Labor of Love (30 page)

Evangelists for egg freezing suggest that the ultimate empowerment for women would be to work hard enough to be able to consume conspicuously and wait, dating forever. Can we really trust that good things come to those who plan?

In order to earn their happy ending, the women in these stories must be willing to go to any length to make things easy on the men they get involved with, just as they must in order to succeed professionally. The American workforce is now more than half female. Is egg freezing really the best fix that we can come up with for the problems that workplace conventions created for men cause for women? Is it not slightly incredible that between policy changes—say, health care and maternity leave policies like those in other developed countries—and an experimental “time-freezing” technology, American business leaders seem to think that
freezing time
is the more realistic fix?

In romance, the final step of planning is to make it seem spontaneous. Whatever she does, a woman on a date must not let her plan show. Richards, the evangelist of egg freezing, rhapsodizes about how the procedure made it possible for her to feel normal on dates. At least it let her feel normal enough to act normal on them. “It's a buzz kill on dates when you feel compelled to ask the guy sitting across from you, clutching his craft beer, ‘So do you think you might want kids someday?'” she wrote.

The go-getting women who are cited as advertisements for egg freezing use the language of choice and self-empowerment—the same language that Helen Gurley Brown and Virginia Slims used in the 1960s.
You've come a long way
, indeed, when you can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to make your date more comfortable. But in practice, the only choice that egg freezing gives women seems to be the choice to buy into stereotypes that perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, to be the one who does all the work of courtship and then hides the effort it costs her.

It is easy to understand why individual women might want to freeze their eggs. But freezing is never a solution to a problem. On the contrary, it is a way to prolong the existence of a problem. Any apparent problem that a society allows to go on and on must somehow be productive. The purpose of the biological clock has been to make it seem only natural—indeed, inevitable—that the burdens of reproducing the world fall almost entirely on women.

Another group of women, who were also receiving a lot of media attention during the heyday of the Clock-Watchers, prove it.

*   *   *

While 1980s Career Women fretted about fitting marriage and childbearing into their life plans, authorities constantly criticized other, younger women for failing to time pregnancy properly.

Enter the Teen Mom.

Around the same time that the story of the biological clock broke, policy makers and media outlets started reporting an “epidemic” of teen pregnancies. A press release from the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future announced that the rate of teen pregnancies
tripled
between 1971 and 1976. The number of teens who became pregnant every year hovered around one million for most of the 1980s, then spiked by about 20 percent around the turn of the decade.

In policy circles, and in the press, the panic escalated. Yet almost all the mainstream reports on these shocking statistics omitted one important detail. Teen birth
rates
were
falling. While nearly 10 percent of girls who were teens in the 1950s had their first child before reaching twenty, in the 1980s, this figure was closer to 5 percent. It was actually the rate of teen
marriage
that was going down.

What was shocking was not that teens were having sex but that girlfriends were not staying with the boyfriends who fathered their children. In 1950, 13 percent of teen births were nonmarital. In 2000, 79 percent were. A culture of increasing sexual permissiveness may have played a role. But the economy surely did, too. In the 1970s, the shotgun wedding option that so many teens had been forced to take in the 1950s was no longer on the table. If a girl got pregnant in the Steady Era, the father could reasonably expect to find a job that could support her and their family. No longer. In a decade of double-digit inflation, stagnating wages, and unemployment, the solution to teen pregnancy was not marriage. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the conservatives who gained political power during the Reagan and Bush years insisted that it was also not comprehensive sex education or access to contraception and abortion. Republicans systematically blocked access to any of the means that have been shown to reduce teen pregnancy.

A consensus emerged that instead the best way to solve the crisis was to teach young women to manage their lives better. And so authorities started telling teen girls growing up in poor households that they had something in common with well-heeled Career Women. They, too, had to
plan
. Only, for the opposite outcome.

There is a long and troubling history of advocates of birth control appealing to eugenics. In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, tried to persuade authorities to legalize contraception by arguing that it would stop undesirable immigrants from reproducing. In the 1950s, the biologists who invented the oral contraceptive pill conducted dangerous clinical trials in Puerto Rico; they justified this choice by saying that the population needed to be reduced. In the 1970s, Latina activists claimed that 35 percent of that generation had been sterilized.

Campaigns against teen pregnancy may have been less overtly exploitative, but they had similar aims. While rich women were told that they would never be happy if they deprived themselves of the joys of motherhood, poor women were warned not to have children no matter what.

*   *   *

In 1980, the Girls Club of Santa Barbara decided that the mostly black and Latina teen girls they served were in dire need of instruction in “life planning.” The board members decided that they had to “raise the level of their consciousness of today's world as it really is.” In that world, these young women were extremely unlikely to marry men who would be able to support them. They would earn 59 cents to every dollar that their male peers earned, and if they headed their own households, they faced 70 percent odds of living in poverty. To make the most of their slim chance at a good life, they needed to develop a “flexible and aware mentality.” To help them do so, the directors of the Girls Club developed a life-planning curriculum called Choices.

Choices: A Teen Woman's Journal for Self-Awareness and Personal Planning
was published in July 1983. Festooned with pastel flowers, it was marketed as both a textbook and a trade book. When schools purchased
Choices
, they also received teacher-training materials. Because the creators wanted
Choices
to be used in public schools, they developed a companion program for boys, called
Challenges
. The pagination of the two volumes was coordinated. They used different gender pronouns and slightly different examples so that public schools could use them together to teach coed classes. By 1985, they had been adopted for life-planning programs in twenty-two states. They offered a picture of formal gender equality, separate but equal.
Challenges
for boys;
Choices
for girls.

Choices
aimed to teach girls about all the career opportunities that were now open to women and get them into the right frame of mind to seize them. “One must remain flexible enough to change,” the book admonished, “but once the basic decision-making skills are learned, the woman is empowered to make sound choices about anything.”

Pages of worksheets allowed students to conduct “Attitude Inventories” on a wide variety of subjects. You were asked to tick off an option from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree” in response to statements like “If a working couple buys a house, the husband should make the payments.” “At work, women are entitled to use sick leave for maternity leave.” “Men should not cry.” You tried to answer questions like “How much does a dress cost?” to realize how much you would have to earn. The self-knowledge that you gained from the process was supposed to help you choose wisely in all aspects of life.

Chapter 7 was devoted to family planning. The teaching materials said that by the time the student reached this stage, “she has learned to create a decision-making model for when to have a baby; she has, through values clarification, thought about childcare options. Through an exercise in role-playing, the student learns how much commitment a family requires.
The young woman usually concludes that she is not ready emotionally or financially for the responsibility of a baby
.”

The authors added that by the time she completed the family-planning unit, the student “has learned to be assertive, a helpful skill in responses that prevent pregnancies.” Being assertive enough to avoid being coerced into sex sounds like a good skill to learn. But you have to wonder what the corresponding page on
Challenges
said:
Try not to rape your girlfriend?

The emphasis on planning and choice put the burden of policing romance on young women—precisely where it had been in the Steady Era. Only now, these women were also responsible for preparing themselves for careers.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, life-planning techniques continued to be incorporated into the curricula in a wide range of public and private schools. These programs told young people to look at their romantic lives as part of a grand strategy. More important, they taught students to think that any deviation from that plan was a personal failing.

A future of debt and loneliness continues to be the main theme of outreach aimed at teen girls who might consider becoming mothers. An ad campaign that the New York City Human Resources Administration plastered on the subways in 2013 confronted them directly.
Got a good job?
one baby asks, bawling.
I cost thousands of dollars each year
.
THINK BEING A TEEN PARENT WON'T COST YOU
? text slapped diagonally across the bottom reads.
EXPECT TO SPEND MORE THAN $10,000 A YEAR TO RAISE A CHILD.

Another ad featured a tiny girl with an index finger pressed against her lips; she is looking off frame right, as if she is embarrassed for you.
Honestly Mom
 … the thought bubble above her head says.
Chances are he
won't
stay with you
.
What happens to
me
?
The banner confirms:
90% OF TEEN PARENTS DON'T MARRY EACH OTHER.

*   *   *

Our culture sends very different messages to richer and poorer women about motherhood. Articles aimed at middle- and upper-middle-class women rhapsodize about the incomparable joy that having children will bring into their lives. Poor women, particularly women of color, are warned that having a baby will trap them in a lifetime of poverty. Both claims may be true. Motherhood may be a joyful experience if you can afford it. It may be ruinous if you cannot. But in both cases, the emphasis on planning serves to make the reproduction of the world look like a lifestyle choice—a purely private concern. The imperative to line up your life perfectly suggests that it is moral as well as practical to do so.

This fiction that it is female nature to take full responsibility for reproduction places a tremendous burden on women. And it strains many romantic relationships. The fiction that men and women who desire sexual and romantic relations are hardwired to want
opposing
things is not good for anyone. I bet you know at least one bachelor who has spent decades unable to commit to any relationship, despite professing that he yearns to do so; I know several. It turns out that even if cultural stereotypes say that a man can date around endlessly without lowering his stock, of course the experience will change him, just as it changes the partners whom stereotypes say he can dispose of at no cost to himself.

The success of the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy
Knocked Up
suggests how desperately men as well as women may want to get out of this impasse. In it, the young, hotshot career woman played by Katherine Heigl spends a wild night celebrating a recent promotion, falls into bed with the schlubby loser played by Seth Rogen, and several weeks later finds herself in the predicament that the title suggests. The first time I heard it summarized, I thought it was a horror movie. If we take the leap of faith that her character would not sprint to the nearest abortion clinic, we get to enjoy a fantasy in which two unappealing people can fumble their ways toward happiness without ever having to make any joint decisions whatsoever.

The unplanned pregnancy is not presented as a disaster. It is a godsend. Especially for Seth Rogen's character. Stereotypes say that the kind of man-child he epitomizes—unemployed, directionless—is terrified of the responsibilities of monogamy, marriage, and fatherhood. But it is clearly he, not Heigl, who is saved by their chance encounter. Knocking up a stranger rescues the man-child from himself.

The movie makes it clear that if, for whatever reason, the woman played by Katherine Heigl wanted to have a deadbeat's child at this juncture, she could have managed on her own. This is precisely what makes her a heroine. Indeed, if we thought that she was desperate to snag Seth Rogen, the movie would be unbearably depressing. It is her willingness to take on all the work of reproducing the world that is supposed to make her worthy of the happiness she stumbles into. She earns a man and a family by proving that she would have been willing to do everything herself.

Is it worth it? The greatest risk run by the Clock-Watcher who plans every day of her life, fearing that any misstep or wrong “choice” will derail her, is being disappointed.

How many Career Women have grown into exactly the women they planned, only to find that the future they thought they wanted was not what they expected? How could it not be disappointing after so much work? Like the housewife of Betty Friedan's
Feminine Mystique
, I imagine the Career Woman who returns to work two weeks after giving birth dismayed. The new Feminine Mystique has created a new problem with no name that feels disarmingly familiar.
Is this all? Is this what all of that was for?