Last year The Irish Times commissioned a widely publicised opinion poll that
tried to answer one of the most clichéd questions of the 20th century: what
do women want? The answer, it seemed, is financial independence.
That poll is now backed up by a hefty new study from the Economic and Social
Research Institute, which finds the average age of childbirth for Irish
women is now 31 and that 36% of women over 45 who gave birth were having
their first child. Commenting on the study, Christina Engel from the
National University of Ireland, in Galway, said more women were putting off
having kids until their thirties so as to concentrate on their careers and
ensure financial stability. In fact, it’s not merely women’s child-bearing
age that is rising, so is the age at which they marry (probably to be
expected, because marriage and children still go hand-in-hand). The average
age at which an Irish woman first marries is now 31, whereas in 1986 it was
24.
However, if women are delaying getting married and having children, so too
must men. Irish men now marry at age 33 on average, and that is also up by
seven years compared with 1986. That is a huge change in the way people
organise their lives, and it’s happening across the western world, so it
can’t be attributed to conditions peculiar to Ireland. Why, then, are people
so dramatically delaying getting married and having kids, compared with
barely 20 years ago?
You’ll be relieved to know that sociologists have put a bit of thought into
this and have even come up with a term for it: “emerging adulthood”. I
prefer the term “delayed adulthood” myself.
Basically, people are delaying making the big commitments in their lives until
they are much older than they used to be. One reason for this is that many
people are spending a lot more time getting an education than they did in
the past. Another reason is their desire to enjoy their freedom. Getting
married and having children has a strange habit of stopping you doing what
you like, when you like.
So, like butterflies in their larvae, 21-year- olds all over the country are
waiting for their “adulthood” to emerge. Careful, though, don’t rush things:
we don’t want something premature and malformed to emerge, do we? Give these
caterpillars enough space and time and something beautiful will emerge of
its own accord and in its own way.
You would imagine that having taken all this time turning themselves into well-rounded,
well-educated and self-actualised adults, our thirtysomethings would have no
further problems because they’d spent so long working things out to the last
detail. Not so, apparently. A study released last week by Cambridge
University has confirmed that a new set of concerns begins to dominate the
lives of people who get married and have children. They start worrying about
issues such as work/life balance and whether family life is harmed by
mothers having to work full-time.
So what do we want? It seems we want to be footloose and fancy-free in our
twenties, but in our thirties we want the freedom to organise our family
life and our work life in our own way. This conclusion is backed up by
another finding in the same Irish Times poll, namely that 42% of women who
work outside the home do so out of necessity, not choice. You could bet the
house that this percentage soars when the women in question are mothers of
young children. Indeed, I would be surprised if it’s not above 60% for this
group.
The finding that women value financial independence above all else takes on an entirely
different complexion when put alongside this second poll result. In the
minds of some women, financial independence might mean bringing home a big,
fat pay cheque at the end of each month. But in the minds of other women —
namely, mothers — it may mean having the freedom not to work at all, or else
to work part-time because their spouse earns enough money to give them that
freedom of choice.
I’m watching Mad Men on DVD at the moment, the latest critically acclaimed
series from the US. Set in the 1960s, the Mad Men in question are Madison
Avenue men — that is, advertising execs. The main character is the
mysterious Don Draper. Don’s gorgeous wife, Betty, lives in the suburbs
raising their children, but she isn’t happy. She’s bored, depressed,
alienated and anxious. She lives through her husband and children and is
radically unfulfilled.
The scriptwriters have obviously been reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, which came out in 1963 and described housewives as a “waste of a
human self”. She painted a picture of millions of bored, isolated and
depressed housewives wasting their lives away and yearning to escape into
the workplace. But there are an awful lot of unfulfilled people in the
workplace as well — both men and women.
The big feminist lie is that paid employment is always more fulfilling than
staying at home and raising children. But this has always assumed that all
women would be able to find high-powered, high-status, highly paid jobs of
the sort enjoyed by many high-profile feminists, women politicians and
female executives.
We shouldn’t have to point out that the vast majority of jobs are not a bit
like that, and many women have cottoned on to this fact. They compare their
often unglamorous jobs with the task of raising their own children in their
own home for a few years. They weigh up the pros and cons of each choice and
evidently very many of them are coming down in favour of dropping out of the
workforce full-time or part-time in order to raise children.
Surprising as it may seem, some women appear actually to like babies and being
around babies. Maybe that is one reason why Hello magazine has reportedly
paid millions of euros to “Brangelina” for exclusive photos of their newborn
twins. It won’t be men who are buying Hello.
The problem is that many women can’t exercise their choice because society and
the economy are set up in a such a way that the wish to enter paid
employment is encouraged much more than the wish to stay at home raising the
kids. In turn, this is because the government and policymakers make the huge
mistake of thinking that women in high-powered, fulfilling jobs — the sort
they typically meet day-to-day — represent all women. It’s obvious that they
don’t. It’s also obvious that many women want to be able to choose between
work and home, career and motherhood. We should be doing a lot more to
enable that choice.
Brenda Power is away
