Author Anna Louie Sussman is both civil and thoughtful in her response to an earlier op-ed I wrote on feminism and fertility, but I am afraid, after this longer discussion, it appears there is less common ground between us than I originally thought.
What first caught my eye in a recent op-ed Sussman wrote for the New York Times was her admission that Americans want more children than they are actually having, and that “fewer women are marrying, at least in part because they’re having trouble finding appealing men.”
Maybe, I hoped, feminists might be interested in reforming public policy to increase the number of “appealing men” available to marry. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be an outcome Sussman is interested in.
In her latest effort, Sussman does admit that “most women still want children and want to be married.” So far, so good. She then claims, however, that “a growing share of American women don’t see marriage as a viable option for them.” And while the Rachel Wolfe story she links to does mention Pew polling showing that only 34% of single women are “looking for romance,” a closer examination of Pew’s numbers shows that more single women still want to get married than Wolfe and Sussman suggest.
That Pew “single women” category includes divorced and widowed women, who understandably are far less likely to want to start a family than young single women who have never been married. If you look at just those single women between 18 and 39, 61% want someone in their lives. Combine that with the 68% of women aged 18-29 who already have a partner, and that leaves just 12% of young women who want to stay single.
Sussman goes on to claim that one of the reasons women are forgoing marriage is that more of them are going to college. And while it is true that more women are going to college, college is not antithetical to marriage. Quite the opposite, in fact. At the height of the baby boom in the 1960s, over 70% of college-educated women were married. And that is still true today!
Where marriage has cratered is among women without a college degree, falling from almost 80% in the 1930s to just over 50% today. Does Sussman really believe these non-college-educated women are choosing their careers over marriage? Or, as she admits earlier in her response, has the decline of male wages played a bigger role in women not starting the families they want than Sussman wants to admit?
Sussman seems to believe that if men started doing more housework and improved their communication skills, more women would tolerate their presence in the home. But there is no policy change that will force men to do the dishes. On the other hand, there are things the government can do to make men more appealing mates.
For example, 10 years ago, you could watch a football game and not see a single gambling ad. Now it’s all gambling ads all the time. This industry preys on the exact demographic we need to be making better decisions: young men. We don’t have to tolerate gambling ads on television, and we can ban gambling apps entirely. The dating market would be better for it.
We also don’t need to allow an endless stream of the most degrading pornography available on every mobile device 24/7. If we prosecuted pornographers and restricted access to OnlyFans, there would be a lot more men looking to make themselves appealing to real-life women.
But it doesn’t really seem like Sussman is interested in helping men at all. “Recall that women have eggs and wombs,” Sussman writes. “Although for some women, finding a partner is a key part of starting a family, a growing number of women are taking advantage of that fact to become solo parents by choice. One way to help this group have more children is to make parenting more attainable and less stressful, for example, by making serious investments in policies such as paid family leave and affordable childcare.”
THERE IS NO FEMINIST SOLUTION TO THE FERTILITY CRISIS
And that is where, unfortunately, Sussman and I truly part. I have zero interest in making it easier for single women to become single parents by choice. Quite the opposite, actually. Children deserve two parents. Boys in particular deserve a father. Children from single-parent households fare worse than children from married households on every measure, but boys are hit particularly hard by the absence of a father. To inflict that harm on a child by choice is reprehensible.
Instead of investing resources in making it easier for women to have children without men, we should be making it easier for men and women to start families together.
