In spite of hard-won changes to Australian women’s legal and political status over the last 30 years, anxieties about pregnancy and motherhood clearly continue to brew in popular culture. Ways of combining motherhood with other feminist aspirations are rarely discussed in the current Australian political climate but become particularly visible when it comes to actually having babies and the way that you have them. Sure, this stupid Relationships Australia survey can somewhat irresponsibly encourage younger women to have babies in theory but in reality, WHERE IS ALL OF THE NECESSARY INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT MOTHERS?! I mean come on, Australia is still lost in the woods when it comes to paid maternity leave, the maternity system itself is barely surviving and it is now almost impossible to get you kid into childcare within spitting distance of your house. So, I ask you, Relationship Australia, how do you expect young women to be mothers if we continue to live in a culture where motherhood is not valued? What makes me even more insane with rage is that instead of blaming the bloody government for not fulfilling it's obligation to support women as mothers, women often end up blaming 'feminism' (like she was a person) for failing to live up to it's promise that it's easy to 'have it all'. I tend to think that all of this moral panic about fertility may point to a ‘backlash’ against feminism(s) both by the Australian government and women themselves. The government absolves itself by telling women that they are getting to independent and they should be 'good' women and stay at home and have more babies and women complain to each other that climbing the corporate ladder is impossible with 2 kids and a lazy husband.
Well, it's 43 degrees Celsius (110 F) in
Anyway, back to business. Nothing irks me more than the current media exhortations to women in their mid-late 30s that if they don't start popping out babies soon, their ovaries will become the next vestigal organ. It seems that the pressure to procreate is now coming even earlier thanks to a new campaign by the American Fertility Association (AFA) to remind women in their 20s that their biological clocks are ticking. The campaign consists of posters like the obnoxious one above and a seminar called 'Manicures and Martinis' at the Dashing Diva Salon in
With the inclusion of Flockhart, the magazine answered its own question: Of course, it is.
Thanks to the sassy gals from Sex and the City, the television show that opened the eyes of women worldwide to frank discussions of sex, love and relationships in 1998, just two years later, Time was asking its readers, ‘Who needs a husband’? Charlotte, Miranda, Carrie and Samantha were deemed ‘the daughters of the women’s movement’. By standing in as spokeswomen for sexual freedom and independence, the single woman, it seemed, ‘had come into her own’. Not only was it acceptable for women to buy their own homes, buy their own drinks and spend $400 on strappy sandals if they wanted to, hell, they could even buy their own diamond rings. By the close of the millenium, the ‘Ah’ ring became the sine qua non of the power of the affluent single woman. Symbolising that a woman is ‘available and happy’ (or is it affluent and hyper-competitive?), the Ah ring was made specifically so that single women could have a diamond ring paid for on their own dime. Feminism, apparently having softened its stance on that whole partiarchy thing, was seemigly allowing middle-class women to crash the engagement party with a ring worn on the right hand as a status symbol and not necessarily one’s status of being ‘owned’ by a man. If women could circumvent the antiquated trappings associated with marriage, single women could certainly invest in solo pregnancies. With the popularity of IVF, surrogacy and adoption, more of those single and fabulous women were saying to themselves, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the sperm for free?’
In the new millenium, singlehood was described as the ‘logical result’ of a generation of gals empowered by the women’s movement. While ladies were being patted on the back for not settling for anything less than Mr. Right, a perfect baby and a white picket fence, they were simultaneously rewarding themselves with the ‘choice’ to foster their own spirit, to relish in their own company. Yet, not only was the essence of the third-wave deeply embedded in a woman’s right to choose (or should I say shoes?), it was also firmly entrenched in having a hot body to match. Whereas becoming a mother was once the essence of femininity, the next generation of women were finding their empowerment in their tiny-waisted ones, big-breasted bodies. With the rise of television shows like What Not To Wear in which the bodies of everyday women are scrutinised from their saggy boobs to their tree-trunk ankles or the covers of tabloids that act as metaphorical calipers squeezing the flesh of female celebrities.
So who is fit to mother? Whereas in earlier generations, mothers seemed to be (un)happily singing the same tune of domestic drudgery, selfless mothering and settling into long days spent with a child on the hip and dinner in the oven, in these uncertain times (economically, socially and politically), an obsessive attention to being a good mother has posed something of an existential crisis for women who want to ‘have it all’ as sexy, high-achieving, independent women.
The whole industry (and yes, it is an industry) of infertility is reliant upon women who are told that as soon as they hit the age of 35, the egg factory will be invariably shutting up shop. Women must be aware of their fertility from the moment they begin to menstruate and are encouraged to have children early in life so as to circumvent any unforeseen 'problems' later on, as a sort of reproductive 'insurance' policy. The overriding message is that if you wait too long, you can find yourself with a 'barren womb' and it is nobody's fault but your own. Why fault women for finally making themselves happy? I thought we had evolved past the women-as-baby-making-machines.
Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/181840
