Out of Step and Having a Baby

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Out of Step and Having a Baby

Newspaper article

By: Molly Jong-Fast

Date: October 5, 2003

Source: Jong-Fast, Molly. "Out of Step and Having a Baby." New York Times (October 5, 2003)

About the Author: Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of best-selling author Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), is the author of The Sex Doctors in the Basement and Normal Girl. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Mademoiselle, and Modern Bride.

INTRODUCTION

In 2002, the average age of mothers giving birth for the first time was 25.1 years; this figure includes all mothers in the United States across all ethnic groups, incomes, education levels, and geographic areas. Meanwhile, the average number of children per woman remains at 2.1, just barely above replacement levels for the current population. Among highly educated women and women in urban centers, however, the notion of giving birth in one's twenties has become unpopular, just as families with more than two children in these sectors are considered abnormal.

Well-educated, career-oriented women in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago have been postponing birth and motherhood from the twenties to the late thirties or forties as part of a trend that spans nearly two decades; in her 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett created controversy among feminists with her assertion that delaying motherhood into the late thirties and early forties was playing with fire; biological clocks are very real, according to Hewlett, and the modern notion that women can finish college, spend fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder, and then focus on childbearing in their late thirties with fresh eggs ready for conception is a myth. Twenty percent of all women over the age of forty are childless; for women earning more than $100,000 per year, that figure is forty-nine percent. Fearful of the "Mommy Track" in which high achievers feel derailed and fear demotion as a result of having children, many women seek to establish themselves firmly in the professional world before having children. According to Hewlett, however, by the time many of these women are ready for kids, their reproductive systems have timed out.

The American Infertility Association agrees; by the time a woman reaches the age of forty-two, the chance of having a child with her own egg is approximately ten percent. When Hewlett's book gained media attention, feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women denounced Hewlett's premise, arguing that it created an artificial urgency that polarized the family vs. career debate further.

Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of writer Erika Jong, who captured the spirit of the sexual revolution in the 1970s from a woman's perspective in her book Fear of Flying, found herself in the middle of this debate when, as a young professional in New York City, she found herself unexpectedly pregnant at the age of twenty-four.

PRIMARY SOURCE

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SIGNIFICANCE

Arlene Rossen Cardoza, in her 1986 book Sequencing, defined sequencing as "having it all"—career, marriage, children—but not at the same time. Cardozo recommended sequencing life by choosing an order—college, marriage, career, children, or marriage, children, college, career—rather than trying to be a "superwoman" juggling all of the roles and mastering none.

Jong-Fast's essay notes the peer pressure from accomplished women in her social network, women in their thirties and forties who are sequencing, postponing childbirth and motherhood for the sake of graduate school or careers. Jong-Fast's pregnancy, in her social network, violates social norms as her young age is viewed by friends as a time for personal and professional development, not motherhood.

This shift in attitude between Jong-Fast's generation and her mother's generation, as evidenced by the anecdote concerning her mother's editor, demonstrates a sea change among a small sector of highly educated, urban-dwelling women in the United States. However, among women of lower education levels, lower incomes, and in more rural areas, motherhood at twenty-four would not be considered deviant or abnormal; indeed, the national average of 25.1 years for the age of the birth of one's first child includes teenage mothers as well as women over the age of fifty using in-vitro fertilization with donor eggs. It is Jong-Fast's social network that defines her becoming a mother at twenty-four or twenty-five as out of the norm.

Jong-Fast notes many of the principles outlined by both Cardoza and Hewlett's books, books that were cast in a negative light by many feminists and women who fall into Jong-Fast's peer group when first published. Those ideas have become more mainstream—as evidenced by Jong-Fast's adoption of some of the ideas and by coverage of these topics in such mainstream press outlets as Time magazine and Salon—as women struggle in the twenty-first century to balance gender role expectations, careers, motherhood, and family.