I recently spoke with Eliane Glaser, a radio producer and author of several books including Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business. This is a great read in which Eliane discusses why mothers are idealised, yet treated so poorly; why campaigns for mothers have become so unfashionable; and what we need to do to improve child-rearing for everyone.
I asked Eliane all about the biological clock.
What's wrong with the concept of the biological clock
Firstly, the science is often misrepresented in the media. Men’s fertility declines with age too and women’s fertility doesn’t fall off a cliff when they turn thirty. There’s a gradual decline. It’s only when you get into your very late thirties that fertility starts declining more rapidly. Even then it’s not as black and white as it’s often portrayed.
All the warnings to women about their biological clock are framed as if women aren’t already aware and aren’t already anxious. Personally, I was definitely both aware and anxious.
I remember a friend advising me that I should be ‘getting on with it’ and finding that unbelievably irritating. I wasn’t able to start a family in my twenties or early thirties, not because the idea didn’t occur to me, but because of structural reasons that were beyond my control.
I knew that if I started a family in my twenties my career prospects and earning potential would be severely compromised. That’s the way the job market is currently set up. I wanted to establish my career and for women in their twenties and early thirties that is when their careers really get off the ground.
The other part of the story that we don’t talk about much is that the main reason women ‘delay’ starting a family is that they haven’t yet found a suitable partner.
There is all this attention on the woman and whether or not she is choosing to prioritise children or work but very little said about men. Just talking about heterosexual relationships for now, but men are delaying wanting to start a family. They are ‘settling down’ later so inevitably this has an impact on when people start to have children.
There’s a perfect storm for women around the issue of the biological clock.
Despite changing family structures and attitudes there is still quite a deep-rooted assumption that women need to become mothers to be fulfilled. We’re told to be perfectionists in our work and to do as well as men and then you have men who are more reluctant to settle down (for more on this check out the research of geographer Danny Dorling).
People should ask men why they are delaying starting a family rather than piling extra pressure on women.
Why do you think we haven’t been able to shake this idea of the biological clock despite the evidence?
I think it’s anti-feminist backlash in a new guise.
Particularly alongside the rise of child-centred parenting which is so intensive, and the decline of state and communal networks. Once you become a mother it is more difficult to retain your status outside the home- whether that’s your work, your public life, or your non-maternal identity.
I think the biological clock is a really convenient tool for those who seek to bring down ambitious women.
Stories in the press always take aim at ‘career women’ choosing to delay starting a family in order to pursue their professional goals. Career seems quite a loaded term in this context. Not working women, but career women.
We no longer accept people being overtly critical of women having aspirations other than children but the biological clock is a really convenient disguise. It’s framed as if women are ‘just being given the facts’ and that it’s just nature, just reality. But it’s not. It’s a way of pressuring women with ‘careers’ to get out of the workforce during the time in which their careers would otherwise take off.
Why do you think we're so reticent to talk about power, politics and economics when it comes to women and motherhood?
I think motherhood has become a really privatised, individualised, domesticated zone which is very retro and ironic, really, in a sort of hyper-modern age. It's almost as if we've bracketed off motherhood as a private space to protect it from hyper-modernity.
We manage motherhood really badly in our society and that's a political issue but instead of talking about it as a political collective issue that we all have responsibility for, we tend to talk about motherhood in very privatised terms.
We wash our hands collectively of the problem and instead say you have all these choices! Isn’t that great, women?
You decide about how you manage your pregnancy and birth parent, about work, about how you parent. But the whole language of choice makes motherhood into a private experience inside the home rather than a collective experience that we can talk about politically.
The language of choice sounds like it’s empowering women but it’s not. Making motherhood a private domain makes every failure your personal failure.
You’re responsible for all the outcomes but you don’t have the support you need to really make a free choice. Our choices are constrained: by economic realities of our family life, by availability and affordability of childcare, by social support networks / lack thereof and by cultural pressure.
The language of choice is also disingenuous because not all choices are socially acceptable. For instance, we only seem to value natural, child centred or intensive parenting options.
Hiding all these issues behind the rhetoric of free choice and personal freedom makes it really hard to have a political conversation about motherhood. We don’t talk about the political ideologies at play, but they are there and shaping our experiences.
Another part of the problem is that the issues mothers experience are often not new. They are the result of unsolved problems over many decades. It can be hard to articulate issues because it feels clichéd. The isolated mother, the guilt, the lack of childcare. There’s a kind of fatigue that comes out in expressions like ‘you’re not the first person to have a baby’. As a society, and in the media we’ve got bored of the problem before it got solved. That makes it hard to keep making the complaint but the complaint is still legitimate and needs to be made.
If you could get people to stop self-censoring about one aspect of motherhood, what would it be and why?
I’ve got two: boredom and rage.
Often parenting is really boring. I think people don't talk about that because there's this pressure to enjoy every minute and then also there's pressure to play with your children. I've never really liked playing with my children. I like being with my children but I just always wanted them to play with each other. But then I feel really guilty that I don't particularly want to play with them, which sounds terrible but then there you go, I'm censoring myself!
The other thing is rage. I feel really strongly about this because I think maternal anger is inevitable and natural. In the past, people who wrote about motherhood like Donald Winnicott or Izika Parker were much more tolerant, open minded and understanding about the inevitability of anger and hatred. But I feel like now we have this culture of an absolute zero tolerance approach to maternal rage. So it's all about positive reinforcement. Parenting by example. The emphasis is all on anger management techniques: count to ten, leave the room etc.
I feel like there's a complete mismatch between the ideal and the reality that results in a huge amount of guilt which you can see on all of the parenting forums and groups. Privately people are really anxious about being angry at their children and what that anger says about them. The taboo doesn’t help, it’s counterproductive because it makes people feel extra guilty and wretched and out of control.
When I was writing the book I spoke to psychologists who said actually, it's really helpful for children to see the limits of what you can tolerate. It’s important to show imperfection and conflict resolution and that a child’s behaviour has an effect on you.
Being authentic and showing authentic feelings is healthier, for parents and children.
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