Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell, 60, has admitted that she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now 'truly alone'.
www.dailymail.co.uk
The tweet from Candace that I just quoted is her responding to someone citing this Daily Mail article with the claim that she "regrets" not having children. I think we can consider that a fairly conclusive statement on the issue. She does not "regret" not having children.
Germain Greer herself said that Feminism is fine when you are young but she imagines a world full of older women in nursing homes screaming "FUDGE!!!!" though the word she used was not fudge.
And what exactly do you imagine the problem is?
Is the problem that elderly women will not have sufficient financial or emotional support unless they have children?
Is the problem that elderly women will feel some sense of personal failure or responsibility for society because, in spite of any useful, important and rewarding things they did, they didn't reproduce enough?
Is the problem that God will smite women with terrible sadness for failing to accord to their divinely given nature?
See, Germaine Greer is someone noone takes seriously any more, because she's kind of a horrible person. Most feminists would look at women existing in a state of oppression and conclude that the problem is oppression, and that effort should be made to correct the material features of society which harm or disadvantage women. Greer looks at the same oppression and concludes instead that the problem is women. Her position, in essence, is that trying to change the world is pointless and futile, and what women really need to do is to just be so #girlboss that oppression doesn't affect them. Unsurprisingly, this is a weak and unsatisfying approach that doesn't work. Not because feminism is flawed and a bad idea, but because Greer is an idiot who is (seemingly deliberately) missing the solutions that would be obvious if we treated oppression as a bad thing.
If you're worried that women might not be able to financially support themselves without children, then the solution is obvious. Create a system of social care that can provide for people regardless of whether they have children.
If you're worried about women's emotional wellbeing because they might be missing out on the experience of having children, then have you considered why younger women don't want to have children, or how you could change society to make having children more rewarding without relying on essentially consigning half the population to unpaid drudgery?
It is not hard to come up with solutions, at least once you stop thinking like Germaine Greer.
As I am old now, I'm seeing the impact of not thinking about it hit women in my family and it isn't pretty.
Well, I'm not old, but I am old enough that a lot of my friends have had children, and I'm old enough to know that having children is not always the wonderful, life affirming experience people like to pretend or imagine that it is.
I have friends who always wanted children, who genuinely believed that that was the primary thing their life was missing, and who have now had children only to find it wasn't what they expected, or that it didn't give them that feeling of completeness or personal worth that they wanted. I have friends who have found the experience incredibly isolating and disempowering. Heck, I have one friend who suffered such severe post-natal depression that she genuinely felt suicidal. Just because there's an enormous social pressure on people not to admit to regretting having children doesn't mean it doesn't happen. From what I've seen, it's actually very common.
www.theatlantic.com
