Learned Ladies Living Large

A recent review of Ready in theWashington Post asked whether a new later mom with a high school education or less would have “the same opportunity to do satisfying things” as the later moms who participated in my study. That’s an interesting question–and not one I can answer on the basis of the interviews I did, since all the women I spoke to had spent some time in college, all but a very few had a Bachelor’s degree, most had a graduate degree, and some more than one. This is less a flaw in the study than a relevant piece of info about later moms these days.

CDC birth data allows us to connect a woman’s age at first birth with her education level at the time of that first birth.

As it turns out, of the 133,237 first-time moms in 2003 who were 35 or older, 60% had BAs or higher, and an additional 19% had some college. 1.54% of the birth certificates did not state mom’s education level. That leaves 20% of the population of new later moms in the category the reviewer asked about–four fifths of them with a high school diploma, and just 4% of the total with less than a high school degree. (Note, this is not the full number of new later moms who gave birth in 2003, just those who had a first birth in that year. There’s no way to determine at what age moms giving birth to second or later-order kids in a given year had their first child. But the educational pattern holds true for all moms who start their families later.)

Compare that 79% with some college or more to the overall data on moms’ education: of the 4 million plus moms giving birth at all ages and in all birth orders in 2003, just 26% had a BA or more, 21% had some college, 30% had a high school degree and 21% had less than a high school degree. And those stats include the later moms. Comparing apples to apples percentagewise, that’s 60/26; 79/47; 20/51; 16/30; 4/21.

This data tells us loudly that education plays a big part in women’s delay. Later moms wait for family in huge proportion because they’re in school, at least for the first few years and sometimes for quite a few more. They’re in school, they know that the student life is doubly difficult with kids, so many women choose where possible to finish their degrees first. Then they put that education to work for a while. A few years in, they feel ready to start their families. In the US, the average college educated woman starts her family at 30. It’s not so much farther to 35.

The question about new later moms with no college resonates a bit differently when you look at the relatively small size of the group we’re talking about, though it doesn’t disappear the question. As I documented in chapter three, Census data shows that the rises in wages linked to delay of kids accrue largely to women with university degrees. So to the extent that “doing satisfying things” has to do with having more cash and status, the answer is, no, later moms with less education would not have the same opportunities. They would be in a similar situation to moms who didn’t defer in that regard. To the extent that “doing satisfying things” as a later mom has to do with being more mature, having seen a bit of the world and being ready to focus on family, the answer might well be yes. Or they may be in entirely different circumstances. That’s a question I hope to explore further.

But maybe the answer the reviewer sought was really to another question–one that addressed how class impacts the experience of motherhood in our world. I’m guessing that’s so because the next sentence in the review comments on how my study, like other “Mommy War manifestos,” skews toward the privileged. (Why is every comment on the lives of modern mothers viewed as part of a war?) Well, we all know that class does affect the options open to moms and their families in big ways.

In so far as class relates to the new later motherhood trend, there isn’t just one effect. Education, women and class can add up in at least two ways I’ve noticed–maybe you can think of others. If you’re a woman from a middle class family of origin, as were most of the women I interviewed, whatever your racial or ethnic background, you may have grown up with an expectation that you would go to college. In the terms of the review, you come from privilege and by going to school, establishing at work and starting your family later, you’re continuing on the path your parents set you on at birth, while moving into a domain newly available to mothers, of status and control of their own resources.

If you’re a woman of lower class origin, as were a number of the women (white, black and Hispanic) I interviewed, you may have chosen education linked with delay of family as a way up the class ladder (see the profiles of Ava and Veronica). By the time you have your kids, you and your family may also be among the privileged. But that’s not quite the same as the circumstance of women who start out there.

Later motherhood can sometimes be a way out of lack of privilege. But it’s a way by no means always desired by young people, and it’s often unavailable as a real option for women whose upbringing didn’t involve expectation of college or a sense of real possibility for well-paid work down the line. That lack of expectation is in part created within the family but it’s enforced as well by society overall, which gives so little in the way of resources or real hope of class movement to many citizens, in spite of its claims to the contrary.

There’s lots of material for future discussion and debate here–but the necessary starting point seems to me that we all have to leave behind the language of mommy wars and work together toward a world not just friendly to mommies of all backgrounds and to their families but active on their behalf. Our fortunes are linked. All our learning ought to teach us that much.

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Ready When You Are

This book takes the name Ready from the mouths of the women I spoke to, who said about themselves that they started their families when they felt ready, at or after 35. And they thought they were readier than they would have been earlier in their lives.

Key words in that last bit are they and their lives. Other women feel ready earlier, and more power to them. In contrast with the not-so-remote expectation that every woman would start her family in her early twenties, the good news is that now a woman can start her family whenever she (and often her partner) personally feel ready, not on a prescriptive time table set by social convention. Some women don’t want kids at all, though they still want romantic lives, and that is now an option too. “Thank god for birth control,” as one of the women I interviewed put it.

But there are other ways of reading the word Ready–and one way, apparently, sees an implied “readier than thou” take. That’s not the book’s attitude, but perhaps it may seem so on a quick read through. After all, the personal feelings of the women I interviewed were backed up by evidence that women who wait have higher long-term salaries than women with comparable degrees who start their families earlier, by a greater likelihood that later moms will be married or otherwise stably networked (meaning they have help and money), and by evidence that women who start later live longer! Several pieces on the book have understood me to argue that later moms make better moms, or that I’m joining in the fabled War among the Moms (the same war Miriam Peskowitz suggested was a media creation a few years back).

On the contrary, I offered all that info in contrast to the usual negative line we get in the media about later moms (most discussions of later motherhood focus on fertility decline, with no exploration of why so many women choose to delay, let alone of why so many succeed). Fodder for a long-delayed discussion of all the different strategies moms are taking to best provide for their families and themselves in all segments of our often family-hostile world. It could be taken as the basis for an argument against starting earlier–if, that is, the whole idea of expanding women’s options were ignored. Or of increasing support for all moms and their kids, and learning from what real women are doing, rather than bossing them around.

In my book, we’ve had enough of that bossing. At long last women begin to get to write their life stories by their own lights. And they don’t all tell the same tale. This book happens to be about the radically new story of women who start their families much later than their mothers did. Of course there are other stories too.

Nor do women today write their stories in a world where everybody gets equal opportunity. For many moms, starting families later provides an effective shadow benefits system–higher salaries and more clout to negotiate family friendly schedules at work. In the current environment, waiting for these benefits makes sense for many women (though that’s not the only reason women wait–see post below). For most women, education is also part of the story behind delay. But those aren’t the only factors that determine whether a woman feels ready for family. And readiness isn’t always required for a happy family–lots of people turn unplanned pregnancies into something wonderful. After all, that was pretty much the way of the world until 1960. But there were a lot of drawbacks to the old way–for many. Nowadays, we can choose when and if we start our families. And readiness, however we define it for ourselves, becomes an important part of that decision-making process.

But the fact that delaying family links to increased benefits raises the follow-up question: Why aren’t those benefits available to everybody? Why should women have to wait for family in order to get a decent wage, health benefits and some time to spend with their kids?

Why that’s so now, I’d argue, has much to do with the low status that women have had til recently in the work world–and our change in status is linked in some measure to the rise in the delay phenom. But the scene is nothing if not dynamic. It seems possible that the trickle up of women into the upper ranks of business may soon lead to a trickle down of straightforward (not shadowy) family-friendly benefits to women (and men) and their families at all levels of society and regardless of their age at first birth. If we can get it together to recognize that all our nation’s kids are essential to our common future–rather than taking the view that “it’s your family, it’s your problem,” we’ll be moving toward real positive change. We’re already farther down that road than ever before, though there remains a good way still to go.

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Why They Wait: The Business Case

In Ready I explore the many reasons the women I spoke with gave for having started their families later. Though every woman had her own particular story, there were five big and basic grounds for delay:

getting an education
establishing at work
finding the right partner
self-development (seeing the world, figuring out who you are)
and, among lesbians, the combination of coming out and identifying as a gay mom.

Many women cited more than one reason–several cited four or five. There’s plenty to say about all these reasons–in fact they could fill a book. In this post I’ll focus on the interaction of delay and work (the outside-the-home kind).

Everybody has opinions on birth timing — because it defines the fabric of our lives, and it has big consequences. Ask the next person you run into their experience with birth timing, and see if you don’t end up in a long and intense conversation.

Lots of later moms invest in work before family because they want to be able to give all their attention to learning the ropes in their field in the initial stages of their careers. After they’ve put in an intense period of apprenticeship, they feel that they can step back a bit at work–still getting the job done well on the basis of their experience and their established networks–but having time to concentrate to their home job too. Adjusting to motherhood, getting to know your baby, and learning the skills that allow you to rear that baby well, all take time.

Devoting their twenties and a good part of their thirties to career, meant that many of the moms I spoke to also felt they were making more money than they would have if they’d had kids earlier. I checked this against census data and found that they were right–comparing full time workers with the same degrees all of whom were in the same age range at the time of the census (40 to 45 and 35 to 39), those who’d started their families earlier made markedly less than those who started later (see chapter 3 for lots more on this). We can figure that the higher salaries linked to starting later had to do with those women getting their degrees earlier, spending more overall time in the workforce, and moving up the ladders of experience and position before kids.

These women also said they felt that delaying family had given them more clout in their workplace–which they could use to negotiate flexible and family-friendly schedules that would not have been available to them had they had not proven themselves over the years to their employers. And as a result of that clout, they were able to stay in the workforce either full time (with flex) or part time (with benefits).

There are lots of cultural ripple effects here!

For one, it seems to be true that the trickle up of women (many of them later moms) into the upper levels of business means that we’re seeing more and more discussion of family-friendly policies, and sometimes of actual implementation of those policies. These may be moving us toward a world where the overall view isn’t that “it’s your family, it’s your problem,” but one that recognizes the importance of childrearing to the common wealth.

Though family friendliness may not seem an obvious plus for the bottom line to some employers, down the line employers do benefit from kids: they all need the customers and workers of tomorrow. In the short term, as more and more are recognizing, family-friendly benefits are needed to retain and grow the talents of women workers. Not only are women important contributors to the national talent pool, but they’re important in terms of sheer numbers. As the boomers retire, you’ll have a huge client pool and a smaller group of workers to serve them. Need those women in the workforce!

If and when these recognitions take hold on a big scale (say when we all have access to good child care, and to sick days that allow us to stay home with an ill child, instead of having to choose between keeping our jobs and tending our young), the need to create your own shadow benefits system through delay might disappear. Which could affect the number of women choosing to start families later. Since that’s not the only factor that leads to later motherhood, it wouldn’t disappear the trend, however.

The business case for waiting is evolving — the dynamics of later motherhood unfold as we go.

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The Taste of Time

This week we’re in Boston, visiting my family. Last week we spent in the Midwest visiting his. The kids love family visits–cousins are a particular attraction, but so is the general mood of relaxation with lots of people who love you. Good for the grown ups too. And lots of good eating (special props to my bro-in-law Mark).

I’ve found that the new later motherhood has all sorts of ripple effects in the wider culture, many of them very positive. At a party on New Year’s day one new later mom (a lawyer and Francophile) mentioned that while waiting made sense for her, she had noticed one international drawback. In France, as women work more and start families later, the French culture of great cooking is degenerating! While the bar is still way higher than in the US, it’s not the case any more that every French housewife you run into is a fantasmic cook. That’s because they’re not really housewives so much. They one-stop-shop at supermarkets like the rest of us, instead of spending the day at a series of speciality stores (butcher, baker, patisserie, etc.), they don’t have hours to spend making the food and then sitting around the table savoring it, and they sometimes buy frozen dinners!

As the daughter of a Frenchwoman who lived and worked in the US, and who spent many an evening poring through cookbooks to plan the next week’s meals–she made great standards but also liked to innovate regularly–I know things have changed. Where my grandmama milled vegetables for the daily soup, my mother’s culinary efforts were much less time intensive, because they had to be. And mine are even more so. Frequently the meals I make involve three solo foods arranged on a plate — some meat (baked or grilled), a starch, and a veg. No recipes involved, no sauces. I consider it a time luxury to sauté onions, and I miss that luxury and some of the things that go with it. But I deeply value what I’ve gained in the work world as well. Luckily it needn’t be exclusively one way or the other.

My kids like the taste of pancakes on Sundays, but I think they also like the taste of the time it takes to make them, the group involvement (the 3 year old loves cracking the eggs, the 10 year old still likes making animal shapes), and the fact that we have to all sit down together to eat them while they’re hot off the stove. Though I don’t have time to make multi-course dinners, I do make those pancakes. Not every Sunday, but frequently. And then there’s the occasional soufflé — my elder daughter’s favorite meal. We do what we can! I imagine the French moms (and sometimes the dads) do too. Vive la (nouvelle) différence!

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Generating: Birth Timing, Gingerbread and Girl Talk

Greetings from my world of gingerbread and travel arrangements. Thanks for stopping by the blog in the midst of all the holiday hubbub.

My house was full of kids yesterday, ranging in age from 2 to 10. Friends came by to decorate baked goods, and after a good spell of dressing the cookies in colored icing (picture a table laden with 8-inch ginger people, there’s Santa lounging alongside a bikini-clad ginger lady, my three-year-old’s green abstraction, the nine-year-old’s bloody vampire with the toothpick stake through the heart, and diverse others) the kids ran out to the back yard to shout and jump. The parents sat around talking for the rest of the afternoon–about birth timing and blogging, among other things.
The three women in the group each had two kids: one started at 39 and is now 50 (that’s me), another began at 33 (she’s now 44) and the third had her first at 19 (she’s now nearly 25). So our experience and our viewpoints varied — but we’re all happy and hardworking moms. Another 50-year old friend who’d planned to come by couldn’t make it because she and her husband had to go downtown to get the police clearance required for their second adoption (she was 47 at their first). And yes, every adoption requires a clearance.
Birth timing and some of its effects (particularly for women who start their families at or after 35, by birth or adoption) are the topic of my book Ready, which debuts in the bookstores on December 24th. Fascinating topic, of course! and a subtext of just about every other story in the news it seems. There are the obvious connections to issues like the politicization of birth control (both contraceptives and abortion), and to the dynamics of women’s work (what’s the effect of the general lack of family friendly workplace policy on the ages at which women have kids? and what connections are there between the current push toward family friendliness, the work status of the women making the case and their ages at first birth?).
Then there are the more subtle links to issues like the aging of the boomers (how are we all going to spend this new time our expanded longevity has given us? well, some of us will be focusing on our young families), the need for an educated work force (what’s the role of a mother’s education in promoting the education of her kids?) and the presidential race (how does Hillary’s age at first birth–32, in 1980–affect the possibility of her candidacy? and how does the average age of women’s first birth in the past affect the fact that so few women before Hillary have had the status to run?)
And then there’s the supermarket news. These days, birth timing is the big story in the ladies’ magazines. Not that they say so outright, but that subtext pushes one pregnancy story after another onto cover after cover–Salma Hayek gives birth at last at 41! Jamie Lynn Spears pregnant at 16! Christina Aguilera pregnant (and baring her belly on the cover of Marie Claire) at 27! Julia Roberts delivers again at 40! Joan Lunden mom to new twins at 55! Quite a range. What do their situations tell us about our own?
In some part these headlines seem to purvey a rather conservative message: every woman yearns for a baby and that’s where the truest fulfillment lies (never mind that it’s the fact that they were career girls first that makes these women celebrities). But at the same time, the covers address a confusion that many young and no-longer-so-young women (those who do think they want kids) are feeling about when’s the best time for them to start their families. What is the relationship between the work I want to do and family timing? How late is too late fertility-wise? What if the right guy (or gal) isn’t ready yet but I am? What if he or she wants kids, but I need more time without them? What if there’s no good partner in sight?
Women’s options today are different than ever before, and they’re dynamic — changing as we move along. We all participate in figuring out what makes most sense for each of us now, by observing and talking with one another, pretty much incessantly–through the checkout tabloids, around the dining room table, in the news, via the bookstores, and here online.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be blogging on these and related subjects. Please chime in. And feel free to add your thoughts on issues raised in Ready as well, if you’re so moved.
Happy holidaze!
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