I am female. This means that for as long as I can remember, people have inquired about my intention to procreate. I recall being asked at the age of about
four how many children I intended to have, and being encouraged to seriously contemplate the question. And I did, too, as did my sister.
My brother did not. It didn't matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn't bring it up.
As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).
... But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to "balance" this with our desire for a "career". Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter
encouraging to pessimistic and downright
demeaning. And, of course, we talk about it with each other.
A (nominally feminist) message board I frequent, which is about 98% female, and mostly teens and 20-somethings, discusses the issue with some regularity. It's not like we talk about nothing else (like, to another woman, about something other than a man), but childbearing comes up a lot. A recent thread included the serious suggestion -- discussed at some length! -- that women should start thinking seriously about this around age 16 or 18, when they are deciding on what life-paths to take, career-wise, because some professions are much more compatible with child-rearing. Within the safe space of our discussions, this is a valid and potentially helpful point to make. But a part of me still wants to shout "COME
ON, MY SISTREN! Do whatever you want with your uterus! Have your kids then let's fight like hell to make sure you have the opportunity to continue your career if you want to! To make sure that your partner is equally able (and feels equally obliged) to bear half the burden of caring for them!
To achieve a gender-equal society!"Because, honestly, while a small part of it all makes sense, biologically speaking -- women are the only ones who are physically obliged to take at least
some time off work to accommodate the actual birth of the child -- there's no reason why all of the
intellectual labour of pondering these questions should be done by the ones who incubate the foetuses. When was the last time you heard a group of young men discussing the relative merits of different career choices based on their potential to accommodate any hypothetical future children? Where are all the op-eds telling young
men how to plan their lives around their reproductive capacities? A google search for 'men career children' first asks if I meant '
women career children' (and gives the top two results for that), then shows a whole bunch of pages about how the career-vs.-children issue is an issue for women and not for men. Big news there. I mean, I know writing this isn't going to tell anyone anything new, either; but I'm not informing, I'm just ranting.
By way of further research, I asked a male housemate if anyone had ever asked him to consider the potential effect of children on his career. It was a small sample size, I know, but the research was purely rhetorical; of course no one had. To be fair, he said, 'career' itself was not much of a consideration for him, either -- which is about the answer you'd expect from an anarchist. However, it gets to what
I think is the real root of the problem: that we, not as women but as
people, at least in the time and place these words inhabit, are encouraged to think of "careers" as the be-all end-all of identity. Not just what we do but who we
are. If "careers" were not hierarchical, and if "advancement" didn't matter so much, then it wouldn't
matter so much if someone -- male or female -- decided to take one or three or fifteen years off to raise their families, and return to them later. Obviously in something like research there'd be some catch-up work to do, but in most cases it would simply mean that you ended your 'working life' with a few years' less experience than your peers. Is that such a bad thing?
Unfortunately, I think that kind of paradigm shift is going to be a lot harder to achieve than simple in-system (but still necessary!) steps like paid paternity leave.
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