Missing out

What leads women to rethink feminism? Earlier this year an English playwright, Zoe Lewis, explained the transformation in her beliefs.

Before quoting some of her thoughts, I'll set the scene. A liberal society takes autonomy to be the highest good. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. Therefore, feminism will aim to maximise female autonomy.

How can you make women more autonomous? One way is to stretch out for as long as possible an independent single girl lifestyle based on casual relationships, travel, shopping and parties. Another is to make career (in which women became financially independent) more important than marriage and motherhood.

And what about equality? If you believe that you should be self-determining, then you won't want your predetermined gender to matter in what you do. An autonomous woman will want to "match it with the boys" and prove that she can do whatever they can do. There will be an equality of sameness.

Young women get the message that to be free they should put career first; enjoy an independent single girl lifestyle in their twenties and into their thirties; and prove themselves by matching it with the boys.

Is this an adequate base on which to build a life? For many women, the answer will turn out to be no. Zoe Lewis is one of the women who was burnt by the feminist and liberal take on freedom:

I never thought I would be saying this, but being a free woman isn't all it's cracked up to be. Is that the rustle of taffeta I hear as the suffragettes turn in their graves? Possibly. My mother was a hippy who kept a pile of (dusty) books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bed ... She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation. I fought with my older brother and won; at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.

Now, nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen. I feel like a UN inspector sent in to Iraq only to find that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams - to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.

Her career did not bring the power, glamour and life success she thought it would:

Ten years ago The Times ran a piece about my play Paradise Syndrome. It was based on my girlfriends in the music business. All we did was party, work and drink. The play sold out and I thought: “This is it! I'm going to have it all: success, power and men are going to adore me for it.” In reality it was the beginning of years of hard slog, rejection letters and living on the breadline.

She once thought Madonna was a living embodiment of liberal autonomy: of being unimpeded in determining one's life so that it was possible to do anything and be anything:

A decade on, I have written the follow-up play Touched for the Very First Time in which Lesley, played by Sadie Frost, is an ordinary 14-year-old from Manchester who falls in love with Madonna in 1984 after hearing the song Like a Virgin. She religiously follows her icon through the years, as Madonna sells her the ultimate dream: “You can do anything - be anything - go girl.” Lesley discovers, along with Madonna, that trying to “have it all” is a huge gamble. I wrote the play because so many of my girlfriends were inspired by this bullish woman who allowed us to be strong and sexy. I still love her and always will, but she has encouraged us to chase a fantasy and it's a huge disappointment.

Women are missing out on being wives and mothers because these roles were rejected by liberals in favour of female independence:

This month the General Household Survey found that the number of unmarried women under 50 has more than doubled over the past 30 years. And by the age of 30, one in five of these “freemales”, who have chosen independence over husband and family, has gone through a broken cohabitation.

I argue that women's libbers of the Sixties and Seventies put careerism at the forefront, trampling the traditional role of women underneath their Doc Martens. I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother wasn't such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals of yesteryear.

Zoe Lewis is not alone in having a change of heart. But for some it will be too late:

Increasing numbers of my feminist friends are giving up their careers for love and children and baking. I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the problem is not so much time as mentality. I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.

There are some important points made in the above excerpt. First, what the liberal emphasis on autonomy leaves out is the importance of love and family. Essentially, what Zoe Lewis is arguing is that "freedom" (i.e. autonomy) is not the sole, overriding good after all. There are other important goods in life that can't be overridden, such as love, home, children and family.

Second, note that Zoe Lewis confesses that "I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships". Unfortunately, this was part of the middle-class, tertiary educated culture of the times. Women thought that family formation could be indefinitely postponed and therefore did not want to settle into a serious relationship.

This had significant consequences. It meant that women no longer favoured family men. Men were rewarded for being unsuitable in some way. So the attitude of men changed as well. Some adapted to the culture of casual relationships by becoming players. Some withdrew from the whole dating game and adapted to a lifetime of bachelorhood. Some looked elsewhere for women. The result was that when some of these middle class women did finally start to look for husbands they met men who were no longer as keen to commit.

Zoe Lewis makes another notable admission:

I thought that men would love independent, strong women, but (in general) they don't appear to. Men are programmed to like their women soft and feminine. It's not their fault - it's in the genes.

This too is significant. Zoe Lewis now recognises that it's not possible to make gender not matter. When it comes to heterosexuality, opposites attract. Men are hardwired to find the feminine qualities of women appealing.

However, it's not just that men don't go for masculine women. Zoe Lewis cannot deny her own feminine instincts:

Somewhere inside lurks a woman I cannot control and she is in the kitchen with a baby on her hip and dough in her hand, staring me down. She is saying: “This is happiness, this is what it's all about.” It's an instinct that makes me a woman, an instinct that I can't ignore even if I wanted to.

Again, Zoe Lewis in practice was not able to live by the credo of making her gender not matter. She couldn't ignore her hardwired nature (her instincts), even if for political reasons she tried to. As a single woman in her late 30s, these instincts appear to be asserting themselves in the strongest terms, perhaps more so than for a woman who had married and had children earlier in life.

Zoe Lewis now wishes she had taken relationships more seriously in her twenties:

Had I this understanding of my psyche ten years ago I would have demoted my writing (and hedonism) and pursued a relationship with vigour. There were plenty of men and even a marriage offer, but I wouldn't give up my dreams.

I talked to the girls who were the subject of my play Paradise Syndrome in 1999. Sas Taylor, 38, single and childless, runs her own PR company: “In my twenties I felt I was invincible,” she says. “Now I wish I had done it all differently. I seem to scare men off because I am so capable. I have business success but it doesn't make you happy.” Nicki P, 35 and single, works in the music industry and adds: “It was all a game back then. Now I am panicking. No one told me that having fun is not as fun as I thought.”

Women in their twenties are in a strong position. They are at the height of their desirability to men. The danger, perhaps, is that this makes them feel "invincible". They may not realise that their advantage won't last forever and that it's most sensible to find a partner when the going is at its best.

Why else doesn't the autonomy principle work well in real life? It's not just that men prefer feminine women, but the biological reality of a woman's ticking clock:

Women are often the worst enemies of feminism because of our genetic make-up. We have only a finite time to be mothers and when that clock starts ticking we abandon our strength and jump into bed with whoever is left, forgetting talk of deadlines and PowerPoint presentations in favour of Mamas & Papas buggies and ovulation diaries. Not all women want children but I challenge any woman to say she doesn't want loving relationships. I wish I'd had the advice that I am giving to my 21-year-old sister: if you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't do later (apart from having kids).

We can't determine everything through our own will. A woman still has to consider the reality of her biological clock. It's genetic and hard-wired. Furthermore women want, as part of their nature, loving relationships. Again, this is not something that can be changed according to individual will.

Therefore, Zoe Lewis does something that shows character. She cannot now change her mistakes, but she can try to steer younger women away from her own fate. So she encourages younger women not to reject good men and leave things too late.

Nor does Zoe Lewis take the easy option of blaming men or a patriarchy. She does not believe that it was men who prevented her achieving the right kind of balance in life. It was the feminism held amongst women:

In the future I hope that there can be a better understanding of women by women. The past 25 years have been confusing and I feel that I've been caught in the crossfire. As women we should accept each other rather than just appreciating “success”. I have always felt a huge pressure to be successful to show men that I am their equal. What a waste of time. Wife and mother should be given parity with the careerist role in the minds of feminists.

She now feels it was a waste of time to pursue "equality as sameness". She recognises that a woman who sets out to do this won't ever give parity to the role of wife and mother.

Finally, she again makes the point that autonomy, whilst important, isn't the sole, overriding good to be chased relentlessly at the expense of everything else:

Choice and careers are vital, of course, but they shouldn't be pursued relentlessly. I love being a writer and still have my dream but now I am facing facts. The thing that has made me feel best in life was being in love with my ex-boyfriend and the thing that makes me feel the most centred is being in the country with kids and dogs, and yes, maybe in the kitchen.

She feels that she has missed out on the things that have turned out to be most important to her. She is yet more proof that liberalism is especially unsuitable when it comes to relationships.

Trials of a feminist daughter

Rebecca Walker was brought up by an American feminist icon, Alice Walker. Rebecca, though, does not share her mother's feminism and for obvious reasons.

Modernity makes individual autonomy the key good in life. Feminism insists that women receive an equal measure of autonomy. Where, though, does this leave motherhood? If you believe, above all, in "independence" - in being able to follow your own will in any direction - then motherhood will be thought of as an impediment.

And so it was in the Walker household. Rebecca was brought up to think that having children was the ultimate form of servitude, and Alice put motherhood low down in her priorities.

Rebecca found it impossible to adopt her mother's feminism: as a child she yearned for a more traditional mother and she found it difficult later in life to suppress her own maternal instincts. When she finally had a child of her own, and found it such a rewarding experience, the break with her mother's feminism was complete.

Here is Rebecca West's criticism of feminism in her own words:

The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness ...

It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.

You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.

In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from 'enslaving' me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late - I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

... I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

... the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive ... A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things ...

As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on ...

When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.

I tried to push it to the back of my mind, but over the next ten years the longing became more intense ...

I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities ... But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?

... there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been made, you need to make alterations.

Singer not so doctrinaire

Jill Singer is not as doctrinaire a leftist as I thought she was. First there was her comment late last year in support of traditional men:

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms.

I hear many women complain they feel dudded in their relationships, that gender equality means women's workload is made unbearable by both work and home duties.

Their husbands apparently benefit from their wife's income but don't put in more at home themselves.

We're not just talking about caring for children, but old-fashioned domestic duties that men used to do such as household repairs. Sure, there are lots of good handymen out there, but they're not married to anyone I know.

Now she has written an article on the importance of our home country and culture and the dislocation of migrants living in a foreign land.

She begins her piece by quoting an ancient Indian text:

One of the paths to happiness, according to an ancient Indian text, is not to leave your homeland permanently.

The wisdom of this has struck me during my visit to Vietnam.

Singer joined a party of Vietnamese men and women and noted:

... it was remarkable to witness their love of country ... The people here are so enthusiastic about their culture and prosperity that I feel sympathy for the Vietnamese who were forced to make their lives elsewhere in the wake of the Vietnam War.

One of the Vietnamese women has a sister living in Sydney who wants to return home but won't because of her Australian born children. According to Singer,

The expatriate sister longs for her family in Vietnam, but her children are Australian.

She lives a life amputated from her culture.

Of those Vietnamese refugees who cannot return home because of "newly formed bonds" Singer writes:

They have gained new homes and new opportunities, but they are also missing out on so much.

Nor does Singer exclude her own kind from the appeal of native land and culture. She writes of those Australians who move overseas that:

Being an outsider can be exhilarating as a visitor, but can prove tiresome over time.

She tells us too that,

I have often dreamed of living elsewhere ... And then I think of being permanently away from home, friends and family, and the appeal quickly fades. Travel is a tonic, but home is a haven.

The conclusion Singer draws from all this is not a conservative one. She argues that refugees wouldn't lightly forsake their homelands and therefore should be judged as genuinely in need rather than as aspiring to a better lifestyle.

It's a pity Singer didn't draw the more obvious, albeit bolder, conclusion, namely that those claiming refugee status should be resettled in places most similar to their home country and culture. This would be an effective way to test whether refugee claimants are genuine, and it would also mean that genuine refugees would suffer the least degree of cultural dislocation.

To illustrate this point, consider the case of a white farmer driven out of Zimbabwe. Would he feel more at home resettled in rural Australia or in a suburb of Beijing? It would seem perverse to place him in Beijing, where both he and his children could never feel part of the mainstream. Yet the refugee policies in place today don't consider this issue, and claimants are resettled without consideration of their prospects for a cultural identity.

Finally, it's worth noting that Singer's article represents something of a return to a traditional view. Throughout European history exile from your homeland was considered an unfortunate fate. Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy of the exile that:

You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another's bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another's stairs ...

In Njal's Saga (written in Iceland in the 1200s) the hero Gunnar is sent into exile for three years. As he is leaving, though, his horse stumbles, causing him to look homeward. He decides to stay, even though this will leave him an outlaw and lead to his death.

Finally, I'm reminded too of Elizabeth Fenton, who travelled with her husband to Australia in the 1820s. In the Arab ship she sailed on were two men, both exiles of a kind, whom she pitied. Of the first she wrote:

He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners, and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab. He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique ... Poor fellow!

The second was from Greece:

Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it, - a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice. Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

So Jill Singer, in writing of love of homeland and the loss of exile, is contributing to a longstanding tradition within Western culture.

A feminism which ends in tears

Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, The sins of our feminist mothers.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

Nor did the feminist mothers warn their daughters of the biological clock, so that:

We are the ones, now in our late 30s and early 40s, who are suddenly sitting before a sheepish doctor listening to the words:

“Well, I’m sorry, but you may have left your run too late. Women at your age find it very difficult to get pregnant naturally ...”

For Virginia Haussegger the end result is that,

here we are, supposedly “having it all” as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes ... It’s a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is – for me at least – the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless ... and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.

Of course, Virginia Haussegger received a bucketing from the sisterhood for her bold complaints. She has, though, held firm in making criticisms of feminism, even publishing a book this month, Wonder Woman, in which she declares feminism to be “an inadequate structure from which to build a life.”

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how far she goes in really challenging feminism. Not too far, I expect, as this would require a radical rethinking of the way things are valued in a liberal society.

Is the important thing in life, as liberals claim, establishing an unimpeded individual choice? If yes, then women who break down traditional restrictions on their choices, for instance by “breaking through” career barriers, really are the feminist heroines they are made out to be.

But what if this assumption is wrong? What if the important thing is to fulfil the better and deeper parts of our own inborn natures? Then the task would not be to break through traditional stereotypes but to create the best conditions in which we could fulfil our masculine or feminine natures – for instance, by protecting the conditions in which women could express and experience marital and maternal love.

Virginia Haussegger is trying to warn us that even when the liberal option is undertaken most successfully, even when we create the greatest level of individual autonomy, in which our individual choices are least impeded, all we get is a pleasant and comfortable, but barren and pointless existence.

This was first posted May 25, 2005. Although it covers similar ground to other articles I've written, I think it's worth revisiting as Virginia Haussegger describes so ably the effect of feminism on my generation. I'll be back to posting new items shortly.

The end of the wave?

Years ago I was browsing through a second hand bookshop and I found a pile of American magazines from the late 1940s. The lead column in one of these magazines was written by a female editor. The editor asked the question of whether feminism had really been worth it: worth the disruption to relationships, to family life and to motherhood. She answered no.

I wish now that I had bought the magazine for future reference. The article seems to mark a significant shift in attitude; it was, after all, at exactly this time that the very long phase of first wave feminism finally came to an end.

I wonder too if we have now reached a similar turning point. It's possible that the shorter, but more intense, wave of feminism which began in the early 1970s and peaked in Australia in 1994 is now really starting to turn.

Older feminists seem to have become disillusioned with the disruption caused by feminism to their own personal lives; instead of a stridently orthodox feminism it's now increasingly common for political women to reassert the traditional in relationships, or even to express regret at some of the effects of feminism on society.

I'll give two recent examples. Jill Singer is the resident left-wing columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun (possibly in her mid 30s, though I'm not sure). In her recent article on masculinity (Latham Shot Down 02/20/06), there's a clear shift away from the usual feminist support for role reversal and raising empathetic men. Nor is there talk of traditional provider-type men being dinosaurs or oppressors. Instead we get this:

While there's a growing number of women fortunate to have supportive stay-at-home husbands, the majority probably still prefer their man to be a traditional bread-winner.

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms.

I hear many women complain they feel dudded in their relationships, that gender equality means women's workload is made unbearable by both work and home duties.

Their husbands apparently benefit from their wife's income but don't put in more at home themselves.

We're not just talking about caring for children, but old-fashioned domestic duties that men used to do such as household repairs. Sure, there are lots of good handymen out there, but they're not married to anyone I know.

It's pretty sad hearing a bunch of educated, well-paid, busy working mothers fantasising about their husbands repairing a door hinge.

Women might melt at the sight of men who are good with children and doggies, but what really brings us undone is an old-style bloke who knows one end of a spanner from the other and black from red in a balance sheet.

... Snags are for nagging, not shagging.

What women really want, sugggests the very left-wing Jill Singer, is an "old-fashioned bloke" rather than a feminist new man.

Then there's the recent contribution of feminist novelist Fay Weldon. Now 75, she too has broken with the feminist orthodoxy of the past. Instead of promoting gender role reversal as a "liberation" for women, she now worries that,

many women are failing to accept that, hormonally and physiologically, they are programmed to experience life differently from men.

I think we need to make the most of being women as women, not aspirational men. The assumptions we all make now as to what comprises a good relationship are upside down. The differences between men and females are what we should be celebrating.

Fay Weldon even appears to feel some guilt for her own earlier feminism. A near death experience convinced her of the existence of an after life, but she wrote that "It is not all sweetness and light over there, at least it won't be for me." A journalist for the Melbourne Age sought clarification on this and asked her if she had a sense that she was being held responsible for doing something bad. She answered,

Yes. Because contempory culture is (partly) my fault. If you help shift the balance in gender, you feel a vague responsibility. Because at the time people shook their fists at you and walked out on you because you were doing that and they may have been right.

I'm not suggesting that feminism will go away entirely. There will still exist feminist academics and a layer of femocrats in government employment (just as there was in the 1950s).

But hopefully some space will open up for family formation, just as it did in the post-War period. If this does occur, the challenge then for conservatives will be to weaken the influence of the underlying liberalism which keeps generating fresh waves of feminism (when the personal costs have been forgotten).