What If Things Are Actually Going Pretty Well?
The news on birthrates and women's progress is mostly good.
This week the internet lost its damn mind when Alex Cooper, the host of the hugely popular podcast Call Her Daddy, announced that she’s pregnant. Cooper is 31. She’s married (to a man). She is doing a thing that some 85% of American women will do before they reach the end of their childbearing years. And she’s doing it on nearly the exact timeline of the average American female college graduate.
But to hear too-online pro-family conservatives tell it, Cooper had spent her 20s convincing young women to live lives of libertine feminism, and now was, hypocritically, settling down.
If this sounds bonkers it’s because it very much objectively is. But women in Cooper’s demographic — college-educated working women — have become something of a trigger for the broader right. The overt misogynists hate them because these women are (allegedly) stealing men’s jobs and then (justifiably) refusing to marry and procreate with men who despise them. But the pro-family conservatives seem to resent them, too, even though these women are, by pro-family measures, doing a lot right.
Women who go to college remain far more likely than their non-college peers to have children within a marriage, and to marry in the first place: A college-educated Millennial born in 1980 is just as likely to be married as a woman born in 1940; the steep decline in marriage has been almost entirely among people without college degrees. College-educated women are vastly unlikely to live in poverty. Even women who graduate from college and have children without being married are far less likely to be raising children in poverty than single moms who didn’t go to college (13 percent vs. 41 percent). College-educated married women are less likely to divorce than their non-college married counterparts. College-educated women have, in other words, generally followed the life script that pro-family conservatives want us to follow: We finished school, worked, chose partners wisely, had children when we were stable and ready, and largely stayed married.
And instead of seeing this as a great achievement, we’ve heard: “No, not like that!”
The idea seems to be that affluent women like Alex Cooper are selling some Sex & the City fantasy to poorer women who are then duped into bad relationships, or maybe into forgoing relationships entirely. None of that seems to be borne out in anything resembling research, but to some significant chunk of the conservative commentariat, it feels true. Or perhaps the argument is that college-educated liberals hold “luxury beliefs” like it’s fine to opt out of college or be single parents but then don’t actually do those things ourselves — so we’re either too prescriptive (telling women to stay single and have fun until it’s too late) or we’re too broadminded (saying any life choice is ok), but either way, whatever is going wrong with marriage and childbearing is our fault, and certainly not that of the same conservative ideologies that are far more prominent in America’s working-class low-marriage enclaves than they are in, say, brownstone Brooklyn. And this is all getting tied up in what seems to be a never-ending Birthrate Discourse, in which there is a collective freakout over declining rates of baby-having.
