“Feminism has left middle-aged women like me single, childless and depressed”

[MongoFrogman]

Article by Petronella Wyatt, thoughts?:

https://archive.ph/IBlas

I would cut her some slack given her mental health challenges.

I think thats her employers responsibility, given they've used her to slag off feminism knowing that everyone knows she had an affair with Boris Johnson and got pregnant by him.

thanks, i hoped that's what you meant but may have been reading it wrong.

I said:
“If all of the author’s friends were feminists at the time she was pregnant, I seriously doubt she would have had any support if she expressed thoughts of keeping the baby. With BJs pressure to terminate and the narrative from her friends “Oh, your life won’t be your own, you’ll lose your freedom, he won’t be a good father, you’ll be better keeping your life as it is”, and so on, that tiny voice within her saying “keep this baby, we could have a lovely life, the two of us”, would be totally squashed down.”

You replied:

”It's utter crap to suggest that Petronella's friends wouldn't have supported her keeping the baby, if they were feminists.”

So I said:

“Although I considered myself a feminist and still do”
“the truth is, in my pre-motherhood days, if I was Petronella’s friend and she told me she was pregnant with BJ’s child, I would probably have encouraged her to have an abortion and I would have thought that I had her best interests at heart.”

To which you replied:

”You seem really confused about the difference between your personal thoughts/experience and feminism as a movement.

You are doing exactly the same as Petronella - blaming feminism for choices that you might have made (advising a friend to have an abortion), and that you now feel are wrong.”

Which is basically the argument:

1.. No feminist would encourage their friend to have an abortion.

Reply- I consider myself a feminist and there was a time when I would have.

2.. Well no true feminist would - or in other words, only a person motivated by personal feelings and choices unrelated to feminism would encourage a friend to have an abortion. No true feminist motives would lead to a woman encouraging a friend to have an abortion.

I’m in my mid twenties and doing my second degree. If I end up leaving it too late to have children, that’s on me, not feminism. I can’t imagine feeling fulfilled having sacrificed the chance of the good, interesting career this will hopefully end in to have babies young. Other people chose differently.

Are you referring to how she found Boris Johnson sexually attractive because that's some mental health challenge 😉

Old wrinklies like me will recall her father, Woodrow Wyatt MP. Elected as Labour in 1964. But was essentially a sort of patrician Tory. A well known bon viveur he preferred sucking up to the Royal family to the boring work of government.

As a renegade Labour mp he got lots of lucrative employment in TV and newspapers. Petronella had every advantage in life.How can she blame Feminism for her taste in men , who were either unsuitable or spoken for? Or even Thatcherism. Dreadful as it was for many women it had no effect on the Wyatts of this world. She could have had children ; its not like she'd have had to bring them up herself.

She has not confused Thatchersim and feminism, it is just that feminism, telling women they could ditch their traditional roles and live outside traditional structures which had been set up partly to protect them (as well as being advantageous to men), played right into the hands of Thatcherism and those who wanted to increase the labour force in order to keep wages down. I am a 2nd wave feminist and the ideas that Thatcher spouted in the 80s were feminist, that women did not need to have husbands etc. and could be independent and working for themselves. Thatcher (who married a millionaire business man, no cypher he) wanted women in the workplace not in the home being 'economically inactive' rather than making money for men like Derek Thatcher. Feminism in the 70s played straight into that idea (just as the Natural Childbirth Trust played into the hands of health providers who wanted to get women out of maternity wards asap so they needed fewer maternity beds and so saved money). Thatcher's children are the women who have to put their children in nurseries because they must be part of the labour force, they are the nursery owners who want the money that government provides only to working parents, they are the mothers of under fives who stay at home and are called economically inactive, or if they are without means, unemployed - with three children under five you are unlikely to be eschewing work. Some of us got married anyway, and had children and divorces and ended up in the workforce but not fulfilled much. Most people have jobs, not careers, and feminism was all about having careers. Unsurprisingly, a lot of us found feminism it bit empty because it did not value what most women value, love and motherhood, and also suggested - as did Mrs T - that women can be just like men. But we can't because we are not men, and our bodies have imperatives that men's do not, and vulnerabities that men's do not. So, the very privileged Ms Wyatt is right - feminism has let us down by suggesting we can be like men and playing straight into the neo-liberal capitalist ideology that makes people economic units and no more.

I think you are spot on. Men aren’t under pressure to settle down and marry, as unlike women they have most of their lives to have children unlike women don’t. Another issue feminism has created is you have women with good jobs and a partner who are able to buy a house on two wages, leaving single women unable to match it and therefore struggling to buy a house alone. I guess you swap one lot of problems for another. As someone who has missed out on having children I am envious of previous generations, the majority of which married and family, as most people have bring dead end jobs, having a family can give you an achievement and purpose in life and unlike a career you don’t need any qualifications.

I'm not sure feminism is to blame for a lot of these problems.

My feminist position, both pre- and post-children, is one of being pro-choice. Let me expand on that: women should not be coerced into continuing an unwanted pregnancy, and no woman should be coerced into terminating a wanted pregnancy. Sometimes medical circumstances sadly mean women have to terminate wanted pregnancies, but men like Johnson have no right to pressure women to terminate for their own convenience.

If I had been Petronella Wyatt's friend, I'd have told her the same thing I told a real friend: "this man is a bastard, and you will end up being a single parent. That's why he's pushing you to terminate instead of accepting that this is what happens when you refuse to use condoms. However, there's no point terminating the pregnancy just to keep him, because having a termination you don't want will destroy your relationship with him. You'll come to resent him as much as he deserves. Assume you would be on your own with a baby, and decide what to do on that basis."

She chose to continue. As expected, he had nothing to do with the baby, or indeed his next girlfriend's baby.

If you want children you only have till your mid-thirties. A career structure which fitted women would be one where getting qualifications and jobs in the mid-thirties was not only possible but encouraged. So, marry, have children, get qualified. I did my MA in my late thirties and took a job just before I was forty (and did a masters in history whilst working). I already had a degree and a PGCE by 25, worked for a couple of years, then had two children and stayed at home with them until the eldest was nine. Worked for me - though the marriage ended in divorce it had more to do with my ex-DH wanting tit-for-tat in being at home (when the DCs were at school full-time!) and also wanting an open marriage but only for him (cultural clash, it was what is known as a mixed-marriage).

my ex-DH wanting tit-for-tat in being at home (when the DCs were at school full-time!) and also wanting an open marriage but only for him

This to me suggests this unfortunate side-effect of feminism on many male attitudes - eg- feeling equally entitled to maternity leave even though they don’t gestate, give birth or breastfeed, embracing ‘going Dutch’ heartily even though men are still generally paid more than women, pressurising women to abort, or being vague about not being ‘ready’,so they don’t have to be responsible or commit, etc, whilst at the same time believing the woman should still do the housework, be faithful, take the day off work when kids are off sick, etc, yet she should be tolerant, even encouraging of his porn habit, only fans, escorts or whatever.

Basically wanting to have their cake and eat it.

Having said that you made sensible choices so you have both motherhood and a career. I absolutely believe that as feminists we should now be trying to bring about a society normalising “A career structure which fitted women” ……. “where getting qualifications and jobs in the mid-thirties was not only possible but encouraged.”

It's not just about time though, it's about money.

If you postpone getting qualifications until your mid 30s when you've completed your family, that means you're having children at an age where you have a low income and little financial stability. You probably aren't a home owner, so you're vulnerable to the uncertainties of the rental market, and you're not a high earner, which means you're even more likely to give up work completely while your children are small because the cost of childcare exceeds what you can earn. And if, during this time, your male partner is establishing himself as the main breadwinner, it will be very difficult to catch up later, to put your own career first or be anything other than the default parent.

Personally I think it's better for women to try and get to the point where they have a career worth going back to before they have children.

“I think it's better for women to try and get to the point where they have a career worth going back to before they have children”

I agree this is the ideal, but it puts women in danger of missing out on having children. There should be systems in place where women who haven’t established this kind of career by their mid to late twenties feel secure in the knowledge that it will be easy to retrain/get further qualifications and opportunities in a decade’s time and change their focus to starting a family when it counts.

Part of my problem with articles like this is that there really isn't a definitive definition of what feminism is and what is encompasses. There is general agreement that it relates to achieving equality between the sexes but there is huge disagreement about what this practically looks like.

Fundamentally we can't agree about whether are biologically designed to women want the same as men. If we think that women are the broadly the same and all observable differences are a result of socialisation then feminism would be all about pursuing the same as men and making sure it was done on equal terms. The far more difficult alternative though is that women as a class intrinsically want different things than men and this may well include wanting children more. What happens if the latter is true?

There seems an overriding assumption that women are often socialised into wanting to be mothers and not to put enough emphasis on financial independence, but what if the socialisation is now working the other way? Many people would now look down on a woman that prioritised and focussed on having children at a young age and she would be widely be considered as inferior to a busy career woman. We can't pretend that this kind of status system wouldn't become internalised by women in the same way that women had previously internalised other types of misogyny. We are programmed to want to be part of the tribe and to want positive recognition. An obvious issue would be that in striving to achieve this, some women don't really think about what they actually value most until it's too late. Your 20s and 30s can flash by and more than ever, people are considered relatively young into their 40s even though our fertility declines rapidly in these decadea. The statistics on unintentional childlessness speak for themselves and I do believe we need to be questioning if our way of life and how feminism is currently being presented is meeting the needs of all women.

I was envisaging a world in which women having children in between first qualifications and beginnings of career and then finishing qualifications later was the norm. In such a world rearing children would count towards your seniority and your entry level into a job (most people have jobs, not careers). It would also be a world where one could purchase and run a home on one income (as it was pre-80s and the infusion of our society with the idea we are economic work units rather than people). So a vision, not a reality, but the vision feminism could fight for, because women are not men, and thus male career structures cannot fit them, we need a motherhood friendly model and an acknowledgement by the state and society that motherhood and childrearing are two of the most important things a society does.

I think this goes to show that our personal experiences heavily influence feelings on this (as has clearly happened in Petronella’s case). I really couldn’t disagree more with what you’ve said here - I don’t think it’s an “issue” that women have careers or that (some) men don’t want marriage or children as I, a woman, have never wanted them either, and have always been career focused since I was a child. I don’t have an ounce of maternal yearning, I do have a career which, while it doesn’t earn me the fabled mumsnet 6 figures, has allowed me to buy a property alone (no financial help) and pursue the kind of freedoms I want in life. I’m surrounded by similar-minded women and only one friend has children. It’s all confirmation bias though - I’m friends with like-minded people because we sought each other out. That doesn’t mean I’m objectively right and you’re wrong.

I don’t think we can or should apply our personal circumstances to our understanding of what feminism is. Fundamentally it is a call for equality of opportunity between the sexes. Yes, we can argue about what that should look like in practice, but surely a world in which most women had very few choices in life beyond having kids and staying at home, and were forbidden from having their own money or property or working after marriage, is not an equal one that gives women choices? Just because that setup might’ve suited you as an individual doesn’t mean it would’ve been good for me, or the women like me that I know.

I don’t subscribe to the belief that all women intrinsically, biologically don’t have ambition or a desire for a career or wealth and that those are “man” traits. Not all men want those things either. Some men really want to be dads. Having the capacity to bear children doesn’t mean all women want to use that. Feminism in its true sense for me is a world in which women can choose whatever path in life they want, without discrimination. That includes motherhood, so absolutely workplaces should be accommodating, childcare should be free, but crucially men should be expected by default to take on an equal share of the caring and childcare duties. Genuinely free choice means many men and women will opt out of parenthood or at least not prioritise it but I don’t see that as a bad thing at all.

This 'feminism made me childless and alone' narrative seems a popular anti-feminist line. I've heard it before.

There is a feeling of "look what you made me do, because I'm too dim to think for myself" vibe from the article. She sounds to be one of those women who choose to be infantalised by men and is upset that people expect her to take adult responsibility for herself.

This is what I mean for a woman-friendly world. Women cannot follow a male career path. We bear children and the burden of reproduction is on us alone. Thus, a woman-friendly world would take that into account and women could participate and desist from participating in the workforce without loss of income or seniority.

Being a woman is tricky, you have twenty years to get qualified, have a career, find a man and have kids, that’s a lot to do especially if you have setbacks, where as men don’t have these time pressures, it does seem to fall to women to sort everything. As someone said having children then a career isn’t easy as you tend to have less money and stability.

This to me suggests this unfortunate side-effect of feminism on many male attitudes

This works both ways though. If a man has been the one to stay at home with the children, a court may rule that he is the resident parent in the event of a separation. Equally, women with more money/assets might find themselves the loser in a divorce settlement (it's sure as hell why I would be very careful about getting married now without a cast-iron pre-nup). The rules and laws that were set up to protect women did so on the assumption that they would be staying at home and/or wouldn't be the high-earner.

Feminist to my core as I am, I also recognise that women cannot have their cake and eat it any more than men can.

You seem to be suggesting two more ways that men can have their cake and eat it in your example.

You seem to be suggesting two more ways that men can have their cake and eat it in your example.

I'm not. I'm saying that - for example - women can't work full time when their partner is the SAHP, then expect to be deemed the resident parent in the event of a separation. That's not men having their cake and eating it, it's a woman finding that being a mother doesn't equal automatically receiving custody/maintenance. Often the two go together because often it's the woman that's stayed at home/earned less, but we're now seeing it work in reverse because a woman can be the NRP/high earner.

I have known women who've been horrified to find that they are have not automatically been awarded resident parent status. They assumed that having birthed the child conferred special rights.

I don't think that's "men having their cake and eating it", it's the fair application of the law regardless of sex.