Women Are Supposed to Want to Be Mothers
But sometimes they don't, and that's Taylor Swift's fault
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That John Mac Ghlionn Newsweek article on Taylor Swift being a bad female role model (because she’s unmarried and unbabied at thirty-four) has been making the rounds on social media for the last five days. I ignored the faff at first — the article is classic clickbait — both overtly provocative and quite poorly argued — which is a great reason to simply ignore it rather than purpling over and taking to social media with clenched fists. It’s patently designed to annoy middle class white women (a profitably engaged and vocal group when irritated) and it comes from Newsweek, a site that most non-US-based people don’t really care about. It also leans right, which is again not exactly the purview of the majority of non-American — or at least Europe-based — middle class women. So a reasonable, maximally sane response to this type of furore is to think ‘who cares?’ and go about your day.
Since the faff has continued for days now, particularly in Ireland where Swift performed this week, I feel a bit more inclined to weigh in. There is always the sense, writing online, that you may simply be adding more noise to an already overwrought and one-dimensional discourse. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed. It’s useful to refrain where possible, unless you have something to add that you’re not necessarily seeing elsewhere.
Women get defensive when this topic comes up. When they’re reminded, particularly by a man, that they’re failing to meet the socially imposed markers of successful womanhood, marriage and motherhood being first on that traditional list. As a person who has chosen not to become a parent, I understand the bristling sense of irritation and injustice that these sorts of conversations generate. After all, what is it to Mac Ghlionn if individual women choose to live in a way that he considers non-ideal? If the perpetuation of humanity depends on women leaning into the prospect of motherhood (and it does but it depends on other factors too), then why does there appear to be so little collective focus on why it is that more women seem to find the prospect of motherhood unappealing, inaccessible or both?
It doesn’t seem feasible that women are electing not to have children because they’ve been indoctrinated by a Girlboss culture symbolised by a leotard-clad, sequin-drenched, red-Fenty-lipped Taylor Swift. They’re not so hopped up on feminine hubris and inoffensive music that they think they have forever to biologically procreate, or that settling down and having a family seems suddenly unappealing because a celebrity has glorified going another way. Try being a woman over thirty without children, and walking into a room with more than ten people in it. Someone will ask why you don’t have children within minutes. We may live in a world where motherhood is more optional than it was, but we’re deeply aware of the pressure toward motherhood that still represents the norm.
The small- (and sometimes large-) c conservatism that considers motherhood the highest good to which a woman might aspire simply does not mesh with the reality of modern middle-class womanhood. The society we live in is unprecedentedly atomised, with less family and community support for parents than ever before, while the majority of parental face-time is still performed by women. There is war in Europe and the Middle East. Afghan women are once again locked away in the dark and denied access to education, while the Taliban jape about with the night vision goggles and MD-530 helicopters the Americans left behind when they skedaddled out of there in August 2021. In my home country of Ireland, the worst housing crisis in the history of the state makes home ownership an impossibility for many, trapping people in shared housing situations into their forties and beyond, delaying their ability to start — or afford to start — a family of their own.
A generational disparity in property ownership rates is breeding bitter resentment, while a 2023 report by the UK charity Coram determined that the average cost of full-time nursery care for one child under the age of two in Britain is now almost £15,000 a year. Meanwhile, two incoherent, deeply confused men — one of whom is an octogenarian and one of whom is on the cusp — compete for leadership of the most influential country in the world. We can thank one of those men for the revitalised Afghan illiteracy rates among women and girls (and the Taliban with their night vision), and the other for achieving more impeachments than sitting terms as President. Thus far, anyway.
In 1971, just 18% of British women had no children by the age of thirty. By 2020, the number was over 50%. Taylor Swift is not a disincentive to motherhood within our culture. She is, like the rest of us, a product of that culture. I have female friends who want to have families and are held back from doing so for pragmatic reasons. I’d imagine many women do. It may be that some women eschew motherhood because serially dating handsome, wealthy men (as Mac Ghlionn insinuated) just seems more inherently appealing to them — it may be that these particular women are not currently best placed for motherhood. They’re busy.
Mac Ghlionn’s article seems to take issue with the idea that this is a perfectly valid use of an individual’s time as determined by their own values but it is the values themselves he takes aim at. The suggestion is that women should want to settle down and be mothers and that something has gone very wrong in a culture which reifies or represents a different desire as equally valuable. His pearl clutching is largely in response to the observation that some don’t crave motherhood, and that they model this lifestyle to young girls who may consider it more appealing than a traditional route. And so they might. That’s probably up to them. There’s little point in saying this — of course women, like men, can and should do whatever they want as long as they’re harming no one else. The reluctant mother is a piteous figure and a target of universal scorn. We consider her a monstrous, unnatural being. The woman who does not love her children is vilified with a thoroughness which, in our spirit of forgiveness, we so often spare the many disinterested, deadbeat dads knocking around. We could fill more stadiums with them than Taylor Swift’s world tour.
We don’t currently live in the (Western) world Mac Ghlionn seems to crave — one in which the motherhood role is encouraged as primary throughout engines of culture. A culture in which motherhood is central not just to womanhood but to young womanhood, and held up as the ideal to young girls. We did live in that world, though. I grew up in it - the Ireland of the 1990s was precisely this sort of conservative environment, in which my mother was scorned and ostracised for being a tirelessly devoted single parent while my father, who volitionally did not take care of his children and left my mother in poverty, experienced no direct social penalty for neglecting his parental — not to mention legal — responsibilities. Women can be rendered supremely vulnerable and profoundly silenced when their validity and social role is seen primarily through their relationship to other people. It is little wonder few of us crave a return to that narrow corridor.
Even in this profoundly confused and confusing time, however, most women do clearly desire motherhood. For a conservatively inclined observer, it may be useful to consider the material obstacles to motherhood which exist now but may have been less prevalent in the former utopia they relentlessly lean back in their chair and tip towards.
It’s easy to fall into reductive, divisive arguments on this. I’ve seen a lot of ‘men aren’t allowed to have a view on women within society’ takes from women online this week. That’s silly - of course they are, and vice versa. If you don’t like double standards only when you’re at the sharp end, then it isn’t really the double standard you dislike. If women can talk about male role models and masculinity and the place of men within society (and we do, a lot), then men can do the same. Mac Ghlionn can lament Taylor Swift Pied Pipering the world’s impressionable girls into a life of serial dating and donating to charity, high level career achievement and shorts-with-boots fashion combinations and taking their sweet time to have babies while overlooking the fact that women who want to be mothers are universally clear on what they need to feel ready for motherhood — stability. A secure home. Help with childcare. A sense of what the future might look like. These things are in short supply these days.
Everyone is free to have a bad take (gender irrelevant), and Mac Ghlionn’s take is bad. Not because he is questioning the influence of celebrity culture on young girls (a practice feminists are - in theory - very much on board with) but because his take is a bit of an overboiled ham. Women are not taking to the streets in cowboy boots and declaring their hatred of babies. They’re telling us that in the UK at least, in general, women would like to have more children than they currently have. It might be worth listening when they tell us why they don’t.
I am a 49 year old mother of 4 kids (and 15/13/11/11) and work 45 hours a week. It’s hard. My husband works part time and is the primary extra curricular and school taxi driver. I am a runner and recently comopleted an ultramarathon.
I love my family but would be equally happy pursuing my own goals and dreams. There’s not enough time in my life to do everything I want.
Thank you for the thought-provoking column!
I think it is actually somewhat helpful to have a role model that shows that you cannot have it all: you can have a career and vibrant love life, but you cannot have babies at the same time. One of the most unhelpful (in my opinion) things that girlpower narrative promotes is the idea that you can kick ass of any task you set for yourself just because you are a woman. This is, in my experience, a completely unrealistic expectation, which normally ends in tears and ruined health. I tried to raise my child without much of an external support, because I though I should be able to do this, otherwise I am a loser. I had such a hard time, because I insisted on taking all the responsibility and tried to accommodate everyone's needs - and all while continuing to work. Then I moved to Ireland and learned a phrase "it takes a village to raise a child" - and it almost broke me, so different it was from the set of expectations I had for myself as a mother. So, let's have a conversation about mega pop stars not having time to be parents (at least by contemporary standards of parenthood), because it is true.