Happy 4th!
As an ardent admirer of the the smart and insightful women who contribute and participate in this blog, I'd like to first say thank you helping me feel a little bit less crazy and ridiculous as a woman in my 20's! Appreciate it...
Because I'm a snively marketing person, I've also decided to use you women as a focus group or audience for my own benefit....
I'm taking an introductory Anthropology course this summer - and I've been charged with taking on my own research assignment from an anthropological point of view. I'm thrilled! (No really, I am.)
I wanted to share my abstract with all of you and get a general feel for your opinions, thoughts, questions, comments, love notes, anything in general in reaction to it. I think it's especially pertinent to 20-something women and would love to hear what you think.
I've apprehensively decided to approach the whole topic of child-birth. (which I believe makes all twenty something women batty in one way or another...) I really want to understand this, what it means to different women, of varying backgrounds, goals, and beliefs. Even if you're not a New Yorker, hope this topic strikes a chord with you and elicits a response!
It's not a totally brilliant abstract, yet. I know that I'm leaving out many other external influencers, but not sure what all of them are yet...This is me trying once again to make sense of my world as a twenty something. I really appreciate your time and response. Be brutally honest. Thank you ladies!!
Abstract:
"Do you want to have children?
Yeah sure, I'll get to it ... later."
Yeah sure, I'll get to it ... later."
Today's world has afforded women more options and more opportunities than generations of women before us. We can travel all over the world, with whomever we want, live with men or women, have children or not have children - so many options. Many sociologists would say the biggest driver of all this change, globally, is the education of women. Women everywhere are now educated to high levels, in a variety of fields, especially in urban environments. Many interesting questions emerge from all of this - but mainly I'm interested in the attitudes and values educated women have concerning childbirth and childrearing.
To date, I've been surrounded by talented and highly educated women (undergraduate degrees and beyond) in business related fields. Most are charging ahead professionally. However, I hypothesize that there is a distinct correlation between higher education levels of women and beliefs about delaying childbirth, specifically in New York City. Women believe that they need to fulfill their professional goals first, and put their personal life plans on hold. New Yorker women plan (or in some cases, do not plan) to have children after age 35. Despite being highly educated, maybe these women are not accounting for biology. Biologically, there are increased risks for many diseases and disabilities for newborns with mothers over age 35. I wonder how many women know this or really believe it? What is their threshold for success? Is it worth it to become President or head of your firm, and then have a risky pregnancy? Does having a family mean success? If not, what does?
Using a survey methodology to test attitudes of educated, working female New Yorkers and second hand research, I will analyze this question in greater detail.
2 comments:
Megha,
I don't know if my comments will be helpful to you, but I can do my best to tell you my personal feelings about "family planning."
I suppose I never really wanted to have children, so my priorities never really included pregnancy and birthing as a factor. I feel so young and immature still; I can't imagine where being a mother would even fit into my identity or my life. So I never made plans for it; this is perhaps due to my ability to predict what the future me will look like; I can't help but limit my perspective to the very near future - a propensity that is both a blessing and a curse.
Over the last few years, I've become more open to the possibility that I may want to have children in the future, but I still have no idea what that looks like as a legitimate part of my life.
Part of why I have not even thought about trying to strike a balance between my career and raising a family, is that I don't feel like it can truly be done well. I'm not saying women can't work and raise children well. But I do believe that very very few people, men or women, can successfully be a great professional leader and a great parent, simply because of the time commitment necessary to achieve either. If I believed it could happen, I might be more inclined to hold those ambitions. But I feel like in a scenario in which I have to choose, I'm more comfortable with going for the thing that I already know - work. For now, that is where I plan to put my eggs, so to speak.
Along those same lines, I expect fully to be influenced by peer pressure, as in, as I get older and more of my friends have children, I'm sure I too will want to have children. So my plans are such that they afford some flexibility; that I don't plan to revolve my life around having children, but if I want them, I don't have to give up my career completely; if I finish my PhD, I have the option of settling into a professorship, which, after tenure, eases up significantly in terms of time commitment. This is one intentional decision I've made to accommodate the possibility of starting a family.
One more word about the medical complications for post-35 births. I honestly think that most women (a) don't think those statistics will affect them and (b) think that has prenatal medicine gets better, that those stats will decline significantly in the next few years - perhaps that they will be negligible by the time they are ready for kids. I should say that those issues are very much on my radar, as I know several thirty somethings, all in perfect reproductive condition, who are having difficulty conceiving, and that has light a little fire under my ass (a little one).
Ravs, that's tremendously helpful. Thank you. Everyone's individual point of view on this topic is truly informing my approach to all of this - hope I come out with something meaningful at the end.
For the rest of you, your personal points of view are greatly valuable to me as well! Thank you!
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