[Fwd: Re: "Family values"]

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Margaret M Gullette wrote:
     Katha's data projection:  " I read somewhere than 20 percent
> of women of childbearing-age are not going to have children."
>         As of 1996, 83% of women up to age 45, had at least one
> child.
>         Many who are younger are going to have them later than in
> previous cohorts, if at all.
>         This is scarcely a situation of free "choice."
>         Capitalism will treat the "no child" or "one child" or "fewer
> children" pattern as if it were an option or a free decision. But it
> will be no freer than was the decision of early 19th century American
> women to have eight  point seven children.

Margaret, my original point was that childless people often feel that
their wishes and needs are neglected in favor of those of parents. I
argued that parenting was just one of the social useful things people
do, and should not be singled out for workplace accomodation. With
almost one in five women remaining childless, and all those childless
men as well, those people need to be considered too.
    I do think women have more options in the childbearing dept than
early 19th century american women. Few  women back then could live
without marrying, and marrying mean sex and sex meant kids, punctuated
by unsafe abortion which women had in great numbers. They didn't even
have the rhythm method! If you think today's women-- with education,
legal rights, the ability to divorce, to have a sex life outside
marriage and without children, to keep her own earnings, etc etc--
haven't achieved SOME increase in self-determination and choice over the
days when they were legal chattels and total economic dependents  of
their fathers and husbands and had no reliable birth control and little
education and religion was a vastly more powerful cultural force -- you
must espouse some sort of total, almost mystical determinism. Sure
choices are always made in a social matrix -- but the social matrix can
be more or less flexible, and I would say ours is more flexible than 180
years ago by a long shot.
   I see no reason to believe that childless women are being forced to
refrain from having kids by "capitalism." Maybe having kids is not for
everyone, and now that people can choose whether or not to have kids,
some are choosing not to. Your 'capitalism" explanation leaves out that
most women do have kids, after all and have them pretty young (average
age at first birth 23.8), and most women have more than one.
Interestingly, US women have more kids than women in most european
countries -- including those with extensive social welfare provisions.
Lowest birth rates in the world are Italy and Spain, but Germany,
Scandinavia, France are also pretty low.

   Do you think there is something wrong with having no kids? Or just
one? That this is not a choice anyone would make who had real options?
That is what i sense behind your post, but perhaps I misread you.