and a bleak future.

On page 189 of her book there appears to be a breakthrough:

I get into the car and instead of telling him how much I missed him, I say, "I want to have a baby." The words just pop out of my mouth as if they bypassed my brain. "I don't know where that came from," I say. "I swear, I have no idea why I just said that."

Chris smiles at me ... "I'm not surprised ... You'd make a great mother."

I am surprised how touched I am by the compliment and my eyes fill with tears.

She has finlly given herself permission, in her early 30s, to think about having a baby. However, even this is only a hesitant beginning. She notes at the end of the conversation with her boyfriend,

We agree to talk about it again in a year.

This seems a surprisingly long time to delay given her age. She is not unaware of the problems of older motherhood:

We are told all our lives that we need to do everything else first - get an education, establish ourselves professionally, buy property - but by the time we've done all that, our biological clocks have ticked. The older I get, the more I witness the heartbreak of women around me who are unable to get pregnant. And the harsh reality in many cases is that they just left it too late.

I've lost count of how many women I know who are undergoing IVF, or have tried it without success.

So why doesn't she commit herself to motherhood while she can? Unfortunately, she is still too strongly influenced by liberal notions of autonomy:

I'm prepared to accept that having kids could be one answer to being thirty-something and over it, but I don't want to accept that it is the answer. It seems so stiflingly predetermined to think that it doesn't matter who we are or what we have done with our lives up until now, we all have to breed in the end.

Stiflingly predetermined to be a mother. She has bought into liberal autonomy theory in which motherhood is thought to be a predetermined, biological outcome - a "biological destiny" - rather than a uniquely created life outcome.

Kasey also now believes that careerism is a predetermined life course for her, so she is no longer willing to commit to that either. So what does she opt for?

She decides to work part-time while writing a book. Writing is to be her baby:

Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I like to think that my friend Godfrey's metaphorical baby [being a writer] is an adequate substitute for a real one. Surely a metaphorical baby can still meet the needs that Erikson talks about, such as devoting ourselves to, and caring for, something ...

I decide to think more seriously about how I can devote myself to and nurture a writing 'baby'.

She rejects an offer from her company to pay her for writing if she works under their banner:

I'm not prepared to surrender editorial control of the book ... It won't be my baby ... I realise that I need more than just an opportunity to write; I also need autonomy. I want to have freedom in my life to do my own thing. And two days of freedom and autonomy are more important to me than two days of income.

All of which serves as a reminder of just how difficult it has become for intelligent, conscientious, middle-class Western women to have children. The ideological barriers have been raised very high. If autonomy and a uniquely created life path are the highest goods for you, then children won't be a priority - even if you have grown tired of the corporate grind.

One final point before saying good-bye to Kasey Edwards. One thing that struck me reading her book was the individualism of the culture she inhabits. Her colleagues are all looking for something to commit to, and those who are disenchanted with corporate values seem to only look to options such as work with international aid organisations.

I'm not sure this problem would have been so significant in earlier times. In a less individualistic culture the ordinary work we did was tied to something larger than our own momentary satisfactions.

Kasey Edwards does seem to have a glimmer of this when discussing one particular colleague:

Jamie has a purpose for what he does each day - to provide for his family. That means that he doesn't need to get innate enjoyment out of every single task at work because the bigger purpose - his family - is what makes working worthwhile.

She might have extended this thought. If a man was to think not just in terms of himself, but also in terms of his tradition, then he would also be connecting his everyday work to perpetuating a much larger, enduring communal entity. And if he recognised over and beyond himself the existence of a masculine "good", then in meeting his work commitments he would be connecting his own masculine self to a larger purpose.

There is, similarly, more to motherhood than just a biological destiny. A woman's heritage - of family, ancestry and nation - is perpetuated when she has children and raises them to successful adulthood. A woman also expresses her feminine identity - and connects this identity to a larger virtue - through qualities such as maternal love.

In place of this Kasey Edwards suggests a "project". Her own project has come to fruition and her metaphorical baby - her book - has been born. It's an achievement, but one that seems thinner to me than producing a human life.

Why would a feminist attack motherhood?

Twisty the radical feminist never lets me down. She is so concerned to follow through with the theory, even if it makes her seem impractical or even unhinged, that she always comes up with something quotable.

Her latest effort? Twisty is a follower of patriarchy theory. She believes that society has been created by men to secure autonomy for themselves at the expense of women. Therefore, whatever seems to compromise women's autonomy must be rejected as a creation of the patriarchy. Motherhood compromises a woman's autonomy, as it places certain commitments and expectations upon women. Therefore, concludes Twisty, women must reject motherhood:

We are desperate for women to stop buying into the patriarchy-sponsored message about women’s fulfillment ... We want women to reject marriage and the nuclear family. We want women to not have kids in the first place.

No kids for women? That might be a logical position for a follower of patriarchy theory, but it's not a politics with much of a future. If women were to follow Twisty's advice, then the human race would very quickly die out.

Twisty is too uncompromisingly logical about her politics not to admit to this. So she wrote a follow-up post, in which she advocated that humans should, as a matter of principle, die out:

In light of a remark I made in a recent post ... that women should just quit having babies ... I thought it might be fun to revisit the Voluntary Human Extinctionist Movement.

The VHEMT manifesto is contained in a delightful website maintained since the late 90’s by an Oregon high school teacher named Les Knight. The gist of Les Knight’s argument is this: that the biosphere simply cannot sustain human beings in any way, shape or form ... As long as there remains a single breeding pair of humans, Knight avers, the danger of a destructo-human flare-up exists, so the only acceptable number of human inhabitants is zero.

So there you have it. A humanistic politics has morphed into a radical anti-humanism.

How did Twisty's readers respond? Some were supportive:

My philosophy has a name. Thank you Twisty, for showing me the way home. Maybe people will stop calling me nihilist now.

To which Twisty responded:

“Maybe people will stop calling me nihilist now.”

Not bloody likely. People get awfully sentimental about The Human Race and its cute little babies. And by “sentimental” I mean “violent.”

You think this is odd? But it's only the same modernist mindset taken one step further. Twisty is saying: look at those human supremacists, those "human racists" with their dark, violent urges and their irrational, merely sentimental attachment to human existence.

This is not a new or a different way of looking at things for moderns ... only a wider application of an existing politics.

Twisty was very upfront in the comments section about another aspect of feminist politics. Someone of my generation would have heard a lot from feminists about "reproductive freedom" for women. This was always assumed, though, to mean freedom from reproduction via contraception or abortion. There wasn't much thought given to a woman's freedom to actually reproduce.

According to Twisty, that's exactly how things should be:

I see this VHEMT stuff primarily as a reproductive freedom message ... What is meant by “reproductive freedom” is “freedom from reproduction.”

So freedom is understood to be a negative freedom from motherhood, rather than a positive freedom to participate in something of considerable significance to most women.

Those women in their 30s finding it difficult to partner and to form a family can't expect much help from feminists like Twisty.