WOMBS ON STRIKE
Today, unlike at the turn of the previous century, there is no political agenda attached to childbirth;
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the decision not to have children (or the lack of a decision leading to the same result) is a strictly private matter. Most of the time, it is the outcome of an intimate dialogue between a woman and herself and has nothing to do with an ideological stance. What we see is that the phenomenon of childlessness is steadily becoming more widespread, particularly in English-speaking countries but also in Japan and throughout southern Europe. In twenty years, the number of childless women in these places has doubled, almost without anyone noticing.
Referring to this new trend, English-speaking countries usually distinguish between “childless” and “child-free,” which implies forgoing the option of having children.
Germans talk of
Kinderlosigkeit
, a word used with similar intent, while in France, where the phenomenon is less prevalent, there is no specific term for this choice. There is no clear distinction between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, or any reference to a particular way of life.
There are an estimated 10 to 11 percent of French women who do not have children and demographers' projections do not anticipate major changes.
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By contrast, that number reaches 18 percent in England,
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20 percent in Italy,
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16 percent in Austria (with 25 percent of that figure in Vienna),
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and between 21 and 26 percent in Germany.
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The same trend is evident outside Europe. In the United States, where fertility rates remain high, 20 percent of women are childless, which is twice as many as thirty years ago.
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An Australian study estimated that at least 19.7 percent of Australian women of reproductive age will remain childless,
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and data from industrialized Asian countries such as Singapore and Thailand point to similar percentages.
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We do not have figures for childless Japanese women, but we do know that Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, along with Germany, where it hovers at 1.3 children.
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The numbers almost seem to point to some unspoken resistance to motherhood. Evidently, as soon as women are able to control reproduction, pursue studies, enter the job market, and aspire to financial independence, motherhood stops being a natural, self-evident fact, becoming a question instead. Although choosing not to have children is still a
decision taken by a minority, the trend constitutes a genuine revolution, suggesting the need to redefine women's identity. Of course, not all industrialized countries are in the same situation. Evolving cultural norms and family policies will influence the choices parents make, but the phenomenon of childlessness, reinforced by the individualism of our age, is not about to disappear, particularly not when it has definite advantages and attractions.
In those countries most affected by childlessness and declining fertility, there is a combination of two factors that act as powerful deterrents to motherhood. The first and perhaps more important is the prominence of the model of the good mother. The secondâwhich follows from the firstâis the lack of family policies that are specifically helpful to women.
These factors are much in evidence in three large industrialized nations that in other ways are profoundly different from one another: Germany, Italy, and Japan. With strong patriarchal traditions, these countries clung for longer than most to a model in which the sexes were complementary, where a strict distinction existed between men's and women's spheres
and roles and tasks were carefully differentiated. Women were in charge of caring for the children, the husband, and the home; men were in charge of everything else.
Historically, this model might have existed almost everywhere, but the three countries in question continue to share an overvaluation of the mother's role to the point where it dominates every other aspect of a woman's identity. The German
Mutter
, the Italian
mamma
, and the Japanese
kenbo
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project a mythical aura of motherhood, at once sacrificial and all-powerful. By contrast, the specter of the French
maman
and English
mommy
seems rather insubstantial.
Women who are identified with so exalted a mother figure find themselves prisoners of a role that tethers them to the responsibilities of the home. A mother can hardly escape her burden when it is endorsed by a powerful social consensus. And changing the situation is a formidable challenge when society is ordered by men and for men, who see only advantages in the status quo. Moreover, the moral obligations of the mother's role have been handed down from an earlier generation, one that experienced motherhood as the full scope of a woman's existence.
Nevertheless, since the 1970s, following the example of other industrialized countries, German, Italian, and, more recently, Japanese women gradually entered universities and the job market,
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striving for freedom, financial independence, and possible reconciliation between their family and
professional lives. But often societyâeven these different societiesâhas remained deaf to women's expectations. Once they had children, however, these women found themselves staying at home to look after them. Not only is there a desperate lack of child-care facilities in these countries, but should a woman happen to find a solution to the problem of child care, she would have to face the disapproval of her mother and mother-in-law. Entrusting one's child to an institution or a stranger is condemned as maternal desertion.
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In the workplace, the situation is hardly more inviting: in Japan particularly, discrimination toward mothers of young children is widespread.
The net result is that women put off motherhood till relatively late in life and have fewer children. Although concerned governments have tried to institute supportive family policies, as in Germany,
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which has invested in better child care for children under three years old, the ideal of the good mother devoted to her children still wields a powerful influence. Changing an ideal takes far longer to have effect than providing child care.
Favoring the Mother at the Expense of the Woman
No country can afford to ignore changes in its birthrate. In the long term, a nation's pension payments, power, and very survival are at stake. To curb the decline in recent decades,
some European governments have reevaluated their family policies. In general, however, demographers have identified four approaches, which are largely determined by the structure of a country's traditional social welfare system:
The Nordic countries have universalistic state policies that promote the independence of individuals and social equality; the state provides most of the welfare (welfare state). English-speaking countries promote market-based individualism; families and the market provide the welfare (liberal welfare states). Central European countries (including France and Germany) have policies geared at preserving the status quo and traditional family forms; they depend mostly on the family to provide welfare (conservative welfare state). Mediterranean countries are like conservative states, but have a stronger family bias (Southern-European welfare state).
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A feminist perspective might rearrange those categories into just two groups: countries that implement policies that address the full range of women's ambitions and countries that do not. To put it another way, some welfare policies help women manage their different roles while others serve only to support mothers in their family life. The second type of approach considers all other demands on a womanâthose relating to a careerâas matters of personal choice, with no connection to government policy. However, the
past few decades have shown that assistance helping mothers fulfill their different roles, such as those instituted in Scandinavian countries and to a lesser extent in France, have been most successful.
Those countries with the lowest birthratesâJapan, Italy, Germanyâalso seem to offer women the least choices. In Japan, as in Italy, birth outside marriage is still greeted with disapproval, as is divorce. Marriages in Japan (which are still frequently arranged) are in decline (the institution is “in the process of collapse,”
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according to one demographer), and the urge to have children along with it. Reconciling family and working life is considered almost impossible. Most Japanese women stop work when they marry or when their first baby is born. According to a 2006 survey by the Japanese Ministry of Health, a third of women who choose to continue working after marriage leave their jobs in the following four years. Child care is rare and expensive; nursery schools take children from only three years old and close at two in the afternoon. Elementary school begins at age six. In these circumstances, a promise from Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama to award families some $250 a month for each school-age child is unlikely to change the situation. Until very recently, similar conditionsâperpetuated by the notion of woman-as-mother, irreplaceable in the care of her childâpertained for German women, particularly in the former Federal Republic of Germany. In the past in both countries, such circumstances left women with very limited
options: exclusive motherhood or remaining childless. The varying European experiences show that the best birthrates exist in the countries with the highest rates of working women. However, this is not wholly a function of generous maternity leave and other similar family policies. For women to have more children, they must be able to entrust them to high-quality, full-day child care, and also to have the option of working part-time or flexible hours. In a country like Austria, which devotes 2.3 percent of its GDP to family leave (among the most generous in Europe), there is also a glaring lack of public or private child-care facilities.
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The result is a low birthrate and a high percentage of childless women, particularly among women with college education.
Germany's example is also instructive. Although Germany has broken free of many of the constraints of the traditional familyâmarriage with children, remaining single, living together, living apart, being a single parent, or being stepparent are all acceptable choicesâthe state's family policies have failed to boost the birthrate. These policies provide considerable financial help, but they essentially encourage mothers to remain at home, promoting the role of the father-provider and obliging women to choose between family and work from the moment the first child is born.
Faced with that choice and a rising culture of individualism, German women, particularly those with higher education, began to opt to devote themselves to their
work, sparing themselves much emotional turmoil. And increasingly, German women (and men) find themselves preferring the childless life. German men and women both register the lowest desire to have children in Europe. In 2004, a survey of twenty- to thirty-nine-year-olds showed that women in western Germany wanted an average of 1.73 children and those in the east 1.78. The men wanted even fewer: 1.59 in the west and 1.46 in the east.
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In an earlier effort to understand Germany's startling decline in the desire to have children, the University of Leipzig conducted a major survey in 1999, canvassing nearly sixteen hundred males and females, parents and non-parents, aged between fourteen and fifty.
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It came as no surprise that the emotional rewards were the strongest motive for having children, followed by the social approval of parenthood (particularly for Germans in the west). The major obstacles to having children were personal and financial constraints. However, it emerged that children had lost their status as the first priority in people's lives. In fact, when the responders were asked to rank what they most valued, children placed sixth after health, income and financial security, work, relationships and sexuality, and living conditions. Only friends and leisure activities were considered less important. Women wanted children more than men, eastern Germans more than western Germans, and older people more than younger.
The results of this survey do not warrant generalization.
They are not cast in stone and could change depending on various factors. Yet it is possible that they herald a profound change in attitudes and a diversification of women's aspirations that extend well beyond Germany. It is particularly worth noting that it is German women who are turning their backs on anything to do with motherhood: the greatest resistance to the desire to have a child is coming precisely from women in a country where a mother's role is especially burdensome. Of course, for some women having a child in the home involves a way of life that simply does not suit them. It is doubtful whether any kind of family policy, however far-reaching, would help change their minds. And for the rest, generous leave and good child care are a beginning, requiring significant public investment. But that is still not enough. Sharing the job market has to be mirrored by partners sharing family-related tasks,
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which can only be achieved by profound feminist reform right through society, as much in politics as in industry, and most significantly among men. No country is yet in a position to boast that it has achieved the goal of sexual equality.
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