Lupa has the solution:
I’m a woman, thank you very much, and to be completely honest with you–I’m perfectly happy with present marriage trends. I don’t want to get married. I have a BA in English; I graduated Magna cum laude. I’ve been living completely by myself and have maintained good credit doing so since I was 25. I’m almost 27, and before my 28th birthday I’ll have a book published and another in the works. I’ll have moved from Pittsburgh to Seattle as I have wanted to do for years, and I’ll be working on starting a home-based business.
If I had been expected to get married right out of high school–or even out of college–I would have not been able to accomplish anything I’ve managed to do the past few years. Doubly so if I’d had children soon thereafter.
I’m not bemoaning anything. The women’s magazines, the media–that’s not a wholly accurate portrayal of what women want. I’m assuming that’s where you’re getting a lot of your information about what women outside your own social circle want, since obviously you can’t talk to us all. I know of my own social circle there are only a couple of married women (median age is probably 26 to 28) and the rest of us aren’t in any major hurry…..
And as for population decline….the answer, as I see it, is adoption. There are thousands of unwanted children just in the US, let alone worldwide, who have no family. Why should there be pressure on me to have a child I don’t even want just because we’re not getting closer to having a billion people here? Why should I sacrifice my goals and dreams because someone who doesn’t even have to worry about giving birth thinks it’s my responsibility to do so?
Instead of saying women need to go back into the home and be barefoot and pregnant (which I realize you didn’t say verbatim, but you amy as well have) why not try coming up with ways to adjust the economy to accomodate the genie that sure as hell isn’t going back in that confining little bottle?
I’m not quite sure where to start on this one, but since Lupa was so polite, I shall do my best to rein in my more sarcastic instincts. Personally, I don’t see where getting married is a complete bar to a BA in English, maintaining good credit, publishing a book or even moving to Seattle, although I have to confess that I have not managed either a BA in English or a move to Seattle, so who am I to contest the point?
As to her proposed answer to the problem of American women maintaining sub-replacement birth rates being the adoption of unwanted American children, I can only marvel in awe at the way in which this neat solution demonstrates a total failure to understand the nature of the problem. With regards to the foreign aspect, there are two difficulties, one being that America has the highest birth rate of any Western nation, the second is that the non-Western nations which see us as rivals are not likely to be keen on handing over their future generations to us simply because Lupa and her liberated friends can’t be bothered to propagate the species.
(Perhaps the answer here is to merge Lupa’s solution with Ben Shapiro’s. After establishing global empire, Americans can simply take children from their third-world mothers – who probably won’t even notice one or two going missing – and ship them to America and their loving day care centers.)
My point, again, is that the women’s rights genie is almost surely going back in the bottle one way or another, regardless of what educated, liberated, upper middle class women want. It is a societal dead end, and societies that embrace it will eventually be swallowed up by those that don’t.
The argument isn’t really with me, it’s with the mathematics. If I have the demographic math wrong, then my argument dissolves in a splash of corrective red ink. If it is correct, then it doesn’t make one little bit of difference what anyone thinks, including me.
Depending on your perspective, women’s rights in America began either as early as 1920 or as late as 1973. I have chosen the latter date, as it is when the women’s rights package of voting, working and infanticide all became widely available throughout the West and their effects had become visible in all the relevant statistics. We are only 32 years into the grand experiment and already it is showing definite signs of failure. One would not think that it would be possible to invent a less viable societal system than Soviet communism, which only lasted 70 years* from start to finish, and yet the feminists appear to have done just that.
*At least, version 1.0. Uncle Vlad appears to be working hard on a 2.0 release.