Has feminism weakened the family and crushed the birth rate?

Part II in a series on feminism

Welcome back to my mini-series on feminism and its effects on men. In Part I, I unpacked whether women’s participation in the workforce has damaged men’s economic standing in terms of their wages, employment prospects, DEI, and the effects of two-earner couples on inflation. I also defined the terms “feminism” and “patriarchy” to prevent any shenanigans. In this essay, I’ll move on from economics and talk about culture: the effects of feminism on marriage and family formation. This is Part II in a three-part series. The last installment will tackle boy’s educational attainment, mental health, and “toxic masculinity” discourse.

First, some updates! Does anyone remember the 1990s trend, Glamour Shots? These were huge when I was in high school. You’d go to the mall, get a pancake-makeup makeover with a full can of hairspray, and get a bunch of soft-focus, Vaseline-on-the-camera-lens style pictures of yourself. Being a nerd and a snob, I was deeply opposed to Glamour Shots, and my inner monologue would occasionally mutter, uncharitably, that they were a bit “mutton-dressed-as-lamb,” if you know what I mean.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I got muttony new Glamour Shots¹ in the lead-up to my book launch, and a new website to boot. My super-talented friend Andrea designed it and you can hire her for your own projects!

Back to feminism: Let’s unpack some arguments!

Claim: Feminism has led women to abandon marriage and family, lowering the birth rate, making it harder for men to find wives and damaging our overall social fabric.

In the pre-feminist days, marriage was an imperative for women who wanted a place in society. Being an old maid meant little freedom, dependency on one’s father or brother, and possible destitution and a life of servitude (or perhaps the nunnery). Generations of women were taught that motherhood was their main purpose on earth, and women who did not want children were perverse weirdos. Feminism has enabled women to choose different paths. When it comes to personal liberty and freedom, having more choices is a good thing. But in the aggregate, increasing choice while removing stigma can shift cultural frames in ways that disincentivize marriage and family formation altogether. Indeed, some feminist voices have overcorrected for previous children-are-your-only-calling messaging by portraying motherhood as constraining and lame (I wrote about this here). I was no fan of a recent viral Jameela Jamil essay about her dislike of children; I don’t see this type of rhetoric as feminist, but as anti-human.

Is feminism the main culprit behind anti-family cultural attitudes and tumbling birth rates, though? We can look across historical time and across cultures to find the answer. We know that birth rates have fallen globally within the last century. It’s a common refrain that feminism caused low birth rates in industrialized societies by encouraging women to abandon their families in favor of sluttish personal freedoms, wasteful education, and email jobs. However, the main driver behind falling birthrates is actually good news: our infant mortality rates are dramatically lower now that at any time in history, so we no longer need to produce large broods in order to fulfill our fertility intentions. Moreover, when economies shifted away from agriculture and small family businesses, we lost the economic imperative to breed children as mini-employees who could contribute to the work of the farm or the shop. Individual families continue to bear the costs of childrearing, but the benefits of childrearing now accrue more to the larger society than to individual families.

Last week, I mentioned Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria as the countries with the lowest female workforce participation, and the birth rate is actually falling most steeply in those countries, none of them hotbeds of feminism. Perhaps counterintuitively, among industrialized democracies, fertility is highest among the countries with the highest labor force participation by women.

High female labor force participation (FLFP) countries (blue line) include Canada, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, USA, and Switzerland. Medium FLFP countries include Austria, Australia, France, and Germany. Low FLFP countries include Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain. Source: Doepke et al., 2023

We see similar trends with women’s education. Contrary to what’s been alleged by many conservatives in the U.S., overeducated women are not the culprit behind tumbling birth rates. Indeed, the relationship between education and fertility has flipped in recent decades, such that the most educated women are having the most kids (and getting married at the highest rates, too).

U.S. data. Source: Doepke et al., 2023

The places where the birth rate is reaching the most alarming lows are not historical strongholds of feminism. Take South Korea. It has the lowest birth rates in the world. Unlike the U.S. and Western Europe, where there is more than a century-long tradition of feminist influence, South Korean culture is not steeped in strong gender-equity ideals. Indeed, it is known for sexist, rigidly hierarchical workplaces and husbands who are overworked and reluctant to contribute to housework and childcare.² The problem in South Korea is not an excess of feminism, it’s that feminism hasn’t gone far enough. Women have high workplace participation, but their low representation in political and corporate leadership means that public policies and family cultures aren’t built to accommodate work and motherhood.

Other recent evidence suggests that male contributions to housework and parenting are a good predictor of birth rates in developed countries, suggesting that we need a feminism that expands to the home front as well as the corner office. Claudia Goldin won a Nobel Prize for making this argument. Indeed, a study of compulsory paternity leave in South Korea found that it increased births by a whopping 15%.

As another example, a new research paper by the economist Abigail Dow found that higher childcare prices in the U.S. reduce birth rates, delay first births, and lengthen the interval between first and second births. A 10% increase in the price of childcare decreases in the birth rate by 5.7%.

To oversimplify wildly, I’d say that if your number one goal is to optimize for birth rates, you either want no feminism (low female workforce participation, traditional gender attitudes), or a lot of feminism (high female workforce participation coupled with high political representation and high egalitarianism). No feminism will bring (force?) many women into motherhood, but entails significant economic and cultural trade-offs that most people in industrialized societies do not want. A lot of feminism means you’re living in a society that accommodates working mothers, has a strong public policy infrastructure to support families, and has social attitudes that promote men’s involvement in care. The least optimal situation is some feminism: enough feminism so that women get degrees and go to work, but not enough feminism to change work cultures and men’s attitudes to make marriage and motherhood a better trade-off for women. Societies with some feminism also tend to suffer from ideological gender gaps that pit the interests of young men and women against each other and deter coupling up. This is what we’re seeing now in South Korea. In fact, the worst possible combination of all, at least from a family formation perspective, is feminist women and anti-feminist men, and that’s where we’re headed in the United States and Europe too, if we’re not careful.

OK, enough about the birth rate. What about feminist attitudes towards marriage and children?

It is often claimed that feminists “hate” children and families. They tell women to go get empowered in the corner office and leave those gross babies behind. But if this were true, you’d likely see poor child outcomes in places with high levels of feminism. The opposite is clear. If you index the success of feminism in terms of the political representation of women in the leadership of a country, the most feminist places actually have the most pro-child policies and the best child welfare, as indexed in terms of child health, literacy, maltreatment rates, and mental health. Indeed, as I wrote in an earlier essay, “There’s a very strong positive correlation (+0.76) between women’s representation in political leadership and public spending on early childhood.” This is good, because early care investments are cost-effective in yielding long-term returns.

Although it’s true that some feminists have endorsed anti-motherhood attitudes, there is also a long tradition of feminist advocacy for the rights and well-being of children. In the U.S., feminists have advocated for insurance companies to cover maternity care; for pregnancy and breastfeeding protections in workplaces; for women’s maternity leave; for better physician training in maternal mental health; and for other pronatal policies. In many cases, anti-feminist attitudes have been the greatest barrier to winning greater protections for women and children. Compare maternal-infant mortality rates in red vs. blue states, or the map of “maternity care deserts” in the U.S., if you’re wondering who’s advocating for the welfare of babies. For decades, conservatives have argued against paid maternity leave because they don’t want women in the workforce at all. As a result, mothers in the United States spend less time at home with their babies than mothers in any other industrialized country. Ironically, feminists hotbeds like Denmark - where women hold 44% of seats in parliament - have much higher rates of mothers working part-time than in the United States, even though part-time work the stated preference of many mothers of young children. If you want to live in a society in which mothers and babies are healthier, childbirth outcomes are better, and mothers are supported in caring for their babies longer, you’d rather live in a more feminist country than a less feminist one.

But, you might argue, all of these countries have been sullied by the bad influence of feminists - even South Korea has a burgeoning women’s rights movement - so maybe these global comparisons are limited. What if we look back historically, at the pre-feminist era, when women were real women and motherhood was embraced as our highest calling? There’s an irony there too: Based on how much time we spend with our children and how much we prioritize their welfare, contemporary parents are much more dedicated to parenting than moms and dads of previous generation. In fact, as I have written, we’d be shocked by the neglectful and even abusive attitudes that mothers of previous generations displayed toward their children. Within the working classes, children were put to work young, and even sent out to factories with brutal working conditions (before kid-hating feminists like Jane Addams fought for better protections for kids, that is). Elite women, who actually did have the leisure time to perform hands-on care, outsourced direct childcare whenever they could. The use of wet-nurses, nannies, governesses, and boarding schools, and even the practice of sending babies out to the country in infancy, was common among the rich. In other words, feminism didn’t suddenly cause women to look down on motherhood; wealth did. When middle-class women could afford childcare, they started acting more like the elite women who had been paying other people to watch their children all along.

Someone should tell this tweeter about the time-use data showing that contemporary working moms spend more time with kids than 1950s moms

I also see the claim that feminists are torpedo-ing marriage with their man-hating rhetoric. But, as Cartoons Hate Her and others have written, that’s not quite true. Divorces are down. Most people, both liberal and conservative, want to get married. The most educated women are the likeliest to get married and have the lowest divorce rates. Given that education also tracks with more egalitarian gender attitudes, it appears that feminism is not destroying marriage after all. Indeed, more egalitarian men make more desirable partners, because women want to be with partners who respect them and don’t assume they’ll manage all the unpaid care of the home by default. To quote Stephanie H. Murray, “IMO feminists should pivot from “marriage is misery” to “look how awesome we made marriage.”

But you’re just cherry-picking a bunch of arguments that make feminism look good. What about the falling marriage rate and research suggesting that conservative women have more pro-family attitudes and larger families?

OK, that’s fair. There is indeed data on this! Conservative women do in fact tend to have more children than liberal women. They also marry earlier, which is conducive to having more kids. The political gap in family formation shrinks, but doesn’t disappear, when you control for religion. Housing and cost of living matter too: Conservatives tend to live in more rural areas with lower housing costs, whereas liberals are often clustered in cities where both housing and childcare costs are higher. But there are also cultural factors to consider. Left-leaning voices are more likely to celebrate (or at least tolerate) alternatives to the traditional family, from childfree lifestyles to polyamory.

Feminists have drawn attention to the downsides of heterosexual marriage for women, like the (very real) gap in unpaid labor that occurs even when both partners work outside the home and earn similar incomes. As economist Corinne Low writes, “My research shows that men do about the same amount of housework today as in 1970! Women are earning more and spending more time in market work than ever before, but they shoulder the majority of the home production burden in heterosexual marriages. The value proposition of marriage is still there for men: they still go to work, and their spouse still cooks and cleans and washes their smelly socks. But for women, the economic benefits of marriage have been exchanged for more work, more sacrifice, and more exhaustion.”

Is this rhetoric anti-marriage? You could argue that yes, it has the effect of making young people less interested in marriage. (Although Low also writes that she is fundamentally, pro-marriage and optimistic about men). But that does that mean we shouldn’t surface these issues? Women initiate more divorces than men do, and unequal divisions of household labor are a frequent lightning rod for conflict. I’ve seen a wellspring of essays arguing against what I’ll call Fair Play feminism. Their stance is that to quantify or negotiate the division of labor is inherently anti-family, because it applies a transactional, bean-counting logic to something that pure love should naturally inspire us to do. Women ruin the beauty of care by score-keeping. It’s true that it’s utterly magical to see a baby’s first smile or a toddler’s first steps. But there are also unrewarding parts of housework and parenting, just as there are dull or irritating components to every job. To act as though we can never quantify women’s unpaid labor is to engage in what the French theorist Roland Barthes called "bourgeois mystification”: to romanticize the work of the household as women’s “natural calling” and obscure the actual effort that goes into maintaining a cozy, loving home. We see men’s work as skill-based, effortful, and deserving of external reward, whereas women’s work is instinctual and ineffable, operating outside the laws of gravity.

In my opinion, marriages flourish the most within an atmosphere of mutual respect and clear communication. In a happy marriage, everyone is generally happy with their trade-offs, whether that means one partner is home and the other partner is engaged in paid work, or both partners are earning and sharing housework. When resentments arise, tracking unacknowledged work can help resolve disputes. But this requires communication skill and the willingness to have good faith conversations, on both sides.

Research recently released by the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies indicates that 93% of liberal married moms report being “happy” with their lives, making liberal married women the happiest demographic out there.³ Maybe those organized gangs of wine moms aren’t so miserable after all.

Eli J Finkel’s concept of the “All or Nothing Marriage” offers a useful framework for understanding changing marriage trends. In my last post, I talked about our K-shaped economy, and marriage these days is K-shaped too. Good marriages are better than ever—more companionate, egalitarian, intimate, and rewarding—but there is a widening gap between great marriages and average marriages, and more people are simply opting out of marriage because it feels aspirational and unattainable. You could argue that feminism raised the quality of marriage because it raised women’s status in a way that created more mutual respect and mutual reward, but it also made marriage more challenging to pull off, because you’ve got two people with equal status rather than one person whose identity subsumes the other.

The “some feminism” problem comes up here too. What’s best for marriage may be either a society with no feminism (women have no choice but to get married because their financial security depends on a husband) or a lot of feminism (women marry men who value them as full partners and respect their contributions), but when we go halfway and land on some feminism, it means that women are participating fully in the workforce while their partners aren’t participating fully in the home. I think that explains why the U.S. divorce rate peaked in the early ‘80s: women and men who’d grown up in a pre-feminist world were trying to reconcile women’s huge workforce gains with a culture that hadn’t quite caught up. Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift, captured that dynamic and is still relevant today, although many men have increased their housework and childcare contributions in the decades since.

Here’s where I land: We humans are social animals, and we struggle in isolation. Family formation matters. There are valid alternatives to the traditional nuclear family, but rather than disparage marriage and childrearing, I’d rather see a feminist movement that celebrates the rewards of family life and seeks to make those rewards more accessible to everyone. Children are wonderful, it takes a lot of work to raise them, and societies should use all the resources at their disposal to support that work and the people who do it, including mothers, fathers, childcare workers, teachers, and aunties. We can call that message feminist, we can call it humanist, but let’s not cede family values to the folks seeking to roll back the clock on women’s progress.

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Playlist link!

Past recs: Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet // Fontaines D.C. // Elvis Costello Spanish Model // Lily Allen // Geese // Olivia Tremor Control // Wake Up Dead Man // Beulah // Rosalia // A$AP Rocky // Dirty Projectors

MITSKI

Mitski has a new album coming out next month and it portends a welcome return to her crunchy, dirty, distorted indie-guitar roots after a few albums of more sedate Great American Songbook style tunes. So far she’s only released one song, Where’s My Phone?, a question that I ask myself multiple times a day.

My fave Mitski records are Bury Me at Makeout Creek and Puberty II. Now that everyone’s into 2016 stuff for some reason, here’s a 2016 KEXP solo performance of her incredible song, Your Best American Girl.

My favorite Mitski song is probably this depressing and weird track from Puberty II, I Bet On Losing Dogs.

1. I was going to write that I feel sheepish about sharing them, but that’s too much punning for everyone except my dad.

2. Lyman Stone might disagree with me; he argues that South Korean men have “surprisingly normal” gender attitudes, but also shows data indicating that, in his words, “Korean men do less housework than married men… anywhere!” That’s partially a function of smaller houses and families and more outsourcing.

3. As I griped in a Note about this IFS report, it’s framed on their website in “gotcha” terms as a salvo against liberal women, even though the findings indicate that liberal married women are doing just fine.