A math Ph.D. in The Wall Street Journal agonizingly sketched out every high-IQ woman’s life dilemma last weekend: Do you sacrifice motherhood to chase a world-class career? She did, and it broke her heart.
“In many ways, my life is what I always dreamed it would be, except for one glaring difference: I am not a mother. I wish I was. My childlessness is something I grieve every day,” Eugenia Cheng writes.
Cheng presents herself as a woman who tried to do everything right yet didn’t get the one thing she wanted most: motherhood. Correction: Cheng is the mother of several children, although she doesn’t specify how many she lost between the mentioned miscarriages and in vitro fertilization cycles. That’s the norm with IVF. Only 2 to 7 percent of the children it generates live to birth.
Like so many other women nobody knows have been mothers, Cheng grieves that she’s never been able to hold her children. Fertility is one of those mystical things that constantly eludes human attempts to control and forces us to grapple with our helplessness and limits.
“I am now 48, too old to have any realistic hope of becoming pregnant again—not that that stops people from urging me to not ‘give up hope,’” Cheng writes bitterly.
Cheng says she pursued a career, “not for its own sake,” but because a “partner” to make babies with didn’t arrive when she was “25 and in my first full-time job[,] when I felt ready to have children.” She essentially goes on to blame the men she dated for not feeling the biological pressure to settle down during the female fertility window, and for breaking up with her because she’s too smart and credentialed.
Give Some Mother-Ready Vibes
I can’t help but notice that Cheng describes her very top-flight career achievements — tenure-track mathematics Ph.D., professional pianist, author of several popular books — in the passive tense, as if she didn’t have to very actively pursue them.
“While I searched for a life partner, my career kept advancing. I got several degrees, landed postdoctoral positions around the world and won tenure in mathematics at the University of Sheffield in Britain.” “My career kept advancing”? Careers like that don’t just happen. They are pushed by very driven people. So I couldn’t help but wonder if Cheng put quite as much effort into telegraphing, “I want to be a wife and mother!” as she did into telegraphing, “I am a kick-butt career woman!”
I wonder that because, 18 months into dating my then-boyfriend, he had to ask if I even wanted children, because he couldn’t tell. I knew he was actually asking if we should get married, so I said yes to get him, and that all worked out very well. But it would have been better if I had given him clear indications, say, 18 months before he had to ask. If men can’t tell you want children, you may be more inclined to attract men who don’t.
Type A women like us have to learn how to give off “future mother” vibes just like we learn to give off “future Ph.D.” vibes to graduate schools. This will be vilified, but activities like cooking, wearing feminine clothing, expressing love for children, and spending time volunteering in your community seem reasonable to suggest to women who do want to be a wives and mothers.
Dog-whistle, not for one-night stands with cads, but for good providers who want a happy home. Maybe even outright whistle! Consider making it a train toot! Men are not always sensitive enough to pick up very tiny clues!
The White-Collar Dating Pool Prioritizes Resumes
Quoting her exes, Cheng claims several men also found her success too intimidating. She was so amazing they couldn’t stand to marry her. While one might chalk that up to the cover statements every person gives when breaking up — “It’s me, not you!” — let’s just assume the claim is accurate.
Beyond the “boss bitch” vibes such a career gives off, another problem could have been her dating pool. High-IQ knowledge workers, and the greater number who pretend they are, often treat intellect as if it’s the only measure of worth. That’s preposterous, and plenty of men maintain other top criteria for a spouse, such as kindness, homemaking skills, compatibility, sense of humor, patience, and so on. One will find more of such men in conservative and especially religious social circles, which encourage lasting virtues above lower-level, materialist criteria such as earning power and natural beauty.
Cheng may have had better luck dating blue-collar guys with good incomes, like a construction foreman or plumbing company owner. But women like her don’t often meet men like that unless they go to church regularly. That’s a downstream effect of the loss of religious commitment among Americans. People who don’t go to church basically have bars and workplaces to find friends and potential mates. The “Bowling Alone” decline of social networks really sucks when you can’t find a spouse and really want one, a situation that fits increasing numbers of Americans.
Now, in one way, Cheng’s is a minority dilemma. That’s because the vast majority of women are neither interested in nor suited for getting a Ph.D. Yet the feminist mindset keeps pushing this dilemma on all women as if we all face a real choice between becoming a Supreme Court justice and motherhood. Projecting a dilemma only faced by a tiny minority of women onto all women is essentially the point of the feminist movement.
If most women knew they were sacrificing the freedom, provision, and safety of full-time mothering to be a gypped gas station attendant or “Office Space”-style paper-pusher, far more would choose full-time motherhood. To make it easier for themselves to reach the C-suite and the Oval Office, elite women sell their lower-class sisters glamorous false promises of “Boss Babe.” This is another reason we should reject feminism: it damages women.
How to Bolster Yourself Against the Sexual Revolution
Another part of Cheng’s situation besides the lack of broad social networking opportunities is also now common to all women. It’s the no-win outcome of the Sexual Revolution: women must either have sex with men before marriage or the men can easily find other women who will.
The post-Pill expectation that women will make sex an infertile act obviously eliminates a major motivation for men to pop the question. If the men Cheng dated in her 20s and 30s couldn’t get sex aside from accepting the responsibilities of husbandry — which include fatherhood — I’d bet $10,000 she would have secured a man before her fertility window closed.
Lowering the likelihood that sex will produce a baby lowers men’s commitment to the act signaling one will accept responsibility for a baby and her mother: marriage. In short, abortifacients plus hoes brutalize women’s sexual bargaining power. This leaves women with a much-degraded ability to secure important things they want from sex: economic and familial security.
Of course, men also get economic and familial security from marriage, as married men earn more, reach higher career zeniths, are happier, and live longer. But those benefits are less obvious and require a longer timeframe than the benefits women and children get from marriage, which usually begin accruing much earlier.
This is one major negative effect of America’s leaders deciding to kill Christianity as a social norm. It’s also another way in which people who participate in the life of a local church dramatically increase their chances of finding a spouse while they still are physically capable of procreation. Pastors, congregations, denominations, and Holy Scripture itself all stand behind women who say, “I’d love to have sex with you, but I can’t unless we’re married.”
These now-derided institutions empower a woman to resist the beguiling pressure a man may place on her to put out before she gets that ring. They give women the bargaining power they need to obtain what most really want: first love, then marriage, and next the grand adventure of raising a baby.