Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children
Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Scare, Panic, Late to the Mommy Track, Baby Bust, and Mother Load are some of the recent headlines dominating the ~opular press since the release in early 2002 of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. Hewlett describes an epidemic ofwomen who are shocked to find that after pursuing careers rather than motherhood, they are childless and miserable. Although the debate of versus has been part of public discourse since women's mass entrance into the workplace following advances of second wave feminism, we might ask what is different about Hewlett's findings in postmodern America. Rapid advances in reproductive technology and a United States humbled by an international terrorist attack have caused anxieties about the future, making both men and women reevaluate their priorities. But if feminism has taught us anything, it has taught us to consider implicit operations of power both in the representation of facts and in their reception. Hewlett set out to write a book about women in the breakthrough generation, our foremothers who were the first to become doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. The majority ofwomen Hewlett interviewed were childless. Hewlett's probing revealed that these women regretted not having the opportunity to become mothers. Alarmed by these findings, she set out on a mission to expose the effects of career success on women's lives. Hewlett's findings come from a national survey of 1,647 high-achieving (earning $55,000 or more) and high achieving non-career (completed a professional or advanced degree but not currentlyworhng) women and a subsample ofhigh-achieving men. Her results are outlined in a chapter entitled Sobering Facts. Forty-two percent of women in corporate America were childless at age 40 and this number rose to 43 percent for African American women. Hewlett also found significant differences between the older and younger generations of high-achieving women: only 45 percent ofyounger women had a child by age 35, while 62 percent of older women had had a child by age 35. Given the advances in reproductive technology, most young women assumed they could have children well into their 40s. Statistics, however, tell a different story. Chapter five, Infertility: The Empty Promise of High-Tech Reproduction, shows the discrepancies between media accounts of reproductive technologies and actual success rates. Women over 40 have a three to five percent
DOI: 10.25071/msnj9x42
Author: Carolyn Cunningham
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2237900489