Feminist fecundity fails
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
“Feminism is the new natalism,” David Willetts, a British member of Parliament, declared in a 2004 manifesto. In contrast to those strains of feminism that argue marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood are systems of oppression, the pro-human feminists grabbed on to this idea of “fecund feminism.” For nearly 20 years, many op-eds have echoed Willetts’s arguments.
“Want more babies?” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg asked in 2018. “You need less patriarchy.”
JUST SAY NO TO BAILING OUT BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS
“The birthrate is low in Japan,” a New York Times caption stated in 2021, “in part because of cultural factors, like rigid gender roles.”
Fecundity feminists point to France. Anne Chemin wrote in 2015: “France’s baby boom secret: get women into work and ditch rigid family norms.”
Well, the United States has tried at least part of that formula: We got women into work, but we didn’t get a baby boom. We got a continued downward spiral.
American women with children under 5 are working more than ever before, a new Brookings Institution study found. More than 70% of mothers with young children (under age 5) are in the labor force, Brookings reported. Overall, 77.8% of prime-age women are in the workforce, the highest level ever.
In fact, 49.9% of all employees in America are women.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Meanwhile, the birthrate has fallen to record lows. Getting women to work more has not delivered the baby boom the fecundity feminists promised but has instead coincided with lower birthrates among the married and unmarried; black, white, and Hispanic; and immigrant and foreign born.
This isn’t a surprise. The biggest competitor with family is work. American culture has become more workist, and a workist culture is going to be less of a familist culture — so it will have greater GDP and fewer babies.