Why Do Women’s Life Choices Get Reduced to “Career or Family”?

All women get presented with is a simplistic binary

So I read this piece, and it pissed me off.

We’ve been getting a million panic pieces that just blame and shame women for why they’re not having kids — whether it’s by choice or not — and it needs to stop.

Have these people seriously not noticed that America has basically become neo-feudal as the planet burns like a pizza bagel that got too close to the toaster’s roof? Even the ocean is on fire. While it’s mostly women bearing the brunt of this blame game, even couples whose relationships and incomes are stable are having second thoughts about bringing kids into a world where we’re going to have wars over water.

Although the piece did bring up some points about how it’s become too difficult and expensive to have children in America, it didn’t offer any fixes for the innumerable structural reasons we’re forgoing children— the focus was on how women can just opt for professional fulfillment over having kids.

As someone who has been childfree by choice for an incredibly long time and built a career that I actually love and that does provide some fulfillment, I’m sorry, what?

The blame continues to be laid at our feet: we’re a bunch of picky shrews who are apparently over-educated because we won’t replicate DNA with the first man who matches with us on some churn-focused dating app. As if people didn’t meet in thousands of other ways since paint was first splattered on the walls of Lascaux.

All while ignoring what we should actually be asking.

Why are women’s life choices constantly presented as this either-or between having kids or a career?

There’s…more to life than just having a career or children. Regardless of your gender.

I get that capitalism makes things harder than they really have to be. This is triply so in America compared to other capitalist nations.

But you don’t have hobbies? Causes you care about? Other types of relationships you’d like to form outside of the family you were born into, marriage, and professional ones? Like friends and communities?

Because you cannot expect either adult children or your profession to be there for your whole life.

For one, no job or business ever fills the void for human connection. Millennial loneliness is at epidemic levels and we keep losing spaces to freely congregate. Spending more time at work isn’t going to fix that when things suck at home, and you lack “third places” to find your people and thrive.

But also, this expectation that you’re going to have people to help you with things and be your caregiver when you’re old? Let’s break out the Twitter meme format: “tell me you don’t have any child abuse survivors in your life without telling me you’ve never spoken to a child abuse survivor, ever.” Abusive and toxic parents often wind up with adult children who are completely estranged and want nothing to do with them.

Having a child is also zero guarantees of anything in your future. You cannot quantify what you don’t know.

Because it also works in reverse: you can be the most wonderful parent there ever was, and your kid can still go astray. You might outlive your child, a grim reality no parent wants to acknowledge. Or in the best-case scenario here, you have a good relationship with your adult child but they now live on the other side of the world because work, romance, or a life purpose related to neither led them there. You have no way of knowing.

Regardless, being presented with this idea that having children means you don’t focus as much on your career in a society that constantly grabs your money in every direction is a pretty short-sighted one. You more or less have to build a career unless you marry rich, or inherit a lot of money. And let’s get real: money runs out, and being financially dependent on a spouse can definitely go south. Whereas other countries seem to have no problem with women working in all kinds of complicated and high-paying fields since they have fewer worries about financial security and childcare through some form of maternal pensions plus a job guarantee for working mothers (at least in Bulgaria).

Hey, universal childcare would be life-changing for millions of people. I would happily pay more in taxes for it instead of those checks going to sending Jeff Bezos into space or overseas imperialism. And we are long overdue for universal basic income, a cause I will fight for the rest of my life.

But it shows you how broken our society and culture are that “spend all your time at work” is the default expectation if you willfully skip out on children, especially if you’re a woman.

You don’t owe some ungrateful corporation the rights to your entire life and free time just because you don’t have children. Everyone deserves free time, full stop. (Including children.)

Speaking just for myself, yes, I’m proud of the business I built. My personal writing and game and movie projects give me fulfillment (and money!) And while I enjoy a great deal of autonomy and laugh at the idea of a 40-hour workweek, there are times I need to put more hours in than I’d like because of an urgent deadline or frantically applying for funding. But at this juncture of my life, I’m prioritizing moving to the west coast and rebuilding my social life post-COVID since the pandemic revealed I don’t have much of my old life left, and I’m going to fight the isolationist forces that keep us apart (deadly virus notwithstanding).

I can think of a million things to do aside from just work: hanging out with my west coast friends and meeting new people. Exploring the new land I’m moving to. Partaking in the local punk and metal scenes, maybe even having a band again. There’s so many books I’ll never get to read, movies I won’t get to watch, games I won’t get to play, because there’s just so many and I want to engage with all them and geek out about them all day. I also can’t wait to get involved in local herpetological societies and spot Western Toads in the wild.

This isn’t a binary, people.

We fill our lives with things that give us meaning like art, music, travel, connection with nature, mutual aid projects, and volunteering. Which in turn gives us communities, and families of our own making. A family isn’t just the nuclear family ideal that was pushed hard in the postwar era: there’s all kinds of families.

In pushing back on this isolationist, toxically individualist mindset American capitalism has forced on us, we should also question the whole idea that you should only rely on your spouse, parents, or kids to help you with things if you’re not paying someone for it. But also the notion that “womanhood” gets equated with “you either work all the time or you’re dedicating your life to childrearing.” The concept of women enjoying leisure time and pursuits of personal development seems to make some people mad.

Instead of this reductive binary, we should work together to take back our public spaces, resources, and our lives so anyone can thrive regardless of career type, gender, and our marital and reproductive choices.