Why are birthrates falling? Observers on the left tend to attribute the decline to material factors, while also typically denying it is a serious problem at all. Voices on the right tend to point the finger at abortion and contraception, stressing the woman’s duty to reproduce. In both cases, the deeper reasons why many women don’t feel able to bear replacement-level numbers of children—or any at all—are set aside.
Germaine Greer’s 1984 book Sex and Destiny, although written before childbearing went into freefall across the West, has the virtue of being willing to explore the dilemma rather than reaching too quickly for solutions. Greer wrote from the perspective of a pioneering feminist who realized, too late, that she wanted children. Greer argued that modern society has disparaged motherhood, treating it as a private matter that individual women had to reconcile with work as best they could. Beneath this predicament, she concluded, lay a deep cultural malaise, a sexuality from which eros had been evacuated and a “sterile” society unable to honor the vital life force.
Critics charged Greer with romanticizing traditional societies and overlooking the fact that for many women motherhood was never freely chosen and came at enormous cost. But that weakness does not destroy her central insight: that modern societies have lost not simply the desire for children, but a sense of belonging within the cycles and limits of life itself.
One result is anti-natalism. In cultures that see meaning only in “achievement and self-gratification,” having a child is a kind of death. This extends to all levels: aesthetically, pregnancy offends the sleek lines, flat stomachs, and sharp hipbones expected of women, which convey a “denial of fecundity.” Psychologically, childbearing shocks women into realizing that, far from being simply people, they have been women all along. As Greer writes, “In order to compete with men, Western woman has joined the masculine hierarchy and cultivated a masculine sense of self. The acknowledgement of her pregnancy means that she must step down from all that and enter the psychological equivalent of the birth hut.” New motherhood is stressful, with most women expected both to work and to take on the lion’s share of childcare. From that point on, many find themselves “divided”—unable fully to concentrate on, or enjoy, either work or motherhood. For many women, the compensations of motherhood may not be enough to make up for the loss of freedom.
And why shouldn’t they? For my generation, women’s right to freedom was part of the cultural atmosphere, educated as we were when the great second feminist wave was ebbing but still frothy, powerful. We took for granted the idea that we could have the same freedom that educated, middle-class men had long enjoyed. They were, after all, the ones who wrote the books and made the films. I read the existentialists ecstatically in my teenage bedroom and empathized deliciously with Mathieu, the hero of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Age of Reason, committed to freedom above all else, who was disgusted by the discovery of his girlfriend’s pregnancy and the prospect of a pinched conventional life that beckoned. I felt the horror of this situation keenly. Like Mathieu, I thrilled to the idea of being free of societal expectations, of rejecting the bleak life of my parents. I was more than prepared to accept the dark side of this: the burden of autonomy, the agony of writing one’s own life, the existential loneliness of it.
“Motherhood threatened the vision we shared.”
By the time I’d reached the end of my teens, several of my friends, nice girls, had had abortions in service of this ideal. Motherhood threatened the vision we shared. My own mother, unavoidably, had given herself entirely to motherhood. She abandoned or delayed her own interests and self-development: never reading a book to its end or shopping for herself. I was a teenager the day I finally convinced her to buy something for herself. I can’t remember what she’d bought for me, but I remember vividly the green-and-blue tartan suit with padded shoulders (it was the ’80s) that she nervously carried to the Top Shop till. But my glee collapsed to bitter disappointment when her card was declined. Something hard came over her, as she turned away, leaving it on the counter in a limp pile.
I knew that my mother’s enormous capacity for self-sacrifice lurked in me too. I had to fight it, or lose my own freedom. This was not “just” selfishness; it was also loyalty. What was the point of her sacrifices if not for her only daughter to have a different sort of life?
As the years went by, I realized there was no such thing as pure freedom and responsibility. I was not, in the end, Mathieu, but rather a confused composite of Mathieu and his girlfriend, Marcelle. Obstacles that lay in my way in life were often not of my own making, nor were they capable of being solved by the power of will alone. I got lost in feminine pursuits, such as romance, and adopted a feminine passivity at work, meaning that my own career was slow, winding, tortuous. Once I finally knuckled down into my role as an academic I found its demands brutal and often daydreamed of retreating into motherhood. In real life, however, I have no idea how other female academics fit motherhood into their lives. How they found the space to go after those thoughts that suddenly appear when you are leaving work, or to follow them down every avenue, on the small chance they bear fruit, whether a child needs your attention or not.
I was having coffee recently with two colleagues in my department, like me women without children. Two of us acknowledged that, despite the undoubted tug of motherhood for much of our later-childbearing years, we could not imagine maintaining our careers with even one child. The third was fortunate in being free of ambiguity: She had eschewed motherhood with no inner torment. There is good reason for this: She is part of a big family and has many relatives, including many lovely nieces and nephews.
The other two of us mourned the fact that we were not merely only children (our own parents, for very different reasons, had also found parenthood a challenge), but the last of our lineage. We contemplated this together, sharing an unspoken understanding that we have broken that sacred line. The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, staring into the void. At three in the morning, I see a future that is weightless, thin air, empty of human contact.
But we have our careers, precious and hard-won. We chose the responsibility of our own existence, as thinking people, as financially independent women, over continuing our lineage—the long line of ancestors who had patiently borne children, who had suffered for them and in turn were justified by them, by passing on the blazing torch of life.
“This is not a choice women should have to face. But we do.”
This is not a choice women should have to face. But we do. Greer wrestles with its complexity. By the time she wrote Sex and Destiny, Greer was mourning the loss of her own fertility. “I still have pregnancy dreams,” she said in an interview a few years later, “waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen.” This grief leaves its damp traces everywhere in her book. Her bitter existential disappointment is what, in my view, accounts for her failure to see the traditional practices around reproduction clearly through the mists of romanticism, and the role that domination—not choice—has always played in women’s childbearing. Because this is the big challenge; how to cultivate a moral accountability to posterity without basing it on patriarchal domination; how to find a place for eros without it being inseparable from traditional notions of masculinity and femininity.
Greer warns: “Human libido is the only force which could renew the world. In allowing it to be drawn off, regularly tapped in domestic ritual, we are preparing the scene of our own annihilation, stupefied by myriad petty gratifications, dead to agony and to ecstasy.” But erotic agony and ecstasy always, always across cultures and societies ends up glorifying masculine hierarchy. Take D.H. Lawrence, whom Greer refers to approvingly. And rightly so. I remember the shock of recognition reading Lawrence for the first time; how men and women were vessels for masculine and feminine archetypes, as if they were mere containers for the gods and goddesses, and through them the cosmos itself. The world is charged with a great vital current, and the same flame burns in both catkins and women.
I recognized too, through Lawrence, how, for women in particular, wanting to be free and wanting to love smashed together in a terrible collision. Take Lawrence’s alter-ego, Rupert Birkin, in Women in Love. Whilst Birkin insists to Ursula that he wants an equal love between men and women, he can only do so by drawing away from practicalities into mythic metaphors: men and women impersonal as stars, two independent beings meeting beyond the concerns of daily life where independence in practice fails—who does the washing up, or whose career takes precedence.
Contemporary literature abounds with examples of women struggling with the twin imperatives to be both a person and a woman. Most illuminatingly, Sheila Heti invites us in her book Motherhood into her quandary, letting us feel her oscillating imperatives—self-determination in one moment, the sadness of forgoing motherhood—opening up to the reader the phenomenological experience of procrastination and equivocation which extended through her thirties. This is what Simone de Beauvoir means when she says, of the free woman, “Her vital interests are divided.” Heti is Mathieu as a woman, for whom the choice is not to abandon a pregnant girlfriend but to abandon what she calls the “lizard brain” part of herself that wants her to choose motherhood. She wants to outwit nature and society at the same time: “Do not want what a woman wants,” she reminds herself. “You are not a woman who wears a diamond ring, the sort of woman … who gets what she wants from a man.” Yet when her boyfriend Miles, who already has a daughter of his own with a former partner, encourages her not to want a child because she has better things to do with her life, she is offended and cold towards him—obviously. Bastard, thinks the reader.
Greer reminds us of the fate of the Parsees, a Bombay community chosen by the British back in the seventeenth century to be their commercial and cultural intermediaries. In this role, they built up the East India Company and later playing a significant role in India’s industrialization. The Parsees took on British cultural values of individualism and self-development, placing a high value on education, including for girls, marrying later, and taking on the trappings of a bourgeois lifestyle. But today, the numbers of the Parsee community are so low that they are at risk of disappearance. One reason is that their women, too, wanted freedom.
Perhaps the Parsees sketch out the fate of our own civilization. I don’t know. Perhaps there are answers to our crisis: cheap, available childcare, a culture of equal parenthood, more status for mothers. But sometimes solutions are evasions, because the dilemma itself is the thing, showing us something rich and precious and tragic about our situation.
My mind, dwelling on such things, is apt to turn them suddenly into little images. One such is a vision of finding a little pocket in time, but not of time, a sort of underwater cave, sealed off from the rhythms of night and day, the inexorable ticking of the clock. I see myself dwelling here, living a whole life as a mother, and then when I’m done, returning to my life and picking it up again. I will have lost no time, broken nothing unfixable. That is the only way I can envision being both a mother and myself.
Meanwhile, in the real world, this dilemma brings suffering and regret, even as it cannot easily be solved. I look at my one, faded sepia photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, and think about all she endured as spirited working-class woman at the turn of the last century: a pregnancy out of wedlock during the First World War, when it was a social outrage; a husband, later in life, with whom she was very happy, and who was killed in World War II, along with the illegitimate son who had grown up to be so brilliant and brave as a fighter pilot; my father, who lost his father and older half-brother, and whose internal wounds later bore the poisonous blooms of serious illness and disability as an adult. And then me, her only granddaughter, who finally achieved social mobility, who built a life filled with books and ideas but paid her back in a terrible way—by ending the line. Lying awake at night, I find the irony almost unbearable.
Sheila Heti has another, kinder, way of thinking about this. Recognizing that her primary female identification is as a daughter, not a mother, she says this: “Art is written for one’s ancestors … Children are eternity forwards. My sense of eternity is backwards through time.” I do not know how we can go from being a society of daughters to one in which women choose to see themselves as mothers, too. But on my good days, I think that finding eternity backwards through time may itself be something good and true.