Interesting new data on the protective effects that delaying childbirth into at least your late 20s and breastfeeding have against triple-negative breast cancer. Click here for the full story.
“The study shows those women whose first childbirth is delayed by at least 15 years after first menstrual period, age at first childbirth, and breastfeeding were all inversely associated with risk of triple-negative breast cancer.”
Women’s work takes many forms–including poetry, which advances the life struggles it carves sense from. 
Modernist Marianne Moore (1887-1972) excelled in this labor, innovating early and late, ever ready for the battles fought both at home, abroad, and in the bookstores, both fierce and playful (see “Roses Only,” “Marriage,” “The Fish,” “Silence” “In Distrust of Merits,” “Armor’s Undermining Modesty,” “Combat Cultural,” & “To a Giraffe” for a few examples). At once “the most high-brow poet in the world” per critic Richard Aldington, and a writer “in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” per herself.
Here’s a favorite (from 1921), for friends in Moore’s old west village neighborhood, recently dark and wet:
NEW YORK
the savage’s romance,
accreted where we need the space for commerce–
the centre of the wholesale fur trade,
starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes,
the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt;
the ground dotted with deer-skins–white with white spots
“as satin needlework in a single color may carry a varied pattern,”
and wilting eagles’ down compacted by the wind;
and picardels of beaver skin; white ones alert with snow.
It is a far cry form the “queen full of jewels”
and the beau with the muff,
from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume bottle,
to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,
and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness
to combat which one must stand outside and laugh
since to go in is to be lost.
It is not the dime-novel exterior,
Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war canoe;
it is not that “if the fur is not finer than such as one sees
others wear,
one would rather be without it–”
that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe;
it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,
the otter, the beaver, the puma skins
without shooting-irons or dogs;
it is not the plunder,
it is the “accessibility to experience.”
For lots more on Moore, check out http://moore123.com/
The economic roots to the ongoing trend to delaying motherhood have become only more clear in the recent recession. But economics has been a motivating factor all along, since the 1960s when the trend began. (Numbers of first births to women 35 and over started rising in the 70s, but the trend began when those same women refrained from earlier births in the 60s.)
A 2011 study by Amalia Miller on compensation (based on a pool of women who first gave birth between ages 20 and 34) indicates that women with college degrees go on to gain 5 percent in wages per year of delay on average, and 12 percent or more in earnings per year of delay.*
The difference between wages and earning comes from expanded hours on the job—delayers can work full time before kids and maintain that schedule once kids arrive because they can at that point afford good childcare. Thus, if you are 18 and childless, go to college, graduate at 22, go to work, then have a child at 25, you will make about 36 percent more per year from there on than you would have made if you had had that child upon graduation.
If you delay till age 30, the average age when female college grads have their first child (for male college grads, it’s 32), you will make roughly 96 percent more across your career than your younger-mom, college-grad self. And so on, increasing with each year of delay.
College grads get special benefit because going to college in itself provides women with part of the boost in wages, based on training and new eligibility for better paid professions. The rest of the boost comes from concentrated time put in on the job, which is easier without kids in a context of limited affordable childcare and employer bias against mothers.
Though economists can now demonstrate that delay links to higher earnings and other benefits, for decades prior steadily increasing numbers of working women have been figuring that out without benefit of experts, through deduction, happenstance, and attention to one another’s examples, as they’ve negotiated the still-shifting world of work in our post-birth control world.
Current anti-contraception politics would have strong economic and political effects, since limiting women’s ability to control their fertility means lowering their wages and their political clout.
*“The Effects of Motherhood Timing on Career Path,” Journal of Population Economics 24, no. 3 (July 2011): 1071-1100. Miller’s article documents that the overall wage gain to all women averages out to 3 percent per year of delay, but notes that the gain is realized only by college grads. When calculated for the smaller pool of college graduates only, she finds a 5 percent wage gain, and confirms via email to the author a concomitant earnings gain of roughly 12 percent.
–Based on material from READY: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (Basic Books, 2012), pp. xv-xvi.
[This piece has appeared in variously edited versions, with various titles on RH Reality Check, Huffington Post, and Ms Blog]
New CDC birth data out Wednesday confirm that the U.S. birthrate dropped one percent to reach an all-time low in 2011, extending the downward trend begun with the recession in 2008. Put down your knee-jerk fears about smaller population. This drop is a good sign, foretelling not a diminished but a strengthened workforce down the line.
Historic lows make headlines, but the deep story here is the time-lag ripple effect of delay that this year’s data demonstrate. The big birthrate declines we’ve seen since the recent high in 2007 (down nine percent overall) have been sharpest among teens ages 15 to 19 (a 25 percent drop over the four years) and to young women ages 20 to 24 (down 19 percent). Both of those age bands hit historic lows in 2011. We’re talking framework change here.
On the other hand, rates among women ages 25 to 29 have fallen a much smaller nine percent since 2007; those among women ages 30 to 34 fell four percent between 2007 and 2010 and held steady in 2011; and those among women ages 35 to 39 also fell four percent between 2007 and 2010, but rose three percent in 2011. Rates among women ages 40 to 44 never fell: they’d been rising steadily since 1981, and rose another seven percent between 2007 and 2011.
What we’re seeing here looks not so much like a big decline in the number of women who have kids over their lifetimes, or even necessarily in the number of kids they have, as like the time-lag effect of postponement. The big switch in the timing of when women have children was underway long before the recession of 2007 (see this CCF fact sheet), but the recession intensified it. We can see that in the chart below, in the rising birthrates for women ages 30 to 44, and the falling rates for women ages 15 to 29.
Already some women who stayed on the maternity sidelines in their thirties in the early part of this decline have jumped back into the game (visible in the rises among women 35 and older). Though the increases to date are not yet sizable, the scene is set for a flood of later mothers down the line. The overall rate of decline was lower than in the three previous years, suggesting that an overall upturn may be on the way in the next year or so. But though the recession officially ended in 2009, younger women’s rates are still dropping drastically in 2011 (down 8 percent from 2010). These indicators confirm that the recovery still needs to gain traction before people trust it with their families. They also tell us that the national birth timing dynamic is changing fast.
In their 25 percent rate plunge in just four years, young women today are enacting a sped-up version of the trend to delaying kids that’s been growing since the introduction of hormonal birth control, in 1960.[1] Like millions of women before them, these citizens are refraining from having a first child early on (first births were also at an all time low in 2011), or sometimes a second, and choosing instead to invest in their educations (high school completion and college entry levels are up since 2007) and to build up their credentials at work. They may not be changing the number of kids they’ll have overall by much, but they are changing the economic circumstances into which those kids will arrive, for the better. Not all recession effects are problematic.
This sped-up delay effect has at least three overlapping causes. Most obvious is the recession/slow recovery (recessions are historically powerful contraception—before the Pill, the lowest recorded birth rate occurred in 1936). If people don’t feel they can afford kids, they become more vigilant about controlling fertility. A second cause lies in recent improvements in birth control methods and access, which make it easier to be vigilant.
A third springs from the fact that not only did young women refrain from having kids for the downturn; because they didn’t have kids quite a few of them were able to complete high school and enroll in college. That put them on track for perhaps a decade of further delay (the time required to finish the Bachelor’s degree and maybe grad school, and then to establish at work) rather than just a year or two (on average college graduate women of all races have their first child at 30).
This will have a major positive effect on the workforce, both because these women will be more educated themselves, and their kids—when they do have them in a few years—will be more educated too. In the fertility realm, more does not necessarily mean better. While the current birth-rate drop responds to and signals the continued slow economic recovery, it is also itself a positive sign of economic growth to come.
Birth-Control Battles
This is not what you’ll hear from the pro-natalist conservatives, who have been pushing higher birthrates, both directly through pledges to support “robust childbearing” and stated concerns that we won’t have enough workers to fund social security for retiring boomers, and more covertly through a coordinated effort to cut access to birth control and abortion. Though this is not the way they’re discussed, the most direct effect of cuts to birth control and abortion is to raise birthrates.
Since poor young women would be most affected by such cuts, and many initially middle-class new moms would be pushed into poverty, the anti-birth-control push would lead to more low-skilled workers, including both the babies and more immediately the newly-created parents. That’s just what the nation as a whole doesn’t need, when even in a down economy many US jobs go unfilled for lack of adequately skilled applicants. When the recovery fully kicks in, the skilled-worker shortfall will only increase if we push our up-and-coming workforce off the educational track and into early parenthood.
Advocates push this agenda as “pro-life,” but since its major effect is to impoverish whole families, it resonates as a “traditionalist” move back to days in which women knew their “place.” This brings out many older and conservative voters and, by denying access to birth control and abortion, pushes young workers (male and female) into poverty, where they are much more unlikely to vote. Since early births keep women out of the paths to education and cultural power, this kind of pro-natalist agenda reinforces old power networks.
Benefits to Delay
When women control their own fertility, the world does change, with big gains for women, their families and society. College-educated women gain on average 12 percent in long-term annual earnings for every year they delay kids. So a woman who has a first child at age 30 earns roughly twice as much for the rest of her career as she would have if she’d had her first child right after graduation, at age 22, and so on up with each year of delay. Without benefit of economic experts, steadily growing numbers of women have figured out through deduction and observation that delay makes a lot of bottom-line sense to families.
Delay also serves women as a shadow benefits system in our family-unfriendly work world, making it possible to climb the ranks at work before kids, and then to use your established clout to negotiate your own deal when the kids do arrive. Delay also makes possible the trickle up of women into policy-making roles in business and government. Only when female citizens control their own fertility do they achieve critical mass and win a voice in the way society is structured. The combination of the ongoing intentional trend to delay and the recession-born delay effect will speed up that trickle up, leading to positive outcomes for kids, parents and women overall.
The 2011 birth data tells us young women are not interested in that road back to the old ways. They want good lives for themselves and their families, and they are working to realize that hope by putting babies on hold.
(All data from CDC Birth Data Reports for 2007-2011.)
[1]The average age at first birth in the US rose to 25.4 in 2010, and has risen further in 2011—official number not due out til 2013
The CDC reports that the 2011 US birth rate hit a historic low, at 63.2 births per 1000 women aged 15.44. The prior low was 63.6 in 1997. The rate in 2010 was 64.1, down from a recent high of 69.3 in 2007. This confirms the CDC’s earlier report in May of this year, and provides details on age, race and marital status of the new moms.
Results— The 2011 preliminary number of US births was 3,953,593, 1 percent less (or 45,793 fewer) births than in 2010; the general fertility rate (63.2 per 1,000 women age 15-44 years) declined to the lowest rate ever reported for the United States. The number of births declined for most race and Hispanic origin groups in 2011, whereas the rate declined only for Hispanic, non-Hispanic black and AIAN women. • The birth rate for teenagers 15-19 years fell 8 percent in 2011 (31.3 births per 1,000 teenagers 15-19 years), another record low, with rates declining for younger and older teenagers and for all race and Hispanic origin groups. • The birth rates for women in their twenties declined as well, to a historic low for women aged 20-24 (85.3 births per 1,000). • The birth rate for women in their early thirties was unchanged in 2011 but rose for women aged 35-39 and 40-44. • The birth rate for women in their late forties was unchanged in 2011. • The first birth rate in 2011 (25.4 births per 1,000) was the lowest ever recorded for the United States. • The birth rate, the number of births, and the percentage of births to unmarried women each declined for the third consecutive year. The birth rate was 46.1 birth per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15-44 and the percentage of births to unmarried women was 40.7. (CDC, NVSR 61.5, October 2012)
The big birth rate declines we’ve seen since the recent high in 2007 (a 9% fall overall between 2007 and 2011) have been sharpest among teens 15-19 (a 25% drop over the four years) and to young women 20-24 (down 19%). Both of those rates hit historic lows in 2011.
Here’s a great piece by Stephanie Coontz in today’s NY Times correcting recent claims of the imminent disappearance of men from the national economy. This follows on the heels of related excellent points made in the Sunday Times’s review of Hanna Rosin’s book The End of Men in last week’s Times (by Jennifer Homans) and Philip Cohen’s multiple posts on the topic on his blog Family Inequality.
The basic point in these discussions is that women are still nowhere near equal in salary or in cultural power to men, though we have made some advances. The claim to dominance is based in a misuse of sociological data. As Coontz puts it:
“Proponents of the ‘women as the richer sex’ scenario often note that in several metropolitan areas, never-married childless women in their 20s now earn more, on average, than their male age-mates.But this is because of the demographic anomaly that such areas have exceptionally large percentages of highly educated single white women and young, poorly educated, low-wage Latino men. Earning more than a man with less education is not the same as earning as much as an equally educated man.”
Without this apples-to-oranges comparison, the argument that childless women in their 20s are now doing better than childless men in their 20s disappears, and of course it never even tried to address what happens to women’s wages when women have kids. Or are the proponents of the equal-wages-are-here theory anticipating that these women just won’t (and shouldn’t) ever have kids? Strange logic.
I’d like to add two elements to this discussion — briefly, for further discussion later.
Later Motherhood: The delayed birth trend indicates the failure of the work system to admit women unless they employ delay as a workaround. The increase in the trend is a marker, indicating the continued unfriendliness of the system to people caring for families. The trend has allowed a progress up the career and pay ladders for women, but it cannot indicate a dominance, since if women were anywhere close to dominant, they would have changed the system to something friendlier to women long ago. That has not happened yet. And a fairer system, if achieved, would not per se indicate dominance, but something closer to equity. Why does even an approach to equity look like dominance to some? Not a feminist argument, more an argument meant to sell books and magazines by provoking anxiety about change .
The trend to delaying kids has developed in large part because women have recognized that they are only NOT PUNISHED (in terms of long term salary and social power), if they delay. NOT PUNISHED (and it might be better stated as “not punished as much“) is not the same as dominant, but that’s the way it’s being discussed. This argument potentially undermines further progress by creating a false impression that women advance at men’s expense, and that they have in fact already done that. As Cohen puts it, “woe to any woman trying to convince a jury she’s being discriminated against while these books are in the headlines.” Rather than representing a loss for men, gains in equitable treatment for women represent a win for the nation across the board, since higher female paychecks add to the revenue of the family as a whole and female workforce participation in a wider range of jobs means an expanded national resource pool.
The Anti-Birth Control Movement: The recent coordinated push to limit access to birth control and abortion in state legislatures across the country represents an effort to push-back against feminist gains. Though women have far to go to equity, the progress we have made in putting more women in policy-making roles seems to be scaring some old-boy employers, who don’t like change that could mean a change in their chokehold on policy or on the current unfair wage system. More later, but I did want to note that non-fact-based anti-feminist East Coast journalism on “female dominance” plays to the same fears that seem to be motivating the anti-birth-control push, though presumably with a different sector of the national audience in mind.
Here’s a link to my post about READY on the “Motherhood Later than Sooner” site today. The post gives an overview of the issues the new edition addresses.