Celebrating One Hundred Years of Failure to Reproduce on Demand [NYT editorial: Way off for women]

April 14, 2002

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Celebrating One Hundred Years of Failure to Reproduce on Demand

By GAIL COLLINS

A century ago, American women were experiencing a spectacular burst of energy and opportunity. For the first time, they were going to college in large numbers. For the first time, they could choose from an assortment of professional careers. The number of female doctors was higher at the beginning of the 20th century than it would be at any time until the 1980's. Most of those suddenly liberated, high-achieving women did not marry or have children. Almost instantly, the country started worrying about "race suicide."

"If Americans of the old stock lead lives of celibate selfishness . . . or if the married are afflicted by that base fear of living which . . . forbids them to have more than one or two children, disaster awaits the nation," thundered Theodore Roosevelt, father of six. G. Stanley Hall, a turn-of-the-century equivalent of a talking head, warned that "if women do not improve," men might have to undertake "a new rape of the Sabines."

It's always comforting in a time of crisis to note that we have been down this road before and are still around to worry about the state of the pavement. The author of the hour, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, is making the talk show rounds warning about "an epidemic of childlessness" among professional women, which she recounts in her book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children." In it, she worries that close to half of the women who get graduate degrees or pursue heavy-duty careers in business are failing to reproduce.

Ms. Hewlett is more worried about personal happiness than the protection of the gene pool. But she has definitely touched a nerve, or perhaps the entire spinal column. She argues that too many women count on being able to become pregnant in their 40's, then discover it's a long shot. Although we cannot have too many warnings about the danger of betting your happiness on the fertility industry, her hand-wringing is a little like the old greeting card in which an alarmed woman announces, "Oh darn, I forgot to have children!"

All this is weirdly resonant. Between 1890 and 1920, when the number of women entering professions like college teaching, social work and library studies was soaring, 75 percent stayed single. Three-quarters of the women who earned Ph.D.'s between 1877 and 1924 remained unmarried.

"Race suicide" — a shorthand way of saying that immigrant women were having lots of babies while Anglo-Saxons were failing to reproduce themselves — was the talk of the nation. The New York City Board of Education, already an institution with an inventive world view, claimed that it could not give female teachers the same salaries as men because it would lead to "the sacrifice of the race for the individual." (Women, the board worried, would blow the extra money on European tours and opera boxes while the poor men struggled to save enough to start their families.)

The women who were failing to marry seemed pretty sure that the problem was a shortage of men worth marrying.

As early as 1885, a young woman was explaining to Ladies' Home Journal readers that she and her friends had decided to pursue professional careers because a good job "could supply a woman with both interest and support, two roles in which husbands just now fail." Popular magazines routinely published first-person stories, with signatures like "A Spinster Who Has Learned to Say No" or "A Happy Old Maid," in which women reported that they had rejected two, three, five offers of marriage from unsatisfactory swains.

But society in 1900 was concerned that the women who appeared to be the smartest, the most energetic and the most competent were not reproducing. Society was, it turned out, wrong. Other women — less well educated but obviously equally smart and competent — were doing a fine job raising families. The spinsters, meanwhile, were doing a fine job teaching children, running settlement houses, building libraries and exposing sweatshop conditions.

A century ago, American women for the first time had the luxury of career crises, of worrying whether they wanted to choose work or home. But they did not believe that they could have both.

Having it all was not on the 1900 menu. Even presidents of universities and heads of unions retired to become homemakers once they married. Jane Addams, everybody's favorite turn-of-the-century woman, seemed philosophical about the state of affairs, perhaps because she was happily committed to a wealthy heiress, Mary Rozet Smith. Addams, at any rate, concluded that women who wanted careers and children would probably have to wait "until public opinion tolerated the dual role."

Public opinion has come around. In fact, women tend to feel guilty now for failing to acquire all the big three: husband, children and world-class career. One of Ms. Hewlett's least convincing theories is that most of the childless career women are feeling robbed. Her best evidence is that a vast majority had expected to have children when they were in college. They probably also expected to keep up with their French and stay in touch with their roommates, but life has a way of paring priorities.

Chances are many women instinctively realize that they don't have the energy to go for the trifecta, and they veer off in one direction or another. Many others manage children, a spouse and a demanding career very well indeed, deeply irritating everybody who believes that two is the appropriate quota. The secret may be a helpful husband or easygoing offspring, or just the ability to keep focused on the task at hand, even on a day when the baby sitter has decided she's moving to Tucson.

Of course, it's regrettable that having it all is easier for men. But frankly, the fact that women who choose hard-charging careers often do not have children is pretty far down on the list of American social problems. Anyway, things are bound to improve by the turn of the 22nd cent

But it isn't for a woman who was brought up in a lower class environment. Teaching or nursing is much easier. It takes as much study to learn how to host a Charity Ball as it does to learn how to become a teacher.

I disagree with your premise that teachers and nurses are in a lower class of women than those who host charity balls.

Teachers and nurses include women who are more than capable of doing that hosting job. However, many women who host charity balls would be lost in a classroom or a hospital ward.

Your comment demonstrates to me how little respect women get for their work when they do something as meaningful as teach a child to read or save a life.

Another reason why perhaps more women should ditch education and nursing and go host charity balls, since choosing a buffet menu and hiring florists is seen as having more value in our society and garners more respect.

As women have been "liberated" from the roles of wife and mother, they have been ENSLAVED by our sexualized culture: They must be thin, they must wear the latest fashions and hairstyles, they must know (as Cosmo tells them) "Sex Secrets to Drive Him CRAZY." With the retreat from marriage and traditional sex roles, men can no longer expect women to cook, clean and take care of the kids.

That's true.

However, I think there is a new, rising tide that will turn this around, because no one anticipated Martha Stewart's empire -- centering around the home, or a 24 hour cable channel like Food TV to actually take off and become so successful, nor these other cable channels that focus exclusively on home decorating and lifestyles -- matters that require one to SPEND time at home. And, to HAVE a home.

I just some OTHER author, on FOX, who wrote a new book called "The Price of Motherhood" and her big argument is that motherhood can be the quickest route to poverty for women.

I haven't read the book, but from reviews it seemed to me that her arguments were mostly a retread of the socialist cant about why we need state funding for mothers Scandinavian-style. I agree that divorce does play havoc with women & that many women are poor because of it. That doesn't mean women shouldn't marry if they desire, though, because women *as a whole* who *remain married* are far better off than either single women, unmarried mothers, or divorced mothers. (Women w/o kids who divorce don't seem to be hurt financially, usually.)

Well, part of the problem here is that we live in a sexualized society

Indeed. It's just like ancient Corinth, in fact. And Paul's advice to the Corinthians is directly applicable to us today: First, he advocated that Christians involved in sexual sin, be thrown out of the church. Secondly, he advocated celibacy for those that could handle it, and, marriage for those who could not. "To avoid fornication...", he advocated marriage as a defense.

We do not obey these things today, quite the opposite. First, sexual sin is rampant and mostly unaddressed in our churches. Secondly, modern teaching on marriage is backwards -- Jesus himself plainly stated that there are some who cannot accept singleness, yet modern churches frequently teach that accepting one's singleness is a necessary precondition to marriage. Also, St. Paul wrote that it's precisely those who are NOT content with singleness, who should get married: "Better to marry than to burn with lust."

Worst of all --
CHRISTIAN CLERGY .... warn young people of the danger of marrying "too young."

You are SOOOOOOO right about this. Telling a kid who's hit puberty at 12 or 13, that sex has to wait til marriage, is difficult enough -- but adding to the burden by delaying marriage til what seems like "old age" to a teenager, is a surefire recipe to convince many youth that waiting is til marriage is just "impossible".

by the way, about COURTSHIP: Your problem was that you were ignoring the rules...make your interest known to HER FATHER

WHAT father? She's an independent career woman. Besides, even if she had an involved, available father figure, could the suitor (fyi, it wasn't me) say to him, out of the blue, "Sir, I don't know your daughter, but she looks good. May I court her"? Would you approve such an approach? Or, would you prefer the young man to get to know her somewhat, first -- so that his interest will have some solid basis rather than beauty alone? And if dating is ruled out, group activities are the only way for them to get to know each other. But if she refuses all group activities where she thinks one of the men might be interested... the outcome is obvious.

I'm sure courtship is great for teenagers living at home with Christian parents and an easily accessible community of like-minded families. But for adults with fulltime jobs in urban areas, courtship is impossible and therefore moot. I used to waste many hours debating this at another website, until the webmaster thereof finally found a girl himself, and, behold, he had to break most of the courtship rules to make it happen. QED, and LOL!!! I am sincerely happy for him, but it was amusing seeing him get flamed on his own message board in the same way I once was.

... the girl who insisted that a cup of coffee with friends would violate her courtship principles... was giving you the brush-off... the "no dating" rule functions like the old "got to wash my hair" excuse.

Once again - fyi - I wasn't the guy involved in that situation -- the girl herself told me about it later. However, I did indeed receive the holier-than-thou "I don't date" brush-off from other women who not long afterwards dated other men right under my nose. As my old pastor put it, "When she says she doesn't believe in dating, it really means she doesn't want to date you."

I remember when I was a freshman in college, it seemed like every girl on campus had a fiance back home and the ring on her finger to prove it. Only later did I learn that this was a strategem.

I guess I'm a little younger; in my day it was always, "I have a boyfriend". They sure acted like they enjoyed the extra male attention though. In the rare case where I was able to verify that the boyfriend existed, he was older, out of school, and had a well paying job and $$$.

if the girl liked the guy, he didn't hear anything about any fiance, and if he asked about the ring, the girl explained that it was her mother's.

Don't women realize that these tactics select for JERKS? A good man will back off immediately at the sight of a ring or the hint of a boyfriend; only the lowest scum would continue pursuit long enough to discover that it was a lie. Then again, lying women deserve scummy men... karma, ya know?

would you rather be rejected by a girl on pretext of a fictitious fiance back home, or would you rather have her respond, "Get lost, zit-face, you make my skin crawl"?

That's a false choice, neither lying nor insults are scripturally appropriate methods of turning down a polite suitor. There's a third option: the lost art of the honest, polite rebuff: "I'm flattered, but, no thanks, I don't want to date you." I always respected women who did this, however disappointed I might have been. But so-called Christian women who used evasions, or insulted me, caused me to lose respect for them very quickly.

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