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Saturday, January 15, 2005

Handmaid's Tale Watch for Saturday, January 15, 2005
Posted by Jill | 9:57 AM
Let's recap where we are so far in the Handmaid's Tale Watch:

First we have the Virginia bill which would require any woman having a miscarriage to report it to law enforcement within 24 hours. We managed to get this one nipped in the bud...for now.

Then we have outrage that Jennifer Aniston might prefer to work on her career than have Brad Pitt's baby.

Now we have the idiotic David Brooks waxing mournful about the legions of American women over 40 who regret that they never had children:

It's possible that some of these women regret not having children in the way they regret not taking more time off after college. But for others, this longing for the kids they did not have is a profound, soul-encompassing sadness.

And it is part of a large pattern. Most American still tell pollsters that the ideal family has two or three children. But fewer and fewer Americans get to live in that kind of family.


Now I have no doubt that there are women in this country who resemble that Roy Liechtenstein design-inspired T-shirt of the comic strip woman with the tears in her eyes saying, "Oh my God! I forgot to have children!" But as a woman of 49 who never had children, I can attest that it is perfectly possible to have a fulfilling life without them. Indeed, I would go so far as to say it's an easier life without them.

Brooks' op-ed piece is not entirely without merit. He rightly points out that the sequence in which most women live their lives mirrors that of men without taking into account the very real issue of decreased fertility over time.

For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.

But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction.

Neil Gilbert observes in the current issue of The Public Interest that as women have entered the work force, they have adopted the male model, jumping directly into careers. Instead, he suggests, it would be better to make decisions based on what he calls the "life-course perspective." It's possible that women should sequence their lives differently from men, and that women may need a broader diversity of sequence options.

Gilbert, who is a professor of social welfare at Berkeley, points out that right now our social policies are friendly toward this straight-to-work sequence and discourage other options. Programs like day care and flexible leave help parents work and raise kids simultaneously. That's fine for some, but others may prefer policies that help them do these things sequentially.


The problem with this model is that the American workplace values youth almost to the exclusion of anything else -- not just in its female employees but its male employees as well. Age discrimination starts to kick in at age 35 and really goes into high gear at around age 40. For women, add the emphasis on youthful appearance that women have to deal with to a greater degree than men, and such a model just isn't workable.

I would love to see a society in which an aging woman is valued for having experience; in which companies would rather hire someone with a thickened waist and some crows feet BECAUSE she has experience and maturity and can handle the job, instead of a Paris Hilton blond with breast implants and a short skirt. But that's not the society we live in. So the question is how can we as a society begin to appreciate maturity when plastic surgery is now considered almost as mandatory to retain youthful appearance as haircolor?

My biggest problem with Brooks' piece is this:

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle," has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing - or to put it another way, we don't have enough young people to support our old people. (That's what the current Social Security debate and the coming Medicare debate are all about.)


I'm sorry, but as soon as we start getting into "increased fertility is good for the country", I wonder how they're going to make that happen.

Brooks seems to be advocating something that at least on the surface looks "liberal" -- instituting policies that on the surface encourage women to be fruitful and multiply by providing tax credits to stay-at-home parents. He doesn't specifically say that women should be those stay-at-home parents, but the implication is pretty clear. What he doesn't say is how to make such an arrangement viable at a time when two incomes are not only necessary to sustain the absurdly high standard of living Americans enjoy, but even just to have a cushion against corporations who regard employees as expendible. If one of two breadwinners is laid off, in many cases the family can cut back, but manage. If the only breadwinner is laid off, it is catastrophic. Where is the corporation's responsibility in this "be fruitful and multiply" model?

Reproductive technology today is such that any woman who wants a child can have one -- if she doesn't insist on having the husband to go with it. In this day and age, there is absolutely no reason for a woman who really wants a child to not have one, assuming she is physically able. So what is this about, then? Is the regret that 70% of childless women over 40 (as cited by Brooks from a Gallup poll) claim to feel a regret solely about not having had children, or is it a regret that they were not able to find a partner with whom to have them? Or a regret that they are unable to fit into some artificial Mom/Dad/Buddy/Sis/Dog/Tract House model that really only existed for a brief time in post-WWII America?

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