She didn't get the memo?

Hayley Hendrix

Hayley Hendrix is a Perth woman who, being single in her early 40s, used a sperm donor she found on Facebook to conceive a child.

She's not alone in doing this, but she is right in line with modern ideology in how she frames her life choices.

Why did she wait until 42 to become a mother? She very honestly describes how she spent her prime years of youthful fertility:

I'm really ready at 42 to be a mother. I was too career focused, too 'me-oriented' to have done this a decade ago. I was living in Los Angeles – it was a hectic lifestyle and there is a real Peter Pan syndrome going on there.

'You almost never grow up and I suppose this is how I missed the memo for motherhood,' Ms Hendrix said.

'I was thinking of where to travel next, what bar was the coolest place to be seen at, who was the coolest person to hang out with.

'Life now is a world apart, filled with unwashed hair and dirty nappies. And I couldn’t be happier. I am more fulfilled now than I ever have been.'

Ms Hendrix explained that living in LA, she felt a void that is gone now. These days, she feels deeply rewarded by the simple things in life.

'Remy’s smile has filled my heart,' she proudly told Femail.

'I am really present with him – he is getting all of me so it is the best of both worlds for the two of us. Not only did I have a miracle child, I really found my purpose.'

It's not that there were no potential fathers to be had, but that she followed the liberal script and spent her younger years in pursuit of an "expressive individualism" in which we focus on those things we can choose as autonomous individuals, such as career, travel and food - as well as casual, uncommitted relationships.

Hayley Hendrix admits that this realm of choice was not genuinely fulfilling or purposeful, and that she has found herself in motherhood, but she just can't let go of her ideological commitments. This is how she justifies single motherhood:

Ms Hendrix wants women to know that they are the authors of their own story, and that regardless of their relationship status, they too can become a mother just like her.

She added that while she acknowledges that there are strangers out there who may disagree with her choice, she wants to share her story publicly to show women that there is no 'right' way to have children.

'It's about breaking down stigma and purely traditional ways of thinking.'

So she's learnt nothing. Instead of admitting "I should not have wasted my prime fertile years doing insubstantial things" she is instead claiming to be a liberal heroine who is the author of her own story (autonomous) and who is breaking down traditional ways of thinking (i.e. breaking down limits on individual choice).

It was this focus on maximising autonomous choice that got her into trouble in the first place, yet she is doubling down on it and encouraging other women to do the same thing.

And it's a lie. She claims that there is no right way to have children. Yet her child will grow up without having a father in his life. And she herself, as a mother, will lose the depth of love and support that would have come from a relationship with the father of her child. She is pushing toward a kind of spiritual barrenness or sterility in denying our more profound relational needs in favour of an "I can choose any which way" mentality.

We are "creatures" in the sense of having a given, created nature and therefore there are necessarily limits on what we can rightly choose if we wish to genuinely flourish as individuals within a community.

There are even leftists now who are using the word "slave" to express how they feel within a modern, liberal society. They are expressing a deeper intuition here, that freedom is not really being able to choose insubstantial things as an autonomous individual. We do not really experience this as a state of control or agency, but as powerlessness over ourselves and our society. In the classical tradition, freedom was more usually understood as an acquired ability to govern ourselves, through habits of virtue, which would then give rise to communities oriented the same way, i.e. in which men were able to apply self-limitations not only to preserve political freedoms, but to live within a community that was able to orient itself toward the good.

Hayley Hendrix changed her surname after having her Facebook baby:

Ms Hendrix, formerly Hayley Chapman, changed her surname as a result of her experience with social media sperm donation to represent the new chapter she had forged for herself and baby Remy.

'I did it to show that Remy and I are a family in our own right.

'I am my own person on my own mission –I don’t need to wait for someone else.'

I'm not sure what exactly to make of this. I suspect, though, that it is another assertion of individual autonomy, in the form of rejecting a connection both to the past and future. Usually our surname marks a particular family lineage that connects us to generations past, present and future. When you select your own surname, to mark yourself as "a family in our own right", then it is just you and the baby as a one generational unit and identity.

It's noteworthy that Hayley Hendrix is a very good looking woman. In most eras, she would have had no trouble finding a high quality man to form a family with. Yet, having embraced the liberal anticulture, she found herself in her later 30s "desperately seeking" motherhood. All she aspired to by this time was to be impregnated by an anonymous man.

It doesn't have to be this way. Last week I visited a family I've known for a couple of years now. I walked in at a good time - they were all on the couch, laughing together - father, mother, three children and another on the way. You could sense the familial love, of the kind that most people aspire to.

The parents have achieved this at a relatively early age, early 30s at the most. How? In their case, they have a serious commitment to an independent church, and therefore to marriage, family and parenthood.

Now, a lot of churches have collapsed into liberal modernity, and many more will not resist liberalism when it comes to issues of nation and identity. But this family nonetheless illustrates the point, that if there is an active community of people, with serious and explicit non-liberal commitments, that a culture different to the liberal mainstream, with different social outcomes, can be generated.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Liberal modernity leads to Amanda Marcotte

I visited Dalrock's site and was interested to find the following quote on abortion by feminist Amanda Marcotte:

…[what a woman] wants trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place.

That is the terrible logic of a liberal morality. For liberals there is no objective right and wrong. What is good is the act of individual choosing, desiring, will-making. For Amanda Marcotte, since the foetus cannot choose, desire or express will it is outside of the moral equation and has no rights. Therefore, all that matters morally are the wants of the mother.

Note too the dangers of the modernist view as expressed by Marcotte. She comes very close to expressing the idea that the person with the strongest will, the strongest will to power, has thereby demonstrated a superior moral status.

I decided to visit the link to Marcotte's original piece to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting her. The piece is interesting because Marcotte is very honest in the way she describes her attitudes. It's a look into the liberal, modernist mindset. Here is Marcotte explaining why, no matter what social policies are in place, she will never want a baby:

You can give me gold-plated day care and an awesome public school right on the street corner and start paying me 15% more at work, and I still do not want a baby. I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. No matter how flexible you make my work schedule, my entire life would be overturned by a baby. I like  my life how it is, with my ability to do what I want when I want without having to arrange for a babysitter. I like being able to watch True Detective right now and not wait until baby is in bed. I like sex in any room of the house I please. I don’t want a baby. I’ve heard your pro-baby arguments. Glad those work for you, but they are unconvincing to me. Nothing will make me want a baby.

She wants her autonomy - her freedom to do whatever she likes, whenever she likes - more than she wants the fulfilment of motherhood. And she is too much of a hedonist to give up a pleasure seeking lifestyle. Which is why she is so strongly in favour of abortion:

This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion. Given the choice between living my life how I please and having my body within my control and the fate of a lentil-sized, brainless embryo that has half a chance of dying on its own anyway, I choose me.

What I would say to fellow traditionalists at this point is that it's not enough to merely condemn Marcotte's moral position. Her moral position points to much deeper failings within modern society which we cannot ignore or pretend don't exist. Society is trending to exactly the mindset that Marcotte is honest enough to describe - the individualistic, hedonistic one. It is an end point of liberal modernity.

Marcotte herself concludes her piece with the admission that she is selfish and hedonistic, but she believes that this is how women should be and that it is only "gender norms" that make women anything else:

So, reading those three paragraphs above? I bet at some point you recoiled a bit, even if you don’t want to have recoiled a bit. Don’t I sound selfish? Hedonistic? Isn’t there something very unfeminine about my bluntness here? Hell, I’m performing against gender norms so hard that even I recoil a little. This is actually what I think, and I feel zero guilt about it, but I know that saying so out loud will cause people to want to hit me with the Bad Woman ruler, and that causes a little dread.

Amanda Marcotte wants a society built on hedonism and selfishness. With no babies. It's not much of a plan.

Why aren't the Germans having children?

There has been a bit of discussion on the web about Germany's declining population. According to one study, 23% of German men believe that the ideal number of children to have is zero.

So what's gone wrong? I think the big picture looks something like this. The liberal culture we live in tells us that we should focus on those areas of life that we can self-determine as individuals. But what kinds of things can we choose for ourselves on a purely personal basis? Well, we can choose a career; we can choose travel destinations; and we have various consumer, lifestyle and entertainment choices.

Of all these options career is the most serious commitment that is left to us and so liberals tend to treat a professional career as the telos  of life (the purpose of life we develop toward). This aim is strengthened by the fact that liberal opinion makers tend to be ambitious people who have relatively creative and high status careers, within academia, the media and politics.

And so elite liberal opinion tells us that career comes first rather than family. Young Germans have picked up on this message: according to one survey 81 per cent of young Germans believe that their society values professional success over family.

Like elsewhere this leads to 20-something men and women putting most of their effort into education and career, to the point that a commitment to family can seem like one burden too many. 79 per cent of childless Germans believe that "daily life brings enough stress without children."

So what can then be done to lift fertility rates? The liberal solution is to accept that professional life comes first and will take most of the time and energy of young people. Therefore, family life has to be made to fit in with a busy corporate lifestyle, largely through investment in formal childcare, paid maternity leave and so on.

There are even conservatives now who are accepting that this is the way to go for family life. The Australian Liberal Party, our right-wing party, has committed itself to this liberal model of the new family.

But there are problems with doing this. First, there is not much evidence that the massive investments in childcare and paid maternity leave actually raise fertility rates significantly. In Germany the fertility rate is 1.4; in countries like Sweden and France which have pioneered the childcare and paid maternity leave policies it is just a little higher at 1.7 (for native Frenchwomen it is 1.7). That's still a long way below replacement fertility levels.

And that's hardly surprising. If you accept a culture in which individual fulfilment via career is the leading principle, then why would people choose to have large families? Most people will choose to have just one or two children and some will choose to be "childfree". That makes it very difficult to get to a replacement population level.

In the newer model of family life there is supposed to be a unisex model of parenting, one that is focused not on gendered roles but on an equal division of labour in meeting the practical burdens of looking after children. This too undercuts a reason for committing to family life, as it disconnects our identity as men and women from distinctly important roles within the family as fathers and mothers. It makes parenthood a matter of practical work rather than an expression and a fulfilment of self and identity.

So what's the alternative? I believe that we have to continue to insist that family comes first. In other words, our role as fathers and mothers is a more significant one than our particular work role. Admittedly that won't be an easy sell to those young women who are geared up to career achievement. We may not do as well amongst that particular demographic. However, in my experience many women do eventually become more open to scaling back career commitments once they've had a lengthy experience of the sacrifices demanded at work and once they've married and had children. So the women we lose at age 22 we might well win back by age 35.

Second, it's unreasonable to put tremendous education and work demands on women in their 20s and still expect them to take on an even greater workload by having children. In most cases, the best answer is to get young men into good jobs and to make affordable housing available, so that young men can get back to performing one of the basic tasks of manhood, which is to create a space for their wives to have children. That should continue to be the basic model within a traditionalist culture.

Most women will not ever have high status and creative careers and will most likely readily accept such a model. And there can be flexibility for those women who do want a role outside of the home. Could we not offer such women, to take just one example, some experience on a woman's magazine, then a period of time having children, then a return part-time to the creative role at the magazine?

As for men, because we believe in the importance of the fatherhood role we should be committed to improving the work/life balance for men, so that they have the opportunity to be not only providers but also to fulfil the important mentoring work that fathers should ideally perform within a family.

Educated Gen X women in no man's land

Buried amongst the stories in the Daily Mail is a very significant report on the fate of university educated Generation X women. These women were born between 1965 and 1978, so they are between 33 and 46 years old.

The report begins by noting that few of these women have succeeded in making it into the boardroom. The reason commonly given for this is that women opt out to have children and so lose motivation.

But it turns out that this is not entirely true. An incredible 43% of these women are childless. That's a depressing statistic. Given that the youngest of these women is 33, it means that the most educated of English women are failing miserably when it comes to reproducing and bringing a new generation of children into the world.

So if these 43% are not taking a detour to have children, why haven't they risen through the corporate ranks? According to the newspaper article, many of them eventually grow tired of the long hours and work pressures of the corporate world and so leave for more flexible positions, such as working as consultants:

'Anecdotally we’re seeing them moving into more flexible roles,’ says Dr Angela Carter, a research fellow at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield. ‘They’re setting out on their own or moving into consultancy roles.

‘There has been a popular conception that flexible working appeals to women because they want children, but that’s not the whole story. Generation X women have been brought up with the expectation of “having it all” — and when they’ve found the corporate world is, in fact, often very restrictive and won’t allow this, they’ve gone looking for that freedom elsewhere.'

That ought to be kept in mind when complaints are made that women only make up 15% of company boards. If far fewer women are willing to make the sacrifices, then surely we should expect a preponderance of men on company boards.

Anyway, here is the Helen McNallen story:

Helen McNallen

Helen McNallen, 44, was formerly a high-powered trader for Goldman Sachs until her mid-30s...

‘When I left university it was the tail end of the “yuppie era”, with City traders swilling champagne and frequenting nightclubs,’ she says. ‘I was thrilled to be accepted into this testosterone-fuelled world. At the time, I became the only female trader in my department and felt that I had to work and play like one of the boys.

‘We worked crazy hours and then be out partying with colleagues or clients well into the early hours.

‘I was on a six-figure salary and had a house in the City and a renovated barn in Hampshire. But I was so exhausted I spent nearly all of the weekend in bed. I felt tremendously pressurised, and couldn’t think about having children.’

By her mid-30s, Helen was suffering from severe stress, which she refused to deal with properly for a long time on the grounds that it might make her appear weak.

‘I eventually realised I couldn’t cope any longer,’ she says. ‘The pressure of being a woman in a man’s world was just too much.’

She says she feels cheated by being sold the myth of the female businesswoman who can work like a man. And she adds: ‘I am both too old and too set in my ways to start a family, even if it was physically possible.'

I feel cheated too. Was this really the best use society had for Helen McNallen? She worked so hard that family was impossible, for a lifestyle she was too tired to enjoy and then she quit it all anyway just at the point that her childbearing years were ending. It just doesn't seem to be a rational life course for society to pitch to women. There is loss all round.

Did feminism betray Zoe Lewis?

When Zoe Lewis was a young woman she followed the feminist life path expected of her:

I was part of the 'golden generation' of women who expected to go to university, have careers and enjoy our sexual freedom.

In our 20s, my friends and I pursued casual relationships, thinking all the 'serious stuff' would come along when we'd reached the peak of our success - i.e. in our 30s, when Mr Right would be attracted like a moth to the flame of our blazing glory.

This is what you might describe as a faulty compromise. According to feminism, the highest good in life is autonomy. Therefore, what matters most for a woman is preserving her independence. A woman can achieve this by following a single girl lifestyle based on careers, casual relationships, travel and consumerism.

The instinct to marry and have children, though, runs deep. So most women did not reject marriage and family entirely as life ambitions, even though these require both men and women to sacrifice a degree of autonomy. Instead, marriage was delayed as a life goal and made secondary to other ambitions.

With often disastrous results. It's not so easy for a woman to successfully marry and have children in her 30s - many will miss out. Zoe Lewis is one of those women who left things too late:

My own late 30s have been spent in an inelegant stumble towards validation - quickly trying to do the thing that defines a woman: have a baby.

And I found myself scratching around in the leftovers of my single male peers to find a partner with whom to have a child before it got too late.

It didn't have to be that way. She rejected many men when she was in her 20s:

Had I had this understanding of my inner psyche in my 20s, I would have mentally demoted my writing (and hedonism) and pursued a relationship with vigour.

There were plenty of men and even a marriage offer from someone with whom I would have happily settled down. But no, I wasn't prepared to give up my dreams, the life I had been told was the right and proper one for a modern woman.

She has friends in the same boat:

Sas Taylor, 38, single and childless, runs her own PR company. 'In my 20s, I felt as if I was invincible, unstoppable,' she says. 'Now, I wish I had done it all differently ...'

Nicki P, 35, single and also childless, works in the music industry and adds: 'It was all a game back then. Now, it's serious, and I am panicking. No one told me having fun isn't as much fun as I thought.'

So what has Zoe Lewis decided to do? She reluctantly, as a last resort, went to Denmark to be artificially inseminated. She's now six months pregnant. Her child will never know its father.

She doesn't think of this as a great act of feminist independence. She feels scarred by her experience of being a feminist modern woman, so much so that she didn't want to bring a girl into the world:

I'd convinced myself it was a boy because I felt I'd be better off with a male child. I didn't want my daughter to have to struggle with the pressure of trying to 'have it all' as I have. The sad and uncomfortable truth is that being a woman has often made me unhappy, and I didn't want my daughter to be unhappy either.

She could have done things differently. If she had aimed to marry well in her 20s, she might have had a husband to help support her literary aims - as well as a more fulfilled personal life. She herself seems to recognise this:

I wish I had been given the advice that I am now giving to my sister, who is 22. 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 go back and do later - apart from having kids.

In the future, I hope there can be a better understanding of women by women. The past 25 years has been confusing for our sex, and I can't help feeling I've been caught in the crossfire ...

I have always felt an immense pressure to be successful, to show men I am their equal. What a waste of time that was...

And how does Zoe Lewis now feel about feminism? She has rejected the feminism of her mother's generation. She doesn't think that autonomy (choice, sexual liberation, the single girl lifestyle) should always be the overriding aim in life. Love and family are what matter in the end:

My mother - a film-maker - was a hippy who kept a pile of dusty books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bedside. (Like every good feminist, she didn't see why she should do all the cleaning.) She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation.

As a result, I fought with my older brother and won, and at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.

But, at nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. Now, I want love and children, but they are nowhere to be seen.

When I was growing up, I was led to believe by my mother and other women of her generation 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 dream of being 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.

Ten years ago, I wrote a play called 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.

 And this:

I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother hadn't been such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals ...

Increasing numbers of my strongly feminist contemporaries are giving up their careers and opting for love and children and baking instead. Now, I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side. But the essence of the problem, I can see in retrospect, is not so much time as mentality.

It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel deep down, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.

It's about understanding what is important in life. That does seem to be the crux of it. Is autonomy always what matters most? Or are there other goods in life which deserve our attention and which should be formative in shaping our character and life decisions?

Tipping the balance

Here's some good news:

Mums are having more babies than ever ... the nation's total fertility rate rose from 1.92 babies a woman in 2007 to 1.97 last year, the highest since 1977.

It's important to get the fertility rate back up to at least replacement level (2.1). To understand why, consider the following graph:

The graph shows the damage done by sub-replacement fertility rates in European countries. If these fertility rates don't improve there will be a drastic decline in the European populations of these countries as early as the year 2050.

The graph comes from an excellent article written by Richard Hoste. He explains the following ramifications of the low fertility rate:

It can be projected that the total number of white people lost from the EU, Canada, Switzerland, the Balkans, Norway and the ex-Soviet states including Russia will be around 279,000,000.

If you don't mind the idea of European people not being around any more, this information might not seem to be of such significance. But for traditionalists it does matter. Getting back up to a replacement fertility rate of 2.1 means a great deal.

Nor is it set in stone that fertility rates have to be so depressed. If you look at historical trends, Western fertility rates began to fall in the 1870s, hit a low point in the mid-1930s and then recovered to hit very healthy levels in the early 1960s. They fell again to reach a low point in the early years of this decade, before once again (in Australia at least) recovering ground.

Here is the fertility rate for Australia showing the mid-1930s low point and the recovery in the mid 1960s:

1900:   3.5
1934:   2.1
1961:   3.6

What happened to restore fertility levels? One academic, Jan van Bevel, thinks a traditionalist backlash against modernity might have been the cause:

The interwar period was an era of strong societal tensions, not just in politics and in the economy, but also in marriage and the family (Coontz 2005).

The tide of modernization had been producing ever more social changes at a pace that was bewildering many common people. Some were enthusiastically embracing the opportunities and freedom promised by modernity, within as well as outside the family. Others were alarmed by new patterns of behavior and saw modernity as threatening the proper, established order, bringing degeneration, decline, and decay instead.

Over time, the latter group formed a powerful, conservative, even reactionary counter-force against modernity. Maybe that was one of the factors responsible for the rise of "the golden age" (or golden cage) of the nuclear family in the 1950s and early '60s (Cheal 1991)

As much as I'd like to believe that a powerful group of conservatives put things right, I doubt that this is true. What's more likely is that first-wave feminism finally burnt out during the course of the 1930s, as the costs of the disruption to family formation became increasingly clear.

Still, Van Bevel has a point. Liberal modernity influences people to prioritise individual autonomy. The modernist mindset is to want to avoid serious commitments that might limit what we can choose to do for ourselves at any moment in time. This runs counter to a culture of family life. Liberal moderns are inclined to prioritise the single lifestyle of personal career aims, travel, casual relationships, consumer choice and recreational pursuits.

Helen Clarke, the former PM of New Zealand, put the liberal mindset as bluntly as it's ever been put, when she explained her decision to remain childless on the grounds that:

You've got better things to do with your life, unimpeded.

But there is a strong foundation for a traditionalist counter-movement. The instinct to marry well and have children runs deeply. Most people haven't given it up as a key life aim; just last week a major survey of Australians aged 18 to 45 found that a "loving relationship" was still the most valued aim in life:

The 1500 men and women ... rated a loving relationship above financial security, independence, career and a social life.

I expect too that many people do want to pass on their own culture and tradition to future generations.  There are even liberals who regret not having contributed in this way. For instance, in my article The no future clause, I quoted the views of Gabriella, a 44-year-old childless English woman. She had been influenced by the liberal modernist mindset in her 20s:

Having children in my 20s would have spelled the end of everything I had spent my life working towards and was about to really enjoy: the ability to spend my money the way I wanted, travel where I wanted, choose my partners, live as I wished.

But in her 40s she was having other thoughts:

If people like me don’t reproduce, civilisation may be the worse for it ... I am a typical product of my family; I can see the thread stretching back through the generations. Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes I do ...

It's the same with Nora. She is a childless Englishwoman who aims to continue, as a liberal modern,

to have fun, to enjoy my job, to meet interesting people, to go on great holidays, to read interesting books

But even she, as committed to the modernist mindset as she is, still feels the draw of other, more traditional, considerations:

I think my parents came from an excellent gene pool," she says, "and it’s a shame that, to date, that hasn’t been passed on ... at the end of our exchange Nora declares fervently, “You and I should have had children!” – hastily appending that she meant not for our own sakes, but in social terms. “We’re blessed with brains, education and good health.” She admits that the longer our discourse has continued, “the more I think I am a squanderer of my gifts and my heritage. But I live in a decadent age where that doesn’t seem such a problem. Anyway, devoting my whole life to promulgating my ethnicity is a big ask.

A traditionalist movement could provide a counterbalance to the dominant liberalism and encourage the commitments that many people, even liberals, do still consider seriously. Even if we weren't able to dominate, we could help to tip the balance. As the European fertility chart shows, even small changes have large consequences over time. It's worth making the effort.

Leaving it too late

What does liberalism tell women? It tells women that individual autonomy is the highest good. What matters is the pursuit of one's independence.

Lucy Edge followed the liberal principle. She spent her 20s and 30s in pursuit of financial independence through a career. Love, marriage and motherhood could wait:

I suppose it is little wonder that it took me until the age of 41 to find the right man ... I'd spent most of my life dedicated to building my career.

By 24, I was a strategist at a leading ad agency. I drove a Golf convertible, wore red wool suits with gilt buttons, and thought I was Paula Hamilton from the iconic TV advert. I remained very single, but I told myself - and my concerned mum - that the mews house and engagement ring would come later.

My life didn't revolve around marriage and children. My friends and I were taking our time. We were big kids in shoulder pads, and life was about working, shopping, drinking and having fun.

When I stopped to think about it (which was never for very long), I could never imagine myself in my mother's shoes.

At 22, she'd had me to look after, whereas at the same age I was staying late at the office to check my secretary's typing or prepare for a meeting. At 30, when she spent her evenings cooking for a family, I was living on cigarettes and canapes.

Busy chasing financial independence, I let my most fertile years slip by, never allowing myself to doubt that the love and babies bit would take care of itself. And so I lost the chance to have a baby I didn't even know I wanted until it was too late.

In my 20s there'd been a lightness of touch in my office affairs (the odd kiss and cuddle behind the filing cabinet), but by my 30s my relationships were tinged with desperation.

I hadn't found him, and I was worried. Yet, I refused to prioritise the man-hunt - the idea seemed so old-fashioned.

Here we have a very typical pattern followed by the middle-class women of my generation. Love, marriage and motherhood weren't rejected, they were delayed and de-prioritised. What mattered was living a single girl lifestyle (working, shopping, drinking and having fun), living for the moment, and achieving autonomy and independence.

But finally at age 41 Lucy was ready to settle. She's a pretty woman who was able to find a loyal husband. But she hadn't counted on fertility issues:

Of course, we knew that women over 40 stood less chance of getting pregnant, but we had no idea that they might fail altogether.

I suppose it's a sign of the times that we believed we could have whatever we wanted. We wanted a baby and if we failed to conceive naturally, then IVF was our back-up.

It was the first time in my life I'd ever given motherhood any serious thought, and the yearning hit me like a thunderbolt.

I had spent the whole of my adult life as a London career girl, married to my advertising agency job, with no time or inclination to settle down.

Yet as soon as David, who has his own events marketing company, and I started trying for a baby, my whole perspective changed. I held my belly protectively and imagined myself walking down the Finchley Road heavily pregnant.

I looked at baby food in the supermarket aisles and noticed women with their children. I imagined the warming smell of my baby's head, the tiny fingers and perfect fingernails. I imagined having a small hand to hold as I walked down the street.

My world opened up with possibility.

"We believed we could have whatever we wanted". This idea sounds dumb, but remember that liberalism tells people that they have a right to self-create in whatever direction they choose, so liberal moderns have to either hopefully believe that there are no limits or else accept that liberalism itself is unworkable.

Note too just how radical the effects of liberal modernism are when it comes to the lives of women: Lucy claims that she hadn't seriously thought about motherhood until her early 40s. This is historically very odd; in most cultures motherhood is a core aspect of the lives of women.

Sadly there were to be no children for Lucy and David:

And yet you are not getting pregnant,' the doctor said, just as I was preparing to celebrate. 'The most likely explanation is age. When a woman reaches her 40s, we have to recognise that we're working with older eggs, and I am afraid their quality declines over time. The question is what we do next.'

What she said next shook me. A woman of 43 or 44 has a 13 per cent chance of getting pregnant through IVF and a 70 per cent chance of miscarriage. 'So Lucy, your net chance of delivering a baby with IVF is around four per cent. I'm really sorry.'

But all that was academic when it came to finding an IVF clinic. A second round of tests revealed that, in just six months, my hormone levels had changed, my fertility had dropped, meaning no clinic was prepared to take me on.

The odds of success were so slim that it was, they claimed, unethical to take my money.

She responded with anger to her loss:

I was angry - with anyone who had fallen pregnant accidentally, anyone who didn't realise how lucky they were to have a child.

I was angry at the ad agency for keeping me in the office throughout my childbearing years, and at the tobacco companies who had sold me the cigarettes I'd smoked throughout my 20s, and at the government for never having had a public health campaign on the subject of increasing age and decreasing fertility.

But, deep down, I knew I had no one to blame but myself. I had never stopped to think about the bigger picture.

Look at the consequences of all this. Lucy Edge sacrificed everything for an office job she eventually quit anyway. Neither she nor her husband will ever have children, so they won't be contributing any well-raised children to society. Lucy didn't take love or marriage seriously in her 20s, so she contributed to the demoralisation of the young men of her generation.

Autonomy as the sole, overriding good didn't work out so well. It changed the priorities of the general culture. Society took seriously the issue of female careerism, but relegated motherhood to the realm of "it will take care of itself at some indeterminate time in the future".

There's no balance in this. We have to move away from the reductive idea of autonomy as the organising principle of society, so that other important goods, such as love, marriage and motherhood, can be given due weight.

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.

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.

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.

Why doesn't paid leave raise birth rates?

There's a big push in Australia right now to introduce paid maternity leave. A new political party called What Women Want has been formed to agitate for paid leave, and the media is awash with articles from both the left and right supporting the idea.

Finance Minister Nick Minchin, though, has been solidly opposed to the idea of paid maternity leave. Back in 2002, he rejected introducing such a scheme because:

There is no evidence that paid maternity leave in particular increases the fertility rate. Twenty out of 24 developed countries with paid maternity leave have lower fertility rates than Australia.

My Department has now formally costed paid maternity leave at between $415m and $780m per annum depending on the rate of pay and eligibility. This would be a major new burden on taxpayers.

I cannot see the justification for taxpayers handing over an additional half a billion dollars to mothers in the paid workforce while ignoring all other mothers.

And he is right. Even if you pay women a full salary to stay home with their children, there is no overall benefit to the fertility rate. The country in the OECD with the highest fertility rate, the USA (2.09), has one of the least developed systems of paid leave.

Australia in 2006 had a fertility rate of 1.81, which is similar to that of countries with paid maternity schemes such as Denmark (1.76) and Sweden (1.86) - but without the very high taxes required to fund the Scandinavian systems.

Which raises an important question. Why doesn't offering such generous financial incentives to women increase their motivation to have children?

The socialised family

In 2003 Elizabeth Kath wrote a lengthy paper titled titled "The Mother of All Battles: Why Paid Maternity Leave is Overdue in Australia".

Her argument is that paid maternity leave is necessary to transform the role of women from the oppressive traditional one of mother to that of professional careerist. We are to abandon the idea that the maternal role is natural and transfer the responsibility for reproduction from individual women to society.

She states 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.

... From this theory of women's oppression it would seem that the solution would be to move reproductive labour into the public realm. However, the problem with unequal relations between men and women is that they are considered 'natural' and therefore inevitable ... Traditionally, the responsibilities of reproduction were seen to belong to women due to their 'distinct nature'. This nature, including such qualities as the 'maternal instinct' and the tendency to nurture, meant women were biologically suited for reproductive labour.

However, feminists have disputed the traditional view, arguing it is a cultural construct ... In The Second Sex, Beauvoir questions the notion that women have a 'maternal instinct'. In reality there is no such thing, she argues ... (pp.3-5)

Here then is one possible reason why societies which adopt paid maternity schemes don't have higher birth rates than other comparable countries like America or Australia. The philosophy behind these schemes is explicitly anti-maternal. If you believe that motherhood is oppressive to women, and that there is no natural maternal instinct or drive, and that the primary focus of women's lives should be their professional careers, then there is unlikely to be a high level commitment to reproduction by women.

The French disconnection

Marilyn French made a splash in 1977 with the publication of The Women's Room. This angry feminist novel tells the story of Mira, an unhappily married woman who escapes via divorce to an independent life of study and sexual freedom. The book sold 21 million copies.

Last Saturday The Age ran a story on the now 77-year-old French ("The French Revolution" 5/5/07). What struck me most about the piece were the "disconnects" in the views of the ageing feminist writer.

For instance, Marilyn French's two children are now in their 50s and both are childless. It's understandable that French should miss being a grandmother and therefore lament the growing rate of childlessness in Western society:

She still has a dim view of marriage, but is passionate about motherhood, believing it should be the central organising principle of society. She sits forward, eyes flashing, when I ask why. "What else are we here for? I mean, if there is a god, what did the god put us here to do? One thing: have children. That's it. And what do we do? We make it into the least interesting, unpaid, on-the-side thing you can do - societies are geared so that really, you'll have an easier ride if you just don't have children. Perverse values.

She points to rising childlessness among women of the current generation and says it's only going to get worse. "You make it so hard, they're just not going to have the babies - people are going to have to pay them to have babies. Building airplanes - is that really what we're here to do? Going to the moon - is that really a primary consideration? No.

I agree with much of this. In a sense society traditionally has been organised around motherhood: around creating a protected and secure space in which women can bear and nurture their children. Most people too do ultimately think of their children as being the most important of their life achievements.

I wonder, though, how French thinks motherhood can be treated as the central organising principle of society if men aren't brought into an active and enduring support for the mothers of their children through marriage.

It's odd too that French thinks that the way to make motherhood more interesting and attractive is to commodify it. Usually the left is opposed to the commodification of social relationships under capitalism, so it's notable that French wants motherhood to be valued in terms of wages and market value.

However, there is a more jarring disconnect in French's views on motherhood and children. She proudly tells her interviewer that:

I've had more love affairs than anyone else except for my daughter ... The number amounts to the hundreds.

We learn too that French has,

a strict policy of living for pleasure. This is a big thing for French.

She won't commit to living with anyone else, choosing instead to live independently:

I've had lovers that would come for four, five days or every other weekend - and that's fine with me. I like that.

She has spent her time writing, travelling (most recently to the Amazon), and having casual affairs. It's the standard modernist lifestyle choice, if you think that autonomy (independence) is the key good in life and that traditional commitments represent an oppressive restriction.

The problem is that it's difficult to fit children into it. When we have children we give up part of our autonomy: we are no longer unimpeded in choosing what to do or be. So French is living and advocating an autonomist lifestyle, the classic single girl lifestyle, in which motherhood is likely to loom as a repressive defeat.

French wants things which are at odds with each other. She advocates autonomist views which are likely to lead people to associate motherhood negatively with oppression. Consider the opinions of right-liberal Charles Richardson, quoted approvingly at the left-liberal Larvatus Prodeo site. Charles Richardson recently attacked the Treasurer's calls for improved fertility on the grounds that:

Decreased birthrates are associated with two things: increased standards of living and improved status of women ... If Australia wants more people we don't have to return our womenfolk to domestic drudgery in order to get them. We just need to open the door (to immigrants) a bit wider ... The drivers of fertility crusades are racism and misogyny: keep the women barefoot and pregnant ...

So autonomy theory led Marilyn French in the 1970s to condemn marriage as a domestic restriction and to propose an independent lifestyle in its place; the same theory now leads modern liberals like Charles Richardson to condemn motherhood as an oppressive domestic burden on women, limiting women's independence.

There's one other disconnect in French's views I'd like to briefly mention. French believes a true revolution in the relations between the sexes has stalled because men haven't changed enough:

Too many are still trapped in the old deluded myths of masculinity, a "hollow suit" of actions and beliefs that has proved extremely stubborn to alter, despite all the talk of SNAGs and metrosexuals, she says.

But is French romantically attracted to the modern metrosexual male? When asked why she wrote, My Summer With George, a novel about an older female pursuing an eligible male journalist, this is the response:

"Well, I got a crush on a guy," she says bluntly. "I realised, I've gone through all these experiences, and here I am - how old was I? I don't know, in my late 60s - and it was like Cinderella. I'm not kidding. You really mean I still have these feelings, that somebody's going to come along, this prince, and make my world wonderful? ... Talk about the triumph of hope over experience."

So the fundamental relationship between men and women, the fundamental attraction between the sexes, is still experienced, even by an ageing radical feminist, in terms of traditional gender. Yet, Marilyn French is calling for a revolution in which traditional masculinity is overthrown.

In other words, she admits that she herself responds romantically to the traditional male, and yet she criticises men for being too traditionally masculine. It seems to me that her own heterosexuality is getting in the way of a consistent politics here. Personally, I'd suggest that she modify the politics at this stage, but I think it's more likely for expectations of love to be sacrificed. A pity, though, if women in general are encouraged to follow suit.

Losing motherhood

It's soon to be election time here in Australia. Currently the right liberal Liberal Party is in power, and they have promised voters a $3000 "baby bonus" as part of their family package.

Interestingly, the left liberal Labor Party has warned that the baby bonus might backfire by encouraging teenage girls to become pregnant.

Why is this interesting? Because it's usually conservatives who worry that government welfare undermines the family. Conservatives often argue that the best way to help families financially is to give tax breaks. This form of assistance supports the efforts of men to be providers by returning some of their earnings. It therefore increases the financial benefit to a woman of having a husband, and strengthens the social role of marriage.

The $3000 baby bonus, on the other hand, undermines the position of men in families. It is the government which gets the credit for this kind of family payment, and not husbands. In effect, the government is taking over some of the role of being a provider from men, so that women need a husband as a provider within a marriage to a lesser degree.

That's why you might expect a family-oriented conservative to prefer a $3000 tax deduction to a $3000 baby bonus. But why would a left liberal oppose the bonus?

The answer, perhaps, is revealed in an article by Fiona Stewart in today's Age newspaper. Fiona Stewart is worried that the $3000 baby bonus might encourage young women to become mothers. Why doesn't she want young women to become mothers? She explains that when she was completing academic work on this subject a few years ago,

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 ... (Age 29/5/04)

This is a logical position for a liberal to take. Liberals believe that we should be self-defined through our own reason and will, rather than through unchosen things we simply inherit. Therefore, liberals like Fiona Stewart don't like the idea that a woman's identity should be formed around motherhood as this is part of an inherited "biological destiny" rather than something chosen individually, like a particular career path.

This issue, of how we define ourselves, is raised again later in the article when the reasons why a young woman might choose to have a child are discussed. According to Fiona Stewart,

She will do this, not to get social security benefits as some seem to believe, but because motherhood is a definer of self.

Which is exactly the problem for a liberal like Fiona Stewart. Motherhood is not supposed to be a primary "definer of self" under the rules of liberalism because it's not something self-created out of a woman's own mind, but is a natural outcome of her inherited sex.

What Fiona Stewart would prefer is for women to fashion their self-identity through educational and career accomplishments, with motherhood being a possible later and subsidiary add on.

For Fiona Stewart, if there is to be any incentive for women to become mothers, it shouldn't be in the form of a baby bonus, nor a tax break, but greater support for childcare, so that women needn't interrupt their focus on career or education when they have children.

Hence her less than maternal conclusion that,

If we have to pay women to have children - rather than providing the infrastructure to support the integration of parenting and work - it should be done in a way that ensures that education and career still come first.

The kids can wait.

Is this a way of looking at things which is likely to lead to a commitment to family and having children? The answer clearly is no, which helps to explain delayed family formation and low birth rates in liberal, Western countries.

Yet, it's hard to blame young intellectual women like Fiona Stewart. They are simply following through the logic of the orthodox liberal philosophy of the West. Unless we decisively reject this orthodoxy how can we expect our intellectual class to view motherhood as a central "definer of self", rather than as a form of self-identity to be suppressed?

Motherhood is likely to be placed in a losing position, despite concern over low birth rates, until we reject the first principles of liberalism.

(First published at Conservative Central, 29/05/2004)

Another casualty

"Where have all the good fathers gone?" asks journalist Tracee Hutchison in a recent column.

The question was prompted by the competition between several men to be declared the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby. After watching Larry Birkhead jubilantly confirm that he had been found to be the real dad, Tracee felt a little undone:

I suspect I wasn't the only single, childless woman of a certain age who belched up a slightly sour-tasting ironic burp ...

... it seemed incredible, from my experience, that each of them seemed so desperately keen to own up to firing the winning sperm.

If only there were men queueing up for fatherhood duties with such fervour in the real-life version of what happens to women in their late 30s. With due respect to the many doting fathers I know, who love and support their kids in one — or two — homes, I seem to know a lot more women who have either given up chasing child-support payments from absent and/or financially gymnastic fathers or given up the idea of having a biological child at all.

If anecdote is the litmus test for truth, the latter category feels like an epidemic. Especially if you're immersed in that special something that happens to women when their body clock starts shrieking like a wounded hyena and there's not a willing bloke within cooee.

... There aren't enough blokes with sufficient enthusiasm for child-rearing to go around.

What can explain this lack of willing fathers for late-30s women? I'd put the answer as follows.

Back in the mid-1980s Tracee Hutchison was an idealistic feminist:

I was young, passionate and idealistic and felt I was part of something with powerful momentum. I walked with thousands of other women in the annual women's day marches and proudly wore the green, white and purple colours of the sisterhood. I felt that - together - we could make the world a better place.

Feminism in those years did have a powerful momentum. Its message to young women was to remain autonomous, which meant in practice focusing on careers, travel, and casual relationships. The independent, single girl lifestyle was to be stretched out as far as it could be, with marriage and motherhood deferred until some time in a woman's late 30s.

The hold of such ideas over university educated woman was very strong in the late 80s and early 90s. It couldn't help but affect the male attitude to relationships. Men discovered that women were rewarding players and shunning men with traditional, family type qualities. They were also confronted with the message that the male family role was sexist and "anti-woman"; the male effort to provide, for instance, was no longer thought of positively but as a source of inequality hurtful to women.

What were men to do? Some accepted the player role; others opted out completely; some focused on careers or personal interests; a number tried to complement a female autonomy with a male one, in which a loss of love and marriage was to be compensated by a greater freedom of choice in work and a greater independence in relationships.

When many women eventually did decide, in their 30s, that they wanted marriage and motherhood they faced a significant problem, the one troubling Tracee Hutchison. They had been all too successful in their 20s in discouraging the family instincts of men. Suddenly there seemed to be a lack of "good men" who would commit to the role of self-sacrificing husband and father.

So the problem derives, at least in part, from the tendency of feminism to follow the autonomy strand of liberalism, in which what is thought to matter most is our ability as an individual to be self-determining (and therefore independent). This didn't lead most women of Tracee Hutchison's generation to reject marriage or motherhood in absolute terms, but it did lead them to fatally defer such commitments.

Which raises an interesting question. Autonomy liberals often talk about life being given a purpose by our having a life plan which is determined not by tradition but by our own reasoned choices.

Can it really be said, though, that the feminist cohort of the 1980s and early 90s had a life plan based on reasoned choices?

Even when I was in my early 20s, I thought some of the choices women were making were madly shortsighted. Why would you defer motherhood to your late 30s, to the very last moments of potential fertility? Even now Tracee Hutchison speaks of women in their late 30s having shrieking ovaries, when fertility decline actually sets in much earlier at about the age of 30.

Why too would you sacrifice the opportunity for love in your 20s, at the very time we are most impelled toward love by our romantic and sexual impulses? Why would you accept a more cynically casual attitude toward relationships at exactly this time?

It wasn't difficult to predict, even back in the 1980s, that there would be many regrets later on, such as those experienced now by Tracee Hutchison and her circle of friends.

So why might autonomy liberals find it difficult to make life plans based on rational choices, when this is so frequently emphasised in their philosophy?

I suppose we could answer with Edmund Burke that individual reason is not as effective an instrument for most people as liberals assert it to be:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages.

Yet, even if a feminist woman had enough private stock of reason to generate a successful life plan, there are other factors likely to hold her back.

For example, the belief in autonomy has two separate effects. First, it generates the idea that we should determine our own life plan based on rational choice as a means to bring meaning to our existence. Second, it then tells us that these life choices should maximise our autonomy.

But the two effects can only complement each other if it's always rational to prefer autonomy over other goods in life. Otherwise, the second effect (of always maximising autonomy) leads us to make irrational choices.

This is, I believe, what happened to the feminist cohort. They were encouraged to choose an independent, single-girl lifestyle over marriage and motherhood as this appeared to maximise autonomy. Yet the single-girl lifestyle was unlikely to prove a superior good in the longer-term for most of these women, and so it involved a set of irrational choices (whilst serving a "logic" of autonomy).

There are other factors too in explaining this problem of liberal life plans, but I'll leave discussion of them for a future post.

An Australian Carrie?

What happens when young women are brought up, en masse, to be liberals? One possible outcome is that you get the Carrie Bradshaw kind of woman.

Carrie Bradshaw was the lead character on the now defunct TV show, Sex and the City. Carrie had a glamorous job as a newspaper columnist, dated men for romance and sex rather than marriage, and relied on female friends for companionship.

In all this, she was fulfilling the liberal principle that we are supposed to be independent, autonomous, self-defining individuals. Carrie had her own independent income, her own self-chosen career identity, and she had the unrestrained freedom to pursue sex and romantic liaisons.

The question is, of course, whether this liberal kind of lifestyle is ultimately satisfying. The TV show itself never gave a clear yes or no. To some degree it glamorised Carrie's lifestyle, but at times it hinted at the frustration, emotional hurt and loneliness experienced by the thirty-something single girl.

Sophie Cunningham is in some ways a real life Australian version of Carrie Bradshaw. She had the glamorous job (Australia's youngest ever publisher at age 28), and she was well-known in her industry for regaling others with tales of her sexual and romantic exploits.

As one journalist said of Sophie Cunningham's life in her 20s and early 30s "In many ways, she exemplified the successful young independent contemporary woman".

But how satisfying was this kind of success? As it happens, Sophie Cunningham gave up her publishing career at the age of 37 after suffering burn out. She also now admits that her generation of women did not generally experience happiness in relationships. She says that in her late 20s when she moved to Sydney she was living,

amid an epidemic of single people, particularly single women who longed not to be single. There was another epidemic of narcissism and extreme self-focus adding to this unhappiness.

Her interviewer then records her as saying that,

She saw what she describes as a tidal wave of passiveness ... Despite contemporary women's supposed independence, so many had their lives on hold, awaiting the man of their dreams to arrive ... and then their real lives could begin ... I saw so many women living in a state of denial about relationships - hanging on for years with the bloke who is never going to commit, the married man who will never leave his wife, the long-distance lover who'll never be available. The love affair basically exists in their head. (The Age 17/4/04)

The ultimate fate of the independent single girl is too often, it seems, to have a "not quite there" relationship with a man who will never commit to her. This leaves her not as an active and self-defining individual which liberalism claims she will be, but as someone who must passively prolong her wait for the normal processes of adult life to begin.

There is one further confession from Sophie Cunningham. She experienced a maternal longing for a baby, but was never able to achieve this. According to one newspaper interview,

in her early thirties she ached so badly for a child and felt such anger that she didn't have one that it drove her quite mad. 'A lot of people find it very painful not having kids ... I don't think it's brave to admit that you'd love to have children but you haven't had the chance.' (Herald Sun 2/5/04)

So the independent single girl ethos didn't help Sophie Cunningham to succeed in this important part of her life either. Instead, she felt the absence of a child as such a loss that she was driven "quite mad" by her anger.

Limitations

Liberals tell young women that they should be able to do whatever they want to do and be whatever they want to be. It's repeated almost like a mantra.

But ironically it's liberalism itself which most severely limits the lives of women. If women are told that they should aim at independence and self-definition, then they are restricted to those things which you can achieve as an independent, self-defining individual.

And the things that a woman can do on this basis are career, sex, shopping and female friendships. Which is why these things are emphasised in the more feminist of women's magazines and television shows.

But these attainments are too limited in scope to ultimately bring fulfilment to a woman. Sophie Cunningham achieved these things to such a degree that she was held to epitomise the successful independent modern woman. But it is her own testimony that she and woman like her were missing out to the point that they felt their real lives hadn't even begun.

This is because there are important aspects of life which we don't achieve as independent, self-defining individuals. This is where liberalism so much restricts the lives of women, as it undermines such things as marriage and motherhood, which require not autonomy or self-definition, but a stable commitment to others.

(First published at Conservative Central, 16/05/2004)

The single girl stretched too far

Anna Pasternak writes that,

our mothers and grandmothers were courting and acquiring the security of a husband when they were 20 to 25.

More recently, women decided their early 20s are strictly for fun, and now the Relationship Window opens at 28 and closes at 35.

This corresponds to my own observations. Back in the 1990s, there seemed to be an understanding amongst women that marriage was something to be postponed to some unspecified time in their 30s.

This trend can be at least partly explained, I think, by the influence of feminism on modern culture. If the aim is, as feminism claims, for women to seek autonomy, then it makes sense for women to stretch out a single girl lifestyle to the last possible moment.

This is not, though, a wise life strategy for women. It has the following problems:

1) As Anna Pasternak’s article suggests, putting things off for too long can lead women to marry in haste. A single woman of 33 who wants to start a family can be influenced by "screaming ovaries" in accepting a man. A woman of 23 isn’t under such duress when she chooses. Nor does a 23-year-old woman have to worry that she will scare partners away with her desperation for a baby.

2) Women are more likely to experience fertility problems in their 30s. There are countless women now gambling that they will have the children they want in their last few fertile years. As in the nature of any gamble, a lot will miss out.

3) If a whole cohort of women leave marriage and motherhood to their 30s, there will inevitably be an effect on men. There will be men who will spend longer “drifting” in their 20s (staying home, studying rather than working). There will be men who will habituate themselves to a bachelor lifestyle. There will be men who will resent their treatment by women within a culture of casual relationships.

By the time women in their 30s finally decide to seek out a life partner, they are more likely to be left wondering where all the good men have gone.

4) If women leave partnering to a narrow “relationships window” they are more likely to misjudge and leave things too late.

Anna Pasternak quotes the director of a dating agency, Mairead Molloy, who describes the women who typically miss out on the “relationships window” as being:

those who wanted the flat, the job and their own money, and suddenly, they lift up their heads at 37 and think: “Right, where’s the man?”

The women Mairead Molloy is describing have things around the wrong way. Love, marriage and family are what really matter and deserve our first attention. It’s denatured to place them low down on a lifestyle checklist.

The “leave it till last” women sometimes end up in difficult circumstances. According to Mairead Molloy, a woman in her mid-40s is left with few choices. She is no longer fertile, and no longer attractive to men in her own age group. In Molloy’s words:

A 45-year-old woman wants a maximum 47-year-old man, or a good-looking 50-year-old, but a 47-year-old man wants to find a 40-year-old woman.

The problem is that the 45-year-old woman doesn’t want to date the 60-something man who wants to go out with her, and yet she’s terrified of facing 50 alone – and projects that.

How different it would be for that same woman to be seeking a husband when in her mid-20s. She would be at the height of her appeal to men, with nature having arranged things very much in her favour.

On marrying, she would be well-placed to fulfil her “reproductive choice”, in being able to have children and create a family without the anxieties and difficulties of trying to do so late in life.

She would give the gift of her youthful beauty and romantic passion to the man she ultimately commits to, rather than to other men she will have no enduring connection to.

She will share her primary memories of love and affection with the man she has married, rather than with other men.

It might seem more modern for a woman to leave marriage and motherhood to her 30s, but I can’t help but think that this is a mistake and that it’s more sensible for women (and men) to aim to marry in their 20s.