I have never been a Julia Gillard fan but I admire the woman on a number of levels and in particular for her ability to make the decision to make her career a priority over having children and not expecting that she could necessarily have both. That’s why she’s PM. She’s probably the smartest woman in the country and perhaps all the more because she was able to make that choice.

As a female born in the late 60’s, I grew up having a very clear understanding that women’s fertility was limited and that by their mid to late 30’s it was much harder to get pregnant than in their 20’s. At school I studied biology and another subject called human development through the life span. I made a choice in my teens not to have children and to pursue a career which is what I’ve done. I’m 40, childless and have had an amazing career that is now in a new phase. I have no regrets about not having children. If I’d had that maternal instinct and felt I had to have children, then I would have made a different decision.

Women should stop expecting to have it all. Our bodies are designed to have babies while they’re young and fertile and you don’t have to have studied biology to work that out. It’s pretty obvious.

Feminism doesn’t work if you try to mix children and career. Look at all the women who juggle kids and work and how haggard they often look, unlike their partners who don’t seem to age as quickly. Having kids on top of a career just adds to a woman’s workload unless she can afford a nanny, housecleaner etc or unless her partner is a stay at home dad.

It wouldn’t matter what we could achieve as women, I’m sure there’d always be something to whine about.

Sophie, you characterise Toni Morrison’s comments as ‘interesting’– by interesting do you mean nuts? she’s talking specifically about girls of 15 and 16 having babies, not just people under 30 as I inferred from the quote in your post.

Pru, I didn’t mean nuts, but it’s a fair cop. That said, I do think it’s valid to talk about how society should support mothers, whatever their age, and that having a child should not mean they can’t do interesting work.

hmmm…ok, but i was reading your post as being about some of the pragmatic realities of breeding: fertility is finite, we have a female prime minister who has publicly spoken about her belief that she could not have fully devoted herself to her political career if she had elected to have children (something Leia picks up on in her post). of course mothers should be supported, and are as entitled as anyone, to do interesting work (though i think this is a whole other tangent because what percentage of the population is doing work they would deem ‘interesting’ let alone worthwhile). what i don’t like in toni morrison’s comments is a flippancy about the reality of unwed teenage motherhood (and it is that, isn’t it, motherhood not parenthood). i agree that teenage mothers should be supported and certainly not demonised but to hark back, as she does, to some earlier time when all mothers were teenagers who got on with the business of running farms is dross sentimentality in my view. oh, well, good post by you, got me (spawn of a teenage mother) tapping away that’s for sure.

Leia I’m not sure I’ve ever, in real life, come across a woman who wanted to “have it all”. I’ve met many many women who were cheesed off at the fact that no matter what their decisions were about children and career, they lost. Not having children helps you, individually, to have a more sparkly career than your (female) colleagues who have kids, but it does nothing much to change the system under which we’re all dudded. Your male colleagues will, statistically speaking, see their career go from strength to strength after they become fathers. They have it all.

Our systems of work, our conventional career paths, are geared towards a man with a stay at home wife. Given that the overwhelming majority of us (whether we’re male or female, single or partnered) aren’t in that position, we need to change the system.

As Bluemilk wrote recently “when are we going to be Swedish already?” http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/when-are-we-going-to-be-swedish-already/

Kate, women don’t say they want to ‘have it all’ but getting upset at the age of 37 about not being able to have children does suggest that they have been leading their lives thinking they can have it all. Men do go from strength to strength if they’re not busy having to take time off to look after children or arrange to work part-time but I know many men who have chosen to take a bigger role in the care of their children to the sacrifice of their career. Like women, they can’t have it all if it means spending quality time with their children. As you say, the only way to improve this situation for both men and women is for the system to change but I doubt we’ll see that happening anytime soon.

Leila, I think it’s harsh to say that women think they can have it all . I think that there is a huge amount of misinformation out there which suggests that it is, in fact, relatively easy to have a child until your mid-forties. I think the IVF industry has a vested interest in this.

I certainly didn’t assume that I could have it all in life. IN fact, I was assuming I’d have a child as a single woman – I simply didn’t expect my last shot at it to come at 37.