Want More Babies? Make More Girlbosses.
Contrary to conservative narratives, it's college-educated liberal women who are having babies in stable, thriving families.
Last week, new data came out showing that the US birthrate has hit an all-time low. Most of this decline comes from far fewer teenage pregnancies; some of it also comes from declines in births among 20-somethings. Birthrates among women in their 30s and 40s are actually up, although not by enough to totally make up for the historically higher rates among teenagers and young adults. These older mothers are more likely to be college-educated than mothers of past generations. They are much more likely to be married than mothers without a high school degree.
This, you’d think, would be music to conservatives’ ears. They spent several decades panicking about teen pregnancy. They’ve often talked about the “success sequence”: Finish school, work full-time, and get married before having children. A greater proportion of American mothers are now doing exactly that.
Cue right-wing meltdown.
All over Fox News and social media, conservatives are absolutely losing their minds over birth rate dips, and are upset that teenage girls aren’t having babies like they used to.
The decrease in birth rates was blamed, predictably, on feminists — or in right-wing internet parlance, “girlbosses,” a term that now apparently means any woman who works for pay instead of staying home and having as many babies as possible. And it is true that women going to college and having jobs has almost certainly decreased the teen birth rate; a stubborn problem with decreasing teen births was that it wasn’t just about getting contraception and sex ed to teenagers, but also about giving teenage girls a reason to delay pregnancy. It is a very good thing that teenage girls now have both the tools to prevent pregnancy and the desire to wait — that there are other things they want to accomplish before becoming mothers. Any sane person would see this as a major win.
When I was a kid in the 1990s, it was conservatives even more so than liberals who wrung their hands about “babies having babies.” Now, though, the conservative line is that if girls don’t have babies as teenagers, and women don’t have babies in their early 20s, society will collapse. Their solution: Mock and shame “girlbosses,” by which they mean any woman with a job (that much of this mocking and shaming is done by conservative women who work for pay telling other women not to work for pay is… interesting). Glorify the trad wife and female submission. Tell women to get married right out of high school, start having babies immediately, and drop out of the workforce to be financially dependent on their husbands (where exactly are the scores of 20-something men who want to get married tomorrow and be the sole financial supporters of large families? That question goes unanswered).
The problem with this strategy is twofold. First, it doesn’t work. Second, it’s the ambitious and educated girlbosses who are actually the ones getting married and having babies.
The data is clear: It’s largely college-educated (and largely feminist and liberal) women who are living by the success sequence of school → marriage → children. The decrease in birth rates is real. But it’s mostly coming from teenagers and lower-income women delaying childbearing and having fewer children.
