OPINION:Though most women value economic success, most also value success in the making of a family
SHE IS a tall, slim, gorgeous 40-something. Career? She’s done that. She spent her 20s and much of her 30s building a successful business but now she’s stepped back from it for a while. To have babies.
She’s doing motherhood on her own terms, the way retired male chief executives do golf.
Whenever I pass her I stare so hard I nearly fall off my bike. Obviously there is somewhere deep in me the expectation that children should vanquish a woman.
They did not vanquish me. But I had to fight both myself and others to put across the idea of having children as – potentially – positive for a woman.
Whereas all around me slightly younger women are proudly wheeling buggies. In my immediate vicinity – at my kids’ school and on my road – I can think of 12 40-something women with four young children or more.
They’re all yummies: beautiful women with the shining hair and glowing skin which say “I’m happy.”. It’s an affluent area and most of them are well-off.
But labelling them a subset of rich bitches doesn’t really explain them away.
The interesting thing about these women is not that they have choice, but how they have exercised it. They have chosen to have babies. They have chosen to have more babies. And they have chosen to stay home, part-time or full-time, for now.
There I was thinking our area was just odd, when the ESRI came out recently and said fertility levels may have been “substantially underestimated” because women are having so many children late in life. Long after the statisticians think they’re dead ducks, they are laying eggs for Ireland.
This “tempo effect” has been seen in other European countries too, but nowhere so much as in this country. Nowhere else in the EU are mothers as elderly and as fecund.
Irish older mothers don’t often leave it at one if they can help it. On average our fertility is the highest in Europe, at 2.2 births per woman.
Nobody has 2.2 children. Plenty of women have one child only. But the older mothers with families of young children I see in my area are not statistical freaks. Older women in Ireland are having more children than they are anywhere else in Europe.
This says a lot of fascinating things, some of them obvious. One of the reasons that women are delaying childbirth is because they can. They have the means.
Another is that they must. They are following a punishing male career arc. They need to finish their education and set themselves up in a career before they’ll chance a baby.
Irish women’s experience would support Al Gore’s prescription for population control – “educate your women” – to some extent. But the enthusiasm for having babies, once education and early work experience is over, is notable.
Becoming affluent is meant to limit families, and to some extent it has. But while we responded to the hard times in the middle of the last century by delaying marriage and staying single, so that we were called “the vanishing Irish”, we responded to the boom by having babies and we’ve kept at it.
It seems to be something we like to do. Which the 1970s feminists didn’t predict.
“We shall not, we shall not conceive!” sang Mary Kenny outside the Dáil in 1971 when Mary Robinson was attempting to get a reading of her contraception Bill. The focus of the second wave feminists was on preventing babies. The idea was that if women could control their fertility they could progress in careers. And that would give them an income of their own.
This makes perfect sense. But in Ireland today, women are choosing from the a-la-carte feminist menu. They delay having children and limit their families, but many are far more devoted to having children than their 1970s sisters could have imagined.
They are entering careers in droves but they are also exiting in droves. Even today, nearly 70 per cent of mothers in Ireland do not work outside the home or work part-time.
You can analyse all this negatively and say the women delay childbirth because they have to and they leave work because there isn’t enough childcare. This does not make sense of the beaming women striding around my area with their burgeoning buggies.
Personally, I believe something far more interesting is happening. I think Irish women are reclaiming motherhood, on their own terms.
Yes, that does often mean delaying childbirth in order to get an education and enough work experience so that you know you can return to work. This can mean playing a cruel game of chance with your fertility, which many women lose.
But many also win, as I know myself, having pretty much dropped a litter at 35.
And if those who do win have any choice, they often choose to take time out of the workforce or work part-time. The ESRI itself reported some years ago that only 1 per cent of women working part-time wanted a full-time job.
Mothers have made a massive biological investment in making a child. They want to go on with the making.
None of this is very surprising. Primate women have gained their status from the number and health of their offspring for most of their history. The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy puts the pushy American mom in context as a woman driven to achieve biological success. Success through her children: something I have always thought really sad, probably because I grew up in a determinedly individualist culture.
I still think it’s sad. But watch my face when my son gets his prize for Latin, just like his grandad did.
It would be appalling if we ditched the advantages of culture and education and began seeing women primarily as breeders. Fertility is a matter of chance, not merit, yet childless women in the past often struggled for any status at all.
But it is also wrong to see babies as mere obstacles strewn along a career path. It’s true that nowadays children represent a huge material loss, not a material gain, as they would have done in a traditional society. But surely everything in life can’t be analysed entirely on the basis of profit and loss?
What about joy? What about fulfilment? What about company?
If we cling to a completely materialist view of success we will never understand women. Because though most women value economic success, most also value success in the making of a family.
Victoria White's Mother Ireland: Why Ireland Hates Motherhoodis published by Londubh Books. She is a former arts editor of The Irish Times