The times, they are a changin'

[fpb]

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command,
Your old road is rapidly agin';
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand,
For the times they are a changin'.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g798CHaazwkE1E0TMQv8AZ60Bj1wD91DKPI00

Like all really inevitable and natural development, this one surprised everybody, including me. Well, what the Hell did we all expect? People like babies. Women particularly like babies. Girls - with a few exceptions in whose personal history it is all too easy to read the emotional reasons - intensely love babies. You cannot introduce a baby among a group of schoolgirls without being practically drowned by cooings and bursts of wonder at the cuteness of them. Nobody should have expected that this natural instinct could be for ever silenced by an artificial image of a brilliant career woman, something which, for nine women out of ten, has no reality at all. Women look at Sex and the City with its childless, unmarried, rich, elegant forty-years-old, as they read Hello magazine: as a kind of fable. I do not understand the appeal myself, but I very much doubt whether it has anything to do with daily or real life. Women read their glossy magazines in ordinary, sometimes drab homes, and do not seem to make much of an effort to imitate them. It all seems to me to live in a special space of the mind dedicated to unreality. If any woman identifies with the Sex and the City characters, it cannot be because of their surroundings or careers; it is more a matter of the common complaint about weak, shiftless, commitment-phobic men - which, whether or not it is true, is at least a commonplace female whine. The idea that millions of schoolgirls go out into the great wide world in the hope of becoming top corporate lawyers, marketing VPs, or even fashion designers or Hollywood actresses, seems to me naive in the extreme. Some of them may dream of such things; most of them know that they never will happen. And the universal cultural pressure on girls to regard babies as obstacles in the way of their careers is increasingly nullified by the fact that, across the advanced world, the vast majority of women know that they will have no careers. The idea of spending one's life moving forwards in a job until one achieves a high and permanent rank is outdated, not only for the majority of women, but of men too. The same people who tried to scare us with the fear of being hobbled to babies for life also informed us, in the same breath, that the notion of jobs for life is an outdated superstition.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide;
The chance won't come again.
And don't speak too soon
For the world's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin';
For the loser now will be later to win,
For the times, they are a changin'.

It is a case study in the power and limit of cultural consensus. They removed the stigma from illegitimacy; these days, most people who call someone a "bastard" (and weirdly enough, it is a popular insult) do not know what is meant to be insulting about the term. But they could not remove the attraction from babies, or the magnetism from sex. Every attempt to make maternity unattractive or dreaded must founder on the reality of human nature. A number of people will no doubt absorb these attitudes: they are the kind who, for one reason or another, deviate from the human average. The majority may well learn to repeat them by rote, but will never internalize them; their emptiness will become manifest - they will vanish like mist in the sun - at the sight of a single real baby. You have made it easier, not harder, for your children to have babies. The result, as I said, should have been expected; it is only the result of our universal attachment to statistics - which are, after all, always yesterday's news - that kept us from seeing the obvious.

I am not saying that there will ever be a fad for having babies as such among sixteen-year-olds. One good (or rather bad) experience of childbirth would knock that sort of nonsense on the head, and at any rate even sixteen-year-olds are not that silly. The point is rather that the coming generation is beginning to instinctively see its future, not in terms of career - they learned at the cradle how difficult and fickle a thing it is - but in terms of children, of family, of heirs. These girls know that in nine times out of ten, what will give their lives continuity and content will not be the ever-changing, mostly frustrating, sometimes dangerous and unwelcoming, reality of work, but their families; that their real life is apt to be at home, with a husband or partner if they are lucky, but with a baby anyway. And like young people across the world, they are impatient to start.

The line, it is drawn.
The curse, it is cast.
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
AND THE FIRST ONES NOW WILL LATER BE LAST -
For the times, they are a changin'.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Also, we're coming up on a huge generational shift. The Millennials, who are analogous to the Greatests, are growing to adulthood. And when this crisis is over, they will likely do what the Greatest did when World War II was over ...

... baby boom!

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I somehow have an urge to watch Jurassic Park again...with that cute scientist with glasses....

What was his quote?

Something about life finding a way....

(hopefully, this will have less blood)

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

In this story, since the girls appear to be from a relatively well-off (or at least middle class) community, the usual pat answer about urban teen pregnancy - they just want the welfare cheques - cannot even awkwardly be seen to apply. Of course, that broad accusation, while it may be true in specific cases, has never rung completely accurate with me. I remember reading a girl saying something along the lines that "working at McDonald's I'm nobody, but with a baby I'm somebody. I'm somebody's Mother."

I know personally a young lady who got pregnant at 18 (yes, technically an adult, but only two years older than these girls) who, when she is honest with herself, admits it was to win her mother's respect. Her mother was furious with her at first, but once the baby was born, her mother had to respect that she was also now a mother - in an important way, she had become her mother's equal.

It's also possible that these girls have considered early child-bearing as an alternative: instead of pushing off family for 20 years and attempting to concieve as they push 40, why not have the babies young (which some studies suggest is more healthy for both mother and child) and still be relatively young and healthy when the kids leave home. You can start a career at 36 and possibly be in the same spot at 50 that would have realistically been in (as a woman) had you started at 22.

women and babies

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

I'm a woman, and I'm not particularly fond of babies.
I mean I have nothing against babies or children as such, I even think I'd like to have kids in a preferably slightly distant future, but I'm not your typical cliché of the girl who starts screaming "so cuuuuuuute!" every times she sees a baby.
I don't think I'm an exception or an error of nature or a victim of some conspiracy to convince women they'd rather have a career than a family.
On the contrary, I have the impression there is still a lot of pressure for women to be mothers or at least aspire to be mothers, as if not wanting children was somehow unnatural.
Also, I want to have a career and perhaps I'm being naive, but I don't think it's impossible. After all my mother did it and she had four kids too, so that can't be completely impossible.

Re: women and babies

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You ARE an exception, beginning with the fact that you are working towards an academic career. I have long since made up my mind that, as a historian, I am an exception, and that my interests are not the interests of mankind at large (although they are quick enough to ask questions about points of interest, they would never make the sacrifices and efforts involved in finding the answers for themselves). More power to you; I certainly would hate a society in which the likes of Ann Douglas or Mary Beard, to mention only two, were forced to stay at home and have babies. If I ever met Ann Douglas, to mention one, I would bow before her genius and immense learning. To make such a woman do anything except the thing she has done would be a colossal waste. More: it would be a crime against the human spirit. The work of an Ann Douglas is the work of one irreplaceable human mind, and had it not been done by her, we could not have an exact replacement, and the whole world would be the poorer. But bear in mind that the vast majority of "careers" available to anyone were never the spiritually validating and emotionally fulfilling ones that research and learning afford. What is more, the academic career structure is one of the few that has not been devastated by globalization and Thatcherism. Talk to the women at the tills where you buy your food, talk to those who stack the shelves in the storage areas, talk to those who work in call centres or factories. Ask them whether that is what they want from life. Ask them if their career means anything more to them than getting a cheque to pay their bills. And bear in mind that this is the experience of work for the vast majority of women in the world.

Second, beware of projection. If you feel that there is so great a pressure on women to have babies, is that because everyone in the world is telling you to have them - or because you are trying not to hear? There is no noise, as they saying goes, so loud as the one you are trying not to hear. And I am not saying that to make you feel guilty or to undermine you. In order to pursue a calling to which you are eminently suited and which is worth following in itself - which would be worth following even if you never made a penny out of it, and had to subsidize it by stacking shelves - you have to make choices, and choices mean sacrifices. But be careful you do not project the difficulty of a choice on to the outside world; that you do misplace the will that drives this choice - which is your will - on to an anthropomorphized "society" which is trying to hold you back. That is both nonsense and spiritually dangerous: it means developing the paranoid belief that all the problems that legitimately face any scholar, or any person with a sense of mission and calling, are the result of hostile wills. They are not. They are the result of life as it is, and all scholars have to overcome them. There is a reason why Chaucer made his Oxford scholar lean and a bit shabby.

EDITED IN: I had to correct this because I mentioned both "Ann Douglas" and "Mary Douglas". They are both women of genius; Ann Douglas is the author of the two finest books of American culture history I ever read - The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty - and the late Mary Douglas was one of the greatest anthropologists in history. To make matters more complicated yet, Mary Beard is one of the greatest Classicists alive. I have read with great admiration and immense debt the works of all three.

Re: women and babies

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

And bear in mind that this is the experience of work for the vast majority of women in the world.


I daresay it's the experience of work for most people in the world! One thing that has often frustrated me about my fellow students is that they don't seem to have a goal in life. They don't seem to have ambition. They don't have that 'dream job'. They want a job because they want something that can buy them a reasonable house and a nice car and all the necessities of life.

More people ought to have a vocation.

l that there is so great a pressure on women to have babies, is that because everyone in the world is telling you to have them - or because you are trying not to hear?

That's an interesting point. Hmm. I haven't personally felt this pressure yet, but I suspect this is because my parents believe I'm far too young. When I'm thirty, I'll have to see which is actually the case. :) Then again, I've told people since I was about ten that I never wanted children. It might actually sink in by the time I'm thirty so maybe nobody will actually say anything!

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

While I can't even begin to contemplate what drove all these girls to get pregnant - from, by the sounds of things, a number of highly inappropriate men - but I'm pretty sure it wasn't sound reasoning. It sounds like a pretty naive notion of what motherhood will be like. "Oooh, we can have baby showers!" These girls are in for a shock. They have no idea what's in store for them.

I think carreer vs family vs juggling both is a personal choice, and you can't say that one or the other is more "natural". Every woman - and man - needs to decide what is important to him/her, and follow whatever that is. Unfortunately, we are constantly bombarded by often conflicting pressures and expectations, which can make it hard to figure out who we truly are.

Not every woman is born to be a mother. Just as not every woman is born to smash the glass ceiling with her stiletto heels. And the two aren't always mutually exclusive, either! I may turn into a pile of goo when I see a newborn baby, but I have no intention of ending my carreer the moment I get pregnant. At the same time, I'm realistic enough to know that I will never be a top-ranking surgeon or anything similar, because I would like to have a family.

But I don't think any woman who feels differently is weird, unnatural or somehow messed up. Some people just don't want babies. Fair enough. You can create a whole lot of problems by trying to convince such people otherwise. I know several older women who say that if they had their time again, they wouldn't have children. And I know a couple who say they'd have more children if only they still could. It comes down to the individual. There is no rule to define all women.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it wasn't sound reasoning. It sounds like a pretty naive notion of what motherhood will be like. "Oooh, we can have baby showers!" These girls are in for a shock. They have no idea what's in store for them.


Patronizing, much?

As for the rest, please read my response to elskuligr, above.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

Patronizing, much?

Nope. Realistic. Childbirth is awful, and raising children is hard, hard, hard. A sixteen-year-old is not well-equipped, socially or mentally or emotionally. I'm not saying that a sixteen year old girl can't raise a child, but it really isn't a great situation. Even older women usually don't have much of a clue about what it's really like - they have an idealised view of childbirth and motherhood. I'm not exempt. I've seen many of the horrors that childbirth has to offer, and seen many of the difficulties experienced by friends who have children. Yet still I have this little belief that when it's my turn, everything will be okay, and I'll have perfect, healthy babies who'll sleep at night and not get sick, and not hate me when they're teenagers. But I'm old enough not to base any life-changing decisions on such fantasies.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

I find this article horrifying. I have to agree with privatemaladict below that these girls made a stupid decision. They're reducing 'creating life' to a schoolyard pact. Personally, I hope they keep the kids and end up realizing what a stupid decision they made.

The same people who tried to scare us with the fear of being hobbled to babies for life also informed us, in the same breath, that the notion of jobs for life is an outdated superstition

Well, I for one do believe in the former (in relation to myself anyway) but I'd love a job for life. It's why I'm aiming for the public service. I have more of a chance of staying at a job for life in there than the private sector.

Girls - with a few exceptions in whose personal history it is all too easy to read the emotional reasons - intensely love babies.

I do know women who had perfectly happy childhoods who don't want babies. They're not intensely ambitious either. They just honestly don't like babies much.

These girls know that in nine times out of ten, what will give their lives continuity and content will not be the ever-changing, mostly frustrating, sometimes dangerous and unwelcoming, reality of work, but their families; that their real life is apt to be at home, with a husband or partner if they are lucky, but with a baby anyway. And like young people across the world, they are impatient to start.

Children do not necessarily create contentment in your life any more than work necessarily creates contentment. It all depends on the individual person. It would be interesting to do a study on this though. It would be interesting to interview twenty year olds to see what they believe would make them content in life, and then interview them twenty years later to see if it's changed.

Although, personally, contentment is not a goal I'm aiming for. I want to live an interesting life. Contentment sounds a bit bland to me.

And personally, I do believe that children should have a parent (or somebody, at least, if you're rich enough to afford a good nanny, then kudos) at home taking care of them full-time for at least the first five years. But I also believe this parent should be the person who earns less money, and/or is more equipped to take care of the child. I do not believe that this is necessarily the woman, especially in circumstances where the woman would make a lot more money and be able to provide for the family better. There have been studies done saying that children do better later in life if university educated parents look after them. And this belief only adds to my desire to not have children. I'm not ready to make that sacrifice should I be the one who earns less money.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are too honest for your own good. Your reply is so full of the words "personally" and "for my part" and "I know women who", that it becomes clear that you are not really able to contradict my statement as to the NORMAL behaviour of human beings. All of us deviate in different ways, and I think you are probably grateful that you come much closer to the human average than I do in the matter of anger. But your own experience is not an answer to anything, and, as such, has no more universal validity than that of any other girl - or sixteen.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

I know I can't generalize about the normal behavior of humans. I don't want to. Generalizations make me really uncomfortable.

However, I would say that you really couldn't make the generalization as to the 'normal' behavior of human beings either. Not unless you can come up with studies to back it up or something.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

We're all sharing personal opinions here. You're no less guilty of generalizing based on personal experience than curia_regis. Your own mother had you at a young age, so naturally you're defending these young mothers and their ability to make a responsible decisions. I'm drawing on what I remember of high school, and what I've seen of teenage girls since then to suggest that a high school girl isn't the best candidate for motherhood. And curia_regis is telling you that in her experience, plenty of non-screwed-up women aren't very interested in having children - something I also agree with. None of us are drawing on statistics or hard data here. We're just talking.

"normal behaviour"

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

Now, this is the reason why we addressed the question of universal instinct elsewhere than on your own livejournal.
curia_regis says "personally" precisely because, as you admit yourself, she is being honest intellectually.
Because all anyone here has access to is personal experience and some knowledge of independent facts.
No one has access to universal truth and no one knows for a fact what is "normal behaviour" for a woman. What does "normally" mean anyway? Is it what most people do? Is it what people would "naturally" do? But natural behaviour doesn't exist, men have always lived in society.
I find all your arguments based on some supposedly universal conception of what is normal for a woman (sacrificing herself for her kids, loving kids, etc.) unsound as far as rational arguments go because it has no solid basis and is solely based on a personal opinion masquerading as universal truth.
I'm sorry if I'm making that point rather strongly, but you insisted we took the matter frankly so here it is.

Also I'm aware that curia_regis already addressed part of these points below, but I did not want to be accused of hiding my opinions or talking behind your back.

The oldest is 16 - the rest are jail bait

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

There is a misconception that this is a well-thought response to social and economic pressure. It is a fantasy which bubbled up from the bottom of the human heap and infected the most vulnerable. The parents of these girls didn't/couldn't teach them self-respect, and their families didn't teach them about men and women caring for each other. None of them expect to do anything with their lives. They are having babies for the "stuff" (their own place to live), the respect (from being mothers), and the love (babies will love them). They will no longer be dictated to by their parents or their teachers. (They are not thinking of ever having a job or a boss.) They don't expect the fathers to be around (or it will screw up the "stuff" - and maybe the respect). They don't expect their children to want a better life, either, since they can't imagine one for themselves.
It's not inevitable. These girls are not even close to adults (the oldest is 16. They start at 14.) This is an aberration. This is a scream for the community to take action. Peer pressure made this look like a great idea to children who grew up without hope or love. The community can figure out how to clean the windows so they can see out of the hopelessness. Because the community let lovelessness become "normal." We let those girls down.

Re: The oldest is 16 - the rest are jail bait

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I have a niece who has loved babies and wanted to be a mother since she was old enough to talk and hold dolls. She has never wavered in that desire. She didn't have some weird childhood or problem with self-esteem; her community didn't let her down. She just wanted to be a mom.

She did become one, eventually, at 18. And five years later, she's one of the best, most responsible moms I know, and she was from the moment she conceived.


Wanting children, even when you're young, is not some kind of mental disorder.

Re: The oldest is 16 - the rest are jail bait

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Wanting children, even when you're young, is not some kind of mental disorder.

Well said!

For what it's worth

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

According to the Newsweek article about this (http://www.newsweek.com/id/142360), the Superintendent "said the girls are generally 'girls who lack self-esteem and have a lack of love in their life.'" He no doubt is bringing his own presuppositions and prejudices to the discussion, but he is also in a better position than we to know true details of the girls' lives. On the whole I agree in principle that these girls probably don't know what they are letting themselves in for. But on the other hand that is probably true of every new mother at any age, regardless of what they think they know. I would say, however, that the younger you are the more true it is, and that is not condescension. It is an observable fact of life.

End of pontification.

Re: For what it's worth

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

He no doubt is bringing his own presuppositions and prejudices to the discussion

I agree.

While I don't agree with what these young women have done, and especially their de facto decision to deprive their children of fathers, I also find the general tone of the discussion regarding them to be degrading. I believe that our society fails to turn our responsible 25-year-olds, let alone, 18 or 14 year olds, because we, as a society, condition our young people to expect a long and protracted childhood - and the attendant immaturity.

Adam Smith, arguably one of the greatest minds of the last 400 years, started university at age 14 - and he wasn't unusual in that regard. That was the common age to commence university. (Frankly arguments that "university" of the 18th century was equivalent to our "high school" give entirely to much credit to our high school system). By age 23 he was a professor of English literature. He was an academic. Others of his generation would have entered traded or apprenticeships at 14; a great step nearer to adult responsibility than the never-ending party some high school cultures exemplify.

We are partly suffering the continuing fall-out of New Deal policies meant primarily to protect the wage-earning potential of white, male heads-of-households during the Great Depression. However, we also have an entire consumer culture built around advertising to teens, on the assumption that they are basically children with money.

Sixteen year olds would be capable if we let them be - and may are despite our best efforts to the contrary. However, this situation (and the reactions I'm reading) illustrate a dualism that FBP hinted at in his original essay: Motherhood and Family are not *really* taken as serious "career" choice. We applaude teenager who become "Young Entrepeneurs", but when a young woman decided that she wants to be a mother, she is immediately decribed as "emotionally immature", "unloved", posessing "low-self esteem" or "seeking attention." It's possible it's true. It's also possible a young mother knows what she's doing.

I don't think the community failed these young woman by not instilling adequate "hope" or "self-respect". I think society at large failed them in general by constantly pushing off adulthood and specifically by pushing the importance of stable fathers out of the picture.

Re: For what it's worth

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And News("Obama rules!")week is no doubt the most unbiased and sympathetic of news sources. As in, I gave up reading the rag years ago.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

You probably already know how I feel about this in general, if not this situation in particular.

How easy our lives are now! It has not made us better people.

[nicked-metal.livejournal.com]

Are we worse, or are we painfully aware of weaknesses that we'd have ignored previously?

I think we are better people. The homicide rate is the lowest it has ever been, in history and prehistory. But we will never be 'good enough', which is to our advantage, this desire to be better (even if that doesn't mean faster and stronger).

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

"One good (or rather bad) experience of childbirth would knock that sort of nonsense on the head"

This is actually not the case! :) In general, I'm pretty sure women can't recall the pain of childbirth, other than in a sort of vague, literal way. This I think, a human response that truly allows for the human race to thrive and multiply so successfully, because if you could accurately remember the pain of childbirth(even in these days with our amazing medical technology and painkillers), no woman would ever have more than one.

Since those girls did do what they did, I sure wish the best for them and their children. I hope they keep to their pact and help each other out, because if they do, it will make all the difference in the world. Their lives will still be hard, but it could be filled with friendship and community.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Trust you to take it positively. However, on the opening point, my mother is female, and she certainly remembers very well every awful detail of my birth - which, she claims, lasted twelve hours. And she had a couple of more children after me.

Late to the Dance

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I saw this while surfing someone else's LJ and felt compelled to repost here:

"We're not old enough to have kids":
http://xkcd.com/441/