Sisters have done it to themselves
Now this is a song to celebrate
the conscious liberation of the female state.
Mother daughters and their daughters too will know
Woman to woman we'll sing it with you.
Ahhh, the 80s. A decade where women decided they could have it all - equality, career, family, friends and interesting hobbies. Sisters were doing it for themselves and we all lauded successful women who were able to balance career and home life, women like Anita Rodderick of The Body Shop. A generation of women were raised to pursue their careers during their 20s and not worry about marriage or kids until their 30s. And if you found you couldn't conceive in your 30s? No problem, there was a whole range of fertility treatments waiting for the women who had the cash to pay for them.
Now the inferior sex has got a new exterior.
We've got doctors, lawyers politicians too
Oh yeah.
But have today's women 'got it all'? What are the sisters doing now? Judging by 'High Achieving Women 2001', a study carried out in the US and UK, it would seem that what the sisters are doing now is regretting their lifestyles.
These are the facts, and if you are a career-minded woman, be scared - be very scared.
In the United States, 42 per cent of female executives are childless by the age of 40 and in the UK that number rises to an incredible 59 per cent. Whereas only 29 per cent of male executives have no children by the time they reach 40.
So what happened? Did these women decide to give up a family in order to be successful? Did they choose to end up childless? Apparently not, for only 11 per cent of high achieving women said they made a choice not to have children. Moreover, 25 per cent who were in the 41 to 55 age bracket, an age well past any hopes of bearing children naturally, said they still hoped to have a baby.
But wait, these statistics get even more sobering. Only 8 per cent of female executives aged 41 to 55 got married after the age of 30. Five years later and the figures were even bleaker, for only 3 per cent got married after the age of 35.
So here we have a picture of more and more career women ending up in their 40s and 50s childless and never having been married - and, seemingly, none of this by their own choice.
What's gone wrong? Jane Fonda and Anita Rodderick managed to have successful lives as well as families, why aren't these women?
Well, it would seem that you simply can't have it all. In your 20s you can choose to doggedly pursue that high-flying career and put in the 50 plus hours a week which 34 per cent of women executives do, or you can choose to not worry so much about being a high achiever and pay more attention to finding the 'right' man and having children.
In Baby Hunger, a book by Sylvia Ann Hewlett that is currently causing waves in the US, she says that women should plan to marry by 30 and get their first child in 'under the wire' by 35. The news is for women not to leave child bearing to chance and fertility treatments, for the sad fact is that a woman's fertility drops by 50 per cent at the age of 35 and by 98 per cent by 40. Fertility treatment won't save these late starters either for, according to The Centres for Disease Control, the chances of a 42 year old woman having a child with her own eggs, even after advanced medical help, is only 10 per cent.
Now there was a time
when we used to say
that behind every great man
there has to be a great woman.
Perhaps the old saying was a more natural way for a woman to live - having a modest career, a family and the time to pursue interests - as well as be supportive of that high-flying male in her life.
Perhaps sisters really should start 'doing it for themselves' again and forget the social programming that feminism brought us. We don't need to sacrifice our lives to prove we can be high achievers; we just need to be happy.
İcurve (Emma) 2002
