In a previous article, Peter Ramsay argued that the project of women’s rights has an interest in the strength of the nation-state because the nation-state alone provides the basis of democracy and equality. Here he looks at the question the other way around, and argues that the British nation has an overwhelming interest in women’s freedom.
(long read)
There are two reasons why women’s freedom is a key national interest. The first is very straightforward. Women make up slightly more than half of the nation’s population, and that half does not consist of a particular regional, ethnic or religious group or a particular social class but is evenly distributed within all of these. This simple fact should compel us to the view that women’s freedom is a central concern of the politics of nation-building.
The second reason is that women make a very specific contribution to the physical reproduction of the nation over time, a contribution that only they can make. Women include among their number the mothers of the nation, of its citizens. This second reason raises a more complex problem for the national interest that is slowly coming to the surface of political life. Fewer women are having children, and those who are having them are having fewer than women used to. The result is that Britain has a steadily ageing population. This problem may at first sight have implications that appear to run counter to the idea that the nation has an interest in women’s freedom. Once we understand the reasons for our declining reproductivity, however, it becomes clear that the only way to reverse it is to expand women’s freedom.
An ageing population might not present a problem for the nation (indeed a slowly falling or static population might not be a bad thing at least for a period) if the ageing was slight and the productivity of those of working age was increasing to compensate. But neither is true. Britain’s birth rate has dropped to 1.5, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, and population ageing maintains a steady pace with almost a fifth of the population now over retirement age. Meanwhile, labour productivity growth in Britain has been weak for decades and flatlined in recent years. [1]
To maintain an ageing population without increasing productivity seems on the face of it to require either longer working lives or mass immigration or both. Large-scale immigration is, however, not a solution. Mass migration is not only causing serious tensions that frustrate any project of nation-building; just as significantly it serves to dilute any productivity gains by substituting cheap labour for technology-driven and capital-intensive growth. Falling birth rates are in any case already a very widespread phenomenon globally, and since most migrants and their children adapt to the existing fertility pattern of the destination society, there is a consensus that even very large-scale immigration could not provide a long-term solution to the ageing of the population. [2]
While the politics of national interest should put the highest priority on increasing the productivity of the nation’s labour force to the benefit of all, the problem of increasing the reproductivity of the nation’s population cannot be ignored. Moreover, the two are connected: stagnant labour productivity and extremely low birth rates are phenomenon of the same globalised political economy and neoliberal consumer society. The neoliberal state has proved to be one with little interest in the future of its people. Moreover, it is in these precise circumstances of declining productivity and reproductivity that the barbarism of gender ideology has achieved its extensive and pernicious influence over state and corporate elites. Here I want to trace out some connections between these phenomena to demonstrate why it is in the national interest to expand women’s freedom in order to overcome this toxic concatenation of low productivity, low reproductivity and gender ideology.
The idea that women’s equality and pro-natal policies are compatible is not new in itself. In the early 1990s, the feminist sociologist Alena Heitlinger showed that policies that served women’s emancipation could also work to increase the birth rate, and policy-making in some states has been informed by this broad perspective. But for Heitlinger, women’s emancipation was a justification for such policies that served as an alternative to the national interest [3]. My argument will be that women’s emancipation and, therefore, the pro-natal policies that serve that end are themselves in the national interest; and, moreover, that a political framing of women’s freedom as a core national interest will help to make those pro-natal policies more effective than they have been so far.
No going back
On the face of it, the falling birth rate might appear to create a national interest in restricting women’s freedom rather than realising it; a national interest in forcing women back into the home to reproduce more. However, the problem only appears this way when viewed through the lens of our zombified political traditions that are incapable of assimilating the fundamental changes that today’s boomers, their parents and their grandparents made to society in the twentieth century; changes overseen by those same political traditions when they were still alive.
Women’s freedom has always entailed the possibility of being free from childbirth and motherhood. Today that freedom has largely been achieved. This freedom could conceivably be taken back: rights to contraception, abortion, divorce, employment and equal pay could all be rescinded. Abortion rights have been curtailed or eliminated recently in some US states. But even if Britain is heavily influenced by the USA, our politics are not the same, and happily there is no serious political party in Britain that proposes anything remotely similar. The idea remains a non-starter here. Some left-leaning political parties continue to back large-scale immigration from countries with limited experience of women’s rights, such as Pakistan. By radically changing the make-up of the citizenry, this might conceivably be a way in which women’s existing freedoms are eventually rescinded. However, even in the unlikely event that such a momentous reversal could be effected, it could not be done in the national interest by virtue of the fact that the nation has the primary interest in the freedom of roughly half of its citizens that I set out from.
Eliminating rights that are necessary to women’s political equality with men would literally divide and weaken the nation by taking it backwards in the direction of premodern social structures. Reducing half the citizenry to second-class status undermines the strength of the nation as a whole. In any case, neither compulsion nor the mass importation of male chauvinism from abroad seems to be necessary if we wish to increase the birth rate. The evidence suggests that large numbers of women want more children than they are in fact having. One authoritative survey shows the existence of a significant ‘fertility gap’: for every three children desired by women of child-bearing age in Britain only two are born. If this ‘fertility gap’ were closed, Britain would return to something much more like the replacement rate.
Today women enjoy rights to control their bodies, and that means that they are no longer socially compelled to have children. Yet in the wake of these changes, many women find themselves having fewer children than they would like to have. This should tell us that something fundamental has changed in the relationship between motherhood and women’s freedom. It suggests that the solution to the falling birth rate is to go beyond defending women’s freedom from childbirth and motherhood, by expanding women’s freedom to reproduce and to become mothers. [4] From the point of view of the politics of national interest, the challenge is to make family life easier to live—and so increase the birth rate—by extending women’s freedom.
To achieve this will require an integrated national approach to employment, housing, education and family policies that will in turn implicate still larger questions of economic policy. The nation has no more important resource than its people, understood not in the degraded manner of neoliberalism as ‘human capital’ but as the very stuff of the imagined political community that a nation is. A policy of enabling women to reproduce is a vital part of a larger political orientation towards nation-building through investing in the nation’s future, an orientation that encompasses increasing the productivity of the nation’s workforce. At the same time, the national interest in women’s freedom to have and raise children also requires us to recognise the redundancy of our existing ideas of gender.
To grasp the shape of the fertility problem requires us first to assimilate the profound nature of the changes in the relation of the sexes, and of the position of women, that took place over the course of the twentieth century. This will give us a perspective that has the potential to identify a solution that breaks out of the culture war impasse of conservative traditionalism vs liberal-left feminism. But it is impossible in current circumstances to make sense of this change without first briefly setting out the gender-critical starting point of the analysis.
Who are these women to be free?
Women are ‘adult human females’, as women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s concise slogan puts it. This is also the view of gender-critical feminists and it is often wrongly denounced by their leftist, liberal and queer opponents as ‘essentialism’, the idea that the stereotypically feminine characteristics are biologically determined. The criticism fails precisely because to be gender-critical is to recognise that the norms of gender—masculinity and femininity—are not facts of nature but a human social creation associated with, and imposed upon, the two sexes. As Holly Lawford-Smith puts it in her book Gender Critical Feminism:
Gender is a set of norms that are prescribed to people on the basis of their sex, prescribing one set of behaviours to female people as desirable and proscribing another set as undesirable; and prescribing another set of behaviours to male people as desirable and proscribing another set as undesirable [5]
The facts of female biology do not determine what these prescribed norms should consist of nor that women should behave only in particular ways that conform to those gender norms. Women and men are socialised into gender norms by the different assumptions of what a girl or boy is supposed to be, assumptions that influence the way that society generally, and parents in particular, treat children.
The stereotypical gender norms that we have inherited are that girls are supposed to be passive, dutiful, caring, emotional, agreeable, decorative, desirable; the boys active, rational, combative, ambitious and so on. These feminine and masculine stereotypes were always just that: constraining stereotypes. But today, although they persist, these norms are now very much at odds with the reality of life in twenty-first century Britain, and the subject of great confusion; and this is because they emerged from a different world that has now passed away. They were a product of the industrial revolution.
The nineteenth century saw the destruction of the older pre-industrial economy in which households were places of production as well as consumption and reproduction. The disastrous effects of the spread of wage-labour on family life, with women and children working for very low wages in the terrible conditions of the factories and mines, led to a deliberate policy of excluding women and children from work and paying men a ‘family wage’, enough to support a nuclear family with women at home looking after husband and children. In practice, working class women often still had to work to make ends meet, but women’s work was regarded as secondary and in general more poorly paid. This novel economic structure of the new capitalist society was stabilised and rationalised by adapting the religiously sanctioned patriarchal norms and institutions of earlier times.
In this patriarchal order, the subjection of females to males was an assumption built into the idea of the state, and that subjection infused all the economic, social and cultural processes. The result was a society that was ruled by a trinity of God the Father, Fatherland and familial father. [6] The stereotypical gender norms made sense and were generally internalised in a society in which women’s rightful place was in the private domestic sphere caring for their men whose rightful place was assumed to be in the public world of paid work and political life.
Conventional ideas of how we think women and men ought to behave arise not from biological difference as such. As diverse thinkers from Frederick Engels through Emile Durkheim to Ann Oakley have argued in different ways, the norms of gender arise from the sexual division of labour in human society, and from how we have rationalised it. This sexual division of labour contains an ineradicable biological moment in the specific female and male roles in reproduction. This biological fact means that for at least as long as human society wishes to reproduce itself then the real differences between the sexes will continue to play a significant part in women’s lives and their position in human society. But exactly how we organise the rest of childcare and household labour generally, and therefore the future relations between the sexes, and the future of our reproduction, is in the hands of human society. In so far as we think and act democratically, this is a question for the nation as a whole.
To address this question successfully we need to understand the reasons why a return to the past is neither possible nor necessary. This requires us fully to assimilate an immense historical transformation that is still only dimly understood when it isn’t entirely overlooked. The impact of the industrial revolution and the development of capitalist society may have created the modern order of family and gender in the nineteenth century, but they could not stabilise it. Over the course of the twentieth century, the patriarchal aspect of that order has disappeared entirely, and the old sexual division of labour has also been transformed but without being entirely eliminated. This specific historical evolution has destabilised gender norms, created the conditions for the long decline in the birth rate and transformed the relationship between the nation and women’s freedom.
The death of patriarchy
The word patriarchy is used loosely by feminists to refer to a social order in which men dominate and enjoy power and privileges relative to women, one in which, as Robin West put it, ‘men’s interests trump women’s whenever they conflict’ [7]. American writer Hanna Rosin has argued that the rapid rise of women and retreat of men in the labour market now marks the death of patriarchy, and I will return to those changes below. Here, however, I am going to make a different, although related, argument: that the continued use of the term patriarchy obscures the most important alteration in the nature of men’s remaining privileges that has taken place in the modern era. The word ‘patriarchy’ literally means the rule of the father. But while men may still enjoy certain privileges and power over women, these can no longer be said to derive from the authority of the Father, from the Father’s right to rule. Patriarchy is, as Nina Power puts it, ‘the name…for a set of confusions’. [8]
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the authority of a singular Patriarch had long ceased to be the dominant form of political power in the state itself. In Britain the old dynastic authority of the monarch was extinguished by the 18th century. In Europe kingly absolutism clung on in backward Tsarist Russia, finally collapsing with the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The authority of fathers persisted, only now reduced to the private sphere of the family. Men continued to enjoy the benefit of a father’s right to rule over his wife, unmarried daughters and his sons for as long as they remained part of his household. This maintained what Kate Millett called ‘the birthright priority whereby males rule females’. [9] The father’s right to rule was institutionalised in the law (family, property, criminal, public), and was backed up by the then widely influential Christian doctrines that rested on the authority of the heavenly Father. The patriarchal privileges of men were recognised as rightful by both state and society as a whole. And this authority powerfully reinforced the sexual division of labour in which women were expected to marry, to have children and were largely excluded from public or professional life. It is this religious, moral and legal order in family and public life that decayed and collapsed over the course of the twentieth century.
This doesn’t mean that people don’t still live in families. Nor does it mean that the sexual division of labour and its attendant cultural norms have disappeared. It doesn’t mean that men don’t enjoy some real (if diminishing) advantages; nor that men (both indigenous and migrant) don’t still abuse their relative power over women in criminal and other ways. What it does mean is that those norms and any advantages or power possessed by men no longer enjoy the authority that was granted to those privileges in the past by the state. The authority of men as head of households has been eliminated from family, property and criminal law. The equality of women is explicitly enshrined in public law. Divorce is relatively easy to obtain. A father’s right to use force against his wife and children has been eliminated. It is unlawful to favour men over women in employment. Officialdom may remain neglectful of women’s rights (as it is of many legitimate interests), and society as a whole may still operate in certain ways that favour men. But this is widely and officially understood to be illegitimate, and sometimes scandalously so (unless the men involved claim to be women), because few people today believe that any privileges attaching to being a man are rightful, and even fewer are willing to defend such an idea. Moreover, if we look at those groups that do openly espouse male domination today, they tend to confirm the story of patriarchy’s loss of authority across the mainstream of British society.
One high-profile group that does maintain the patriarchal idea, but it finds its reasons for asserting men’s right to dominate in a cosmopolitan religious commitment that has no place in British national traditions. The patriarchal commitment of some of Britain’s Muslims has either been imported from the south Asian and Middle Eastern countries that its adherents migrated from, or it is a postmodern affectation adopted by second or third generation descendants of immigrants under the patronage and indulgence of the official multiculturalism and/or of influential Middle Eastern elites. These groups often rely for the arbitration of private disputes on sharia law and sharia courts which in practice maintain some truly patriarchal aspects. The outward cultural forms of Islamic patriarchy—for example, the niqab and hijab, or sex-segregated worship—are so alien to the indigenous British consciousness that they appear like the practices of medieval Europe, deriving from a time before Britain even existed as a nation. Islam’s most militant adherents are aggressively anti-British, promoting the cosmopolitan politics of Islamism that openly seeks to subject the British nation to sharia law or the premodern Caliphate.
The second group is found among those who inhabit the online ‘manosphere’. They bemoan the loss of men’s distinctive role in society, but their ideas are not the survival of the old patriarchal authority but are explicitly framed as a reaction to the advance of feminism in the public sphere and the demise of the old order. It stands adjacent to the incel phenomenon in which young men understand themselves to be the victims of women and feminism. The manosphere is no doubt an incubator of misogyny and violence but it also is notoriously full of grifters and conmen, with little capacity to reestablish real authority; a morbid symptom of the death of the old order rather than a real basis for its recovery. The emergence of this atavistic postmodern nostalgia only emphasises the extent of real social change in the mainstream in which, for reasons we will come to below, feminism has for some decades now walked the corridors of power, enjoying a significant influence on law and policy in fields like sexual harassment and discrimination, employment, family life, education and foreign affairs (notwithstanding that gender critical feminists found themselves rapidly excluded from those corridors during the 2010s).
A third group is another online lifestyle cult known as the trad-wife. It promotes nostalgic ideas and styles of women as homemakers, dependent on a man’s income and for some, at least, subservient to his rights. Like the manosphere, it is a backlash phenomenon, in this case against the dissatisfactions of a society in which it really has become more difficult for some women who desire a traditional homemaking role to choose it, both because of contemporary social expectations and the fact that for most couples real wages are not high enough to amount to a ‘family wage’, so that one parent can stay at home without bringing in some income (something I will return to below). Some women adopting a traditional home-making role are conservative Christians, but wider trad-wifery is a self-consciously nostalgic fantasy replete with grifting and commercialisation. Trad-wifery might appear to have at least some connection to an actual national tradition of Christianity, but—given the radical retreat of Christian belief, and of the Anglican church in particular, in one of the world’s most non-religious societies—that connection is tenuous if not atavistic.
A fourth group is the transgender lobby and its liberal supporters. Unlike the other three, they do constitute the mainstream of recent thinking in the UK’s elite, but their justification for men being permitted to dominate in women’s sports or to spread anxiety and insecurity among women in protected spaces like prisons or rape crisis centres plainly does not derive from the ancient idea of the father’s authority. Their justification is the postmodern idea of gender identity. Insofar as they promote male privileges, they rely on redefining males as women; and in their queer commitments and hostility to sex-based rights they are, as I argued previously, decidedly transnational. The success of the transgender lobby and of its encroachment on women’s rights relies on sustaining the claim that men can be women if they feel like it, and this is very far from relying on the authority of the Father over his family. On the contrary, one aspect of the claim that transwomen are women is precisely the proposition that transwomen are also vulnerable to men’s power in the same way as women. Whatever else he may or may not be, a man in a dress is no patriarch.
Whatever we think of the ideas of any of these groups, they all tend to confirm that the old imperial British nation with its repressive patriarchal authority is long gone, along with the laws that enshrined that authority. The queer logic of transgenderism and its rapid rise to predominance among state bureaucracies and corporate elites is particularly compelling evidence of this. Male chauvinism nowadays literally appears in drag.
The rule of the Father gave way under the pressure of a century of women’s rights campaigning on the one hand, and a century of war, economic development and domestic political struggles, on the other. Women got the vote, after a combination of years of suffragist struggle prior to the First World War followed by the huge contribution of women on the home front during the war. Women were very slowly accepted into higher education and the professions, and in the Second World War were actively recruited into almost every aspect of the ‘total war’ effort except the military frontline. By the 1960s sex outside marriage became less risky with the development of the contraceptive pill and the partial decriminalisation of abortion. The early 1970s also saw the radical easing of restrictions on divorce and the formal legal enforcement of equal pay and working conditions for men and women doing the same work. Alternatives to married life became easier for women, and since the 1970s, the annual number of heterosexual marriages has almost halved, despite a growing population.
Restriction to the domestic sphere declined with all these developments. The growth in women’s paid employment mushroomed during the world wars and after periods of retrenchment has been particularly marked since the 1980s. Where the proportion of men in employment was almost 35% higher than that of women in the early 1970s, the gap had narrowed to less than 7% by 2020. Where around 58% of women of working age were in some kind of paid employment in 1984 it was over 70% by 2020, and that growth was driven by a 50% rise in full-time employment over the same period. In this later period, the rise of women in the middle-class professions has been particularly marked. Women became a majority of students in higher education during the 1990s, and girls’ educational performance and achievement is now significantly ahead of boys. The educational disadvantage experienced by boys is now a matter of significant concern. Women became the majority of solicitors in 2019 and of registered doctors in 2025. In the political life of the state, the experience since the 1980s has been only slightly less pronounced. In 1983 a mere 3.5% of MPs in the House of Commons were women, four decades later in 2024 it was 40.5%. And, of course, there have been three women prime ministers over that period where there had been none previously.
The demise of the authority of the patriarchal family as a social institution that has accompanied these changes was also a necessary condition for the emergence of the neoliberal consumer society that we now live in. As I argued in the previous article, the authority of the old patriarchal order both established and enforced the morality of deferring the gratification of immediate desire, of repressing infantile desires and redirecting their energies into higher ends. The rise of consumer society was enabled by the retreat of this order. It would be inconceivable in a truly patriarchal society for public institutions to concede, as ours have, to the demand that the immediate feelings and desires of children should never be questioned, and to treat these anxieties as markers of deep identities that justify life-changing medical intervention. The consumer society, by contrast, depends upon the incitement of desire. It has seen a boom in the reactionary memes of pornography. After half a century of living in this society, and acclimatising to its mores, the professional middle classes came to believe that giving up on adult authority and accommodating without question a child’s immediate fantastical desire to change sex by embarking on irrevocable life-changing medical interventions was a matter of being ‘kind’ to those children.
The long persistence of the idea of patriarchy is remarkable given that the decay of patriarchal authority across the West could be clearly identified by the early 1960s (as German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich did in his 1963 book Society Without the Father), and the legal order that institutionalised that authority had substantially collapsed in Britain by the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, the largely overlooked disintegration of patriarchal authority has unsurprisingly had a huge impact on society in general and women’s lives in particular. Among other things, the withering of patriarchy has transformed the circumstances in which women and men decide whether and when to have children.
Falling birth rates; persisting sexual division of labour
The decline of the birth rate in the developed countries to below replacement rate largely followed the technological transformation of sexual relations by the invention of the Pill in the 1960s and improvements in other methods of contraception. However, these technological developments were merely a necessary condition for the decline to occur. They made it much easier for women to choose when to have children and when not to, but they cannot explain why couples and families then decided to use contraception to have fewer children. In particular technological change cannot explain why women then chose to have children later and why on average women ended up having fewer children that they would like to have.
To understand this particular experience, we need to understand the prior waning of patriarchal authority and the parallel rise of consumer society. [10] Strikingly birth rates in Britain fell permanently below replacement rate only in the 1970s (with a further rapid fall after 2008). This not only correlates with the substantial end of patriarchy in law and the consolidation of the consumer society, but these two developments can provide an explanation for the very low rates. Their combined effect has been to turn both having children and getting married into a lifestyle choice, something that it never could be in a truly patriarchal order. As Kathleen Stock observes:
‘At root, the cause of fertility decline is that [in] modern liberal society….we treat childbearing as a rational decision to be consciously deliberated over and optimised relative to private goals, rather than treating it as in the will of God or other people.’
It is a decision that young people are often ill-equipped to make. In consumer society, the conventional private goal to be optimised is happiness, achieved by realising our true selves. But how do we know what will make us happy, or what our true selves are, especially when we are young?
In their fascinating study of the attitudes of contemporary young Americans to the prospect of childbearing, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman describe the decision to have children as akin to ‘throwing yourself off a cliff’. [11] Berg and Wiseman’s young women see themselves as faced with a choice between, on the one hand, the consumer society’s promise of a life of travel, higher education, making new friends, creative projects, pursuing professional success and public recognition, enjoying leisure time and so on—which is to say, maintaining their independence—or, on the other hand, having children, an option that seems to imperil all the possibilities of independence.
Faced with this intimidating choice, women who nevertheless want to have children understandably prioritise finding the right partner whom they can imagine being with for a long time, and whom they will be able to rely upon to enter into raising a family. But, in the consumer society, relationships too have become a question of consumer choice. With patriarchal authority gone, divorce is relatively easy to obtain and divorce rates are high. With many young people having direct experience of divorce in their family, the question of finding the right partner who you can be confident will stick around becomes fraught with difficulty. This problem is exacerbated by the weakening relative position of men in the labour market and the high expectations of self-fulfilment through romance that is created in the consumer society [12], reducing the pool of men perceived to be eligible. The result is that making a commitment to another is increasingly deferred. The longer it is deferred, the fewer children women are going to have on average.
In the face of this uncertainty, Berg and Wiseman point out that young adults often find that their own parents are not much help. Their parents are themselves the product of the consumer society of moral pluralism and consumer choice that became established between the 1950s and the 1980s, and they do not feel that they have any right—any authority—to advise or interfere because they do not want to impose their vision of happiness on their own children. Berg and Wiseman note the profound character of this historical change:
‘Until not too long ago, for most people around the globe, child-rearing was a basic part of becoming an adult. It was not, as it is steadily becoming today, one possible path to take among several equally legitimate ones.…Children were not just a biological or economic or political necessity; rather, human life was understood as essentially intergenerational, not just on the level of the species but also that of the individual.’ [13]
Having children has ceased to be the norm, even a norm that people could deviate from if they wished to. Having children remains an obvious option, but it is no longer the default setting for the right thing to do with a human life. We have not yet fully assimilated the implications of this immense historical transformation. The radical individuation of life in neoliberal consumer society means that the intergenerational character of human life, and even the persistence of the human species, are no longer taken for granted as human purposes. This loss has been accompanied by the popularisation of a deep scepticism about humanity itself that has taken form in green ideology, in hostility to so-called anthropocentrism and the widespread belief that climate change is a secular Apocalypse. Climate pessimism is very widespread among young people and, while it appears to be a direct cause of reluctance to have children for only a small minority, it is closely bound up with the same transformation of society’s norms that is contributing to the falling birth rate.
The difficult choices about having children are not only faced by women. But for men the stakes are much lower, chiefly because they will usually bear less of the costs of the choice. The rapid increase of women in the workforce and public life during the era of the neoliberal consumer society may have completed the demise of the old system of patriarchal authority, but it has had much less effect on the sexual division of labour in the private domestic sphere. Sociologists Frances Goldscheider, Eva Bernhardt and Trude Lappegård describe this as an unfinished ‘gender revolution’. The first part, breaking down the sexual division of labour in public, is largely completed, but the second part has stalled. [14]
Women continue to undertake the bulk of unpaid domestic labour, although social attitudes surveys show that only small minorities of both men and women think that this is how it should be. Women also continue to do a significant majority of unpaid care work. Though patriarchy as a formal system of rule has ended, here its traces survive and make their quiet contribution to the cultural persistence of the long abandoned political order. It remains the case that men are simply less likely to take responsibility for these tasks than women.
While Goldscheider and her co-authors give reasons for optimism on this front, the private division of labour is still marked. And this reality continues to have an impact on women’s equality in the world of work. On average women are still paid less than men in Britain, but this gender pay gap is not the consequence of the (unlawful) payment of lower wages to women for the same work by a viciously misogynist official regime. The lower average pay for women is primarily the result of a motherhood penalty, because while fathers tend to remain in full-time work, mothers particularly in the better paid middle-class professions are much more likely than fathers to return to part-time work after having children, and even if they return full-time, their careers are more likely to be negatively affected by having children. The overall result is that, to give an example, while the majority of solicitors are now women, men are still twice as likely to be partners in law firms. Women are effectively disincentivised from having children, tend to delay having them and on average end up having fewer of them; and if a heterosexual couple does decide to have children, prioritising the man’s paid employment will seem to be the better bet financially.
Another aspect of the post-patriarchal neoliberal era has made a subtler but equally powerful contribution both to the survival of the sexual division of labour and the falling birth rate. As I have argued elsewhere on TNS, the consumer society in which ‘self-realisation’ and the satisfaction of personal desires are the officially endorsed purpose of individual existence has in turn led to a new morality, and to a new purpose and justification for the exercise of state power: protecting us from the vulnerability we experience in this radically individuated world. No group appears to be more vulnerable than children, and childcare has as a result become a minefield of anxiety as the risks to children have been promoted, while at the same time parents have been subjected to the novel cultural expectation that they must somehow succeed at parenting.
Eliane Glaser in her book Motherhood spells out the many different ways in which mothers are today bombarded with official advice, guidance and faddish expectations about childbirth and good parenting in a process that idealises motherhood while making demands on actual mothers that are simply unrealistic for most [15]. Not only does this culture inhibit people directly from making the choice to have children but, as Joanna Williams points out, this has had the effect of recreating motherhood as an all-consuming identity for many of the women who do chose to have children, with the result that ‘Women who more readily define themselves by motherhood are more likely to feel guilty about working full time and prioritising their own needs’. [16] This pressure can only tend to deter and delay women from having children even when they want to and deter men from taking responsibility for childraising, also helping to sustain the division of labour. One of the markers of this anxiety is the huge increases in the average time spent by parents on childcare over the past half century notwithstanding falling average family size. And, to put it mildly, it is very far from clear that paranoid parenting is good either for children or for parents.
To cap it all off, the final decades of the neoliberal era since the Great Financial Crash have added the stagnation of real wages to the mix, making it essential that both mothers and fathers do paid work if they are to bring up children. A critical component of this problem of inadequate real wages is the low rate of house-building and the consequent high cost of housing, itself a significant deterrent to family formation in the first place and to having more children for those people who do have one or two.
The combination of parenting anxiety, motherhood penalty, housing costs and stagnating real wages has a conservative effect on the sexual division of labour and gender norms. It disincentivises men from engaging more in childcare and domestic labour because these only seem to threaten their future working life with a set of duties that state policy deliberately makes unattractively burdensome. At the same time, the combination has been disastrous for family formation and birth rates. Women’s greater sexual freedom, education and career opportunities, and the increasing difficulty of commitment, together with the rising cost of housing and the apparent disadvantages of motherhood have led women to couple later and have children later. This list does not exhaust the causes of falling birth rates [17], but nevertheless these factors play a very significant role in falling family sizes and increasing childlessness.
The rapid seizure of society by the queer ideology of gender has coincided with the later part of this long decline in fertility. The norms of gender persist along with the sexual division of labour, but now neither of these institutions has the authority of either the law or the (traditionally British) religious sources that they once enjoyed; and even their underlying social basis in reproductive roles and family life is being eroded. The idea that gender is either a superficial performance or an innate psychic identity—disassociated entirely from female biology—could only become the official ideology in a state like ours: one that is at best institutionally indifferent to the reproductive labour that once underpinned the norms of gender, and at worst approaches the reproduction and socialisation of adult human beings as a dangerous activity that ordinary people cannot be trusted to undertake unaided and without all-consuming anxiety. Not only is motherhood no longer coercively enforced by the state as it once was, but it is now effectively disincentivised by a political economy of low productivity, service sector growth sustained by open borders and low real wages, and by the risk-averse regulatory ideology of vulnerability that has accompanied that political economy.
Perhaps this is a cause of celebration for queer activists. Certainly, their desublimated outlook provides an apology for the political economy of the globalist era, as I argued previously. But queer political success during the era of stagnation in both the nation’s productive and its reproductive forces has not been a cause for celebration among many feminists, many women and many mothers (and, for that matter, many fathers). They have rightly seen this as an attack on women’s rights and children’s welfare. All this speaks to the deep connections between sex realism, women’s freedom and the national interest. This connection hinges on the way the nation treats motherhood, the sexual division of labour and family life more generally.
The national interest in women’s freedom
Our gender norms persist because they are propped up by the sexual division of labour and the grim sexualisation of our desublimated consumer society. But those norms have lost all the political authority they once enjoyed. What is their remaining contribution to the life of the nation? They make the lives of young people a confusing misery as they struggle to adapt to the image-obsessed, hyper-sexualised and barren dystopia that is what remains of postwar youth culture; they keep young people mired in the navel-gazing dead-end of (gender) identity politics; they incentivise barbaric medical treatments for the adolescent psychological difficulties that are produced by this culture; they fuel the demands of paraphiliac adult men to appropriate women’s rights; they keep the porn and sex industries booming; they sustain the background conditions for persistent male violence, resentment and suspicion against women. And they achieve all this without even managing to maintain adequate birth rates.
We therefore as a nation have a stronger interest than ever in marginalising the remaining influence of the categories of gender. In both the medium and the long term, the solution to the birth rate problem lies in fully assimilating the real advances in women’s freedom achieved in the twentieth century and then seeing their implications through. The public moral and legal authority of the old gender norms has been eliminated; and, among other things, that has freed women to be able to choose whether or not to be mothers, a vital step forward in women’s freedom. There can be no going back on this if the truly national interest, the interest of the British people as a whole, is to be pursued at all.
The traditionalist natalism of trad-wifery is a non-starter as national policy. Individual women may choose it, but without tackling the disincentives to motherhood identified above few couples can afford it and relatively few women will be tempted. On the contrary, the next step is to stop taking the underlying social basis of the old gender norms in the sexual division of labour for granted. That can only be done by a state that is willing to value motherhood and childcare as an exercise of freedom. A particular exercise of human freedom that is peculiarly dependent on the will of the females of the species.
The historic decline in the birth rate could be seen as a long, rolling strike by women. The decay and defeat of patriarchal authority created the historical opportunity for women to lay down the tools of the mothering craft and to stop having (so many) children. And women have taken it. The majority have joined the strike not because they don’t want to have children (or more children), but because the pay and conditions are so poor, the work has so little public status and its less inspiring aspects are still so unfairly distributed between women and men. Here, however, the usefulness of the strike analogy ends. Unlike a strike, there has been no collective decision to down tools by a women’s union with the conscious aim of improving motherhood’s conditions. It is an accidental consequence of the survival of the sexual division of labour in the absence of any authority structure able either to enforce it or to place any special value on women’s part in it.
The lack of a conscious political movement to eliminate or mitigate the sexual division of labour is striking, given the huge advances in women’s equality during the twentieth century and the significant influence of feminism in government in the twenty-first century. Kellie-Jay Keen has been harsh about what she sees as feminism’s failure in this regard:
‘feminism…should have embraced and celebrated the power of mothers, but it didn’t. So there are many mothers who feel alienated from feminism.’ [18]
This might seem unfair given that there is a very rich tradition of feminist writing and thinking about the formative, creative power that motherhood gives to women and the highly ambivalent experience of it that many women have had for a very long time. Changing the conditions of childrearing was a major issue in the feminist campaigning of the 1970s. A more generous view is suggested in the subtitle of Glaser’s book: Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business. But even this framing reinforces Keen’s underlying point: notwithstanding the often superb writing of feminists about motherhood, childcare and the division of labour, this has not translated into a contemporary feminist politics that has ‘embraced and celebrated the power of mothers’. Despite feminism’s advance in recent decades in ministries, boardrooms and lecture halls, the immense labour and responsibility traditionally imposed on women in the reproduction and socialisation of humanity do not figure in contemporary politics as a potential source of social or political power.
The dominant feminist understanding of women’s experience remains that they are the victims of the ghostly patriarchy. Glaser’s book provides a compelling critique of the contemporary conditions of motherhood, but her account too falls back on a vague idea of ‘the patriarchy’ to explain those conditions even though she herself explicitly recognises the disappearance of father’s authority in family life in practice. [19] The confusion that is ‘the patriarchy’ facilitates a one-sided focus on women’s powerlessness, on their vulnerability to men. The influential feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon formulated that idea in this way in 1989: ‘To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.’ [20] The feminist agenda that follows is one dominated by questions of sexual harassment, sexual offending, domestic violence, glass ceilings, toxic masculinity, prostitution and pornography. For all that the politics of vulnerability is promoted by the ‘left’, they are a key ideological component of the existing neoliberal order, as I have argued elsewhere. This compatibility accounts for feminism’s recent influence in policy-making. And its agenda has not sought to emphasise the power that could come with women possessing a socially essential biological capacity that men do not.
The point here is not to insist that motherhood, instead of vulnerability, must be the defining experience of womanhood: many women don’t want to be mothers, and they don’t have to be; some can’t be. Nor is it to deny that in many respects women are in fact vulnerable to men’s powers and crime is often the result. I have set out from gender critical assumptions and, while these reject the necessity of gender norms, they recognise the reality of those norms and the resulting misogyny and violence they produce in men, and the need, therefore, to protect women’s sex-based rights. Rather, the point is to repudiate the mainstream feminist proposition that women’s vulnerability to men is their defining condition because it derives from their subordinate position in a system of authority called patriarchy.
Once most women have a real choice whether or not to be a wife and mother the strictly political subjection of women is over because the old order of patriarchal authority has in fact given way. As Williams puts it in Women vs Feminism, ‘women can no longer be said to be oppressed in any meaningful sense’ [21]. In the wake of that historical revolution, the sexual division of labour persists in the private sphere and the old gender norms that that division of labour gives rise to cling on. For all that women’s career prospects have improved historically, the expectation that girls will conform to the conventional stereotypes lives on, while boys are still assumed to be reckless, noisy and take the sexual initiative. These expectations map badly on to their real social lives and probably contribute to the weakening educational performance of boys. The facile culture of consumer society is heavily pornified and sexual aggression and violence by males is still far too common. These remain serious problems, and we have a national interest in effectively addressing them too, but it does not follow from this that women should be defined by, or thought of primarily in terms of, their vulnerability to men. Such a construction distorts the reality of a century of women’s success and public agency and facilitates the persistence of the gender norms exploited by gender ideology.
Having said that, everything about the forthright and well-organised resistance of British women to their erasure by gender ideology tends to prove that sex-realist women generally, and gender-critical feminists in particular, in fact refuse the condition of mere victimhood. Nothing symbolises this better than their adoption of the colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the flag of women’s political agency and political equality. These campaigners are exactly the sort of citizens who are capable of building a nation in Britain: a nation of freedom for women.
In contrast to the mainstream feminist perspective, Nina Power articulates an alternative approach to the sexual division of labour:
‘If we decide…to value childcare, no matter who does it, then that will be what we value….Rather than attacking “male privilege”, it would be better to raise up and celebrate all positive behaviours: if mothers are currently overlooked or even demeaned, they should instead be respected and rewarded.’ [22]
This is the outlook of nation-building. What we need is a state that will value motherhood and childcare in a way that ours currently does not. It will value motherhood by giving women more freedom to become mothers, and childcare by giving men more incentives to engage in it. A nation that truly respects women as citizens and understands motherhood as a necessary element of the national interest will continue to ensure that women have the choice to opt out entirely from the sexual division of labour if they wish, but it will go further. Such a nation will change the real conditions in which women make the choice; it will change those conditions so as to increase their capacity to choose to realise the distinctive potential that biology has gifted to women; something that the evidence suggests many women wish to do to a greater extent than they currently feel able to.
The political question to be answered is concisely posed by Mary Harrington in her Feminism Against Progress:
‘what would it take at scale, across relationships, family life and sexual intimacy, to create a world in which every baby is welcome in conjunction with and not at the expense of his or her mother?’ [23]
However Harrington herself argues that this requires stepping back from the modern feminist project of individual freedom and in favour of what she calls a ‘reactionary feminism’. She does not want to reverse the women’s rights that have been gained, but rather to abandon what she sees as the underlying modern project of an ‘absolute’ individual freedom that both ‘deprecates all duties beyond personal fulfilment, and views intimate relationships in instrumental terms, as means for self-development or ego gratification’ [24] and, worse, promotes the barbaric technological fantasy of escape from the naturally determined bodily encumbrances of sexed being. She argues that this is creating a world of misery and loneliness for young people, and that we need instead to embrace the interdependency of childrearing and the obligations of family life in general, and the heterosexual family in particular, because they are the site of a basic solidarity between sexed human beings that helps them to flourish in the harsh world of freedom and market competition.
Harrington is right that a libertarian vision of freedom from obligations is undermining important human needs and essential institutions. But she takes the impoverished libertarian idea of freedom to be the genuine article when, as we have seen, women’s freedom from these obligations is now a contributing factor to the frustration of women’s desires to have more children than they are having, which is to say their freedom to have children.
Individual freedom is more than merely a lack of constraints on whatever you might want to do at any one moment, a freedom from obligations and constraints, as Harrington constructs it; freedom is a project of self-determination, of choosing to engage in this or that concrete activity, and to bind yourself to this or that set of commitments, because they serve your needs more than the other options. Harrington’s own experience of motherhood is itself an illustration of the idea of freedom as self-determination that she describes eloquently but at the same time obscures by treating the narrower libertarian conception of freedom as good coin. She writes that:
‘I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally. Then I went through the wonderful and disorienting experience of finding my sense of self partly merged with a dependent infant….
The kind of absolute freedom I’d accepted as an unalloyed good, pre-baby, was suddenly a great deal less appealing to me than it had been, because I actively enjoyed belonging to my daughter. It was also, obviously, not in her interests to go on insisting that my obligations to her were always optional. Where, pre-baby, I could do more or less what I liked, as a mother I couldn’t very well refuse to get up and feed my crying newborn at 3:30 a.m. just because I didn’t feel like it.
Her interests mattered more to me than anything else in the world, including my once-treasured autonomy.’ [25]
Harrington is falsely polarising freedom and obligation. If her daughter’s interests truly matter to her more than ‘anything else in the world’ then she is doing the work that serves her own interests as she has determined them, and to the extent that she has also freely chosen to be a mother in the first place, chosen to oblige herself to her child in this way, then her motherhood is an act of self-determination, an expression of her true autonomy. She has chosen to relinquish her freedom to do whatever she ‘feels like’ at a particular moment, for the greater freedom that lies in pursuing a singular object of desire she herself has elevated above the more immediate possibilities: that is being a mother, working on the great labour of love.
The national interest perspective accommodates this larger vision of freedom and offers an answer to Harrington’s question that does not polarise freedom and solidarity in the way she does. The family is not the only site of solidarity. The nation-state offers a larger political framework of self-government in which to grapple with the problem of achieving a solidarity in equal freedom among its citizens. [26] This conception of freedom is one that recognises the interdependence of individual self-determination and the collective self-government of the nation. In the wake of the disappearance of patriarchy, the pursuit of the national interest in the survival of the nation with its regime of collective self-government, now depends on adequately integrating the freedom of women as citizens, on the one hand, and the necessary labour of reproduction and childcare on the other. That can be done by collectively creating the conditions in which more women can find themselves in the position that Harrington describes, and get there a little bit earlier in their adult lives so that on average they may have more children.
The national interest in collective self-government also allows us greater capacity to mitigate the inevitable problems that come with the project of motherhood as individual self-determination, and in so doing make the decision to have children less like jumping off a cliff. When Harrington says that her child’s interests mattered more than anything else in the world, that does not imply that nothing else mattered to her, including presumably her work as a thinker, critic and writer. The national interest in motherhood as women’s freedom necessarily takes account of that. Secondly the project of freedom necessarily entails the possibility of error. Women fear that they will choose to become mothers only to find that their mothering is a merely burdensome unwanted obligation because they are not truly invested in the child’s life in the way that Harrington is. Collectively, we have a national interest in lowering the perceived and real risks associated with that possibility through state policies that make adequate affordable nursery care available and that explicitly aim to diminish the sexual division of labour and eliminate the motherhood penalty.
Policy and political vision
This brings us finally to the question of practical policies. Many states have implemented a wide variety of pro-natal policies for decades now. [27] Heitlinger’s perspective that policies oriented towards equality for women can have an indirect upward influence on the birth rate informs policy in some states. But success has been limited and patchy at best, as the continuing global downturn in birth rates attest. [28] My argument here is that if these practical policies are to succeed it depends on them being framed as part of a new political vision, one that celebrates motherhood, parental responsibility and authority as at once an exercise of individual freedom and one of the great contributions to the life of a nation of freedom.
This is a vision that will recognise that childcare and housework may take place in the private sphere but, as Lucy Jones argues, they need to be understood as ‘a public good with immense social benefits’. It will institutionalise Jones’s idea that ‘Care work is hardcore. It is life and death work.’ It will honour the physically and intellectually challenging labour that it is. [29] We have a national interest in promoting the truth that of all humanity’s marvellous creations as a species, none is more marvellous than human beings ourselves; that all who care for and educate children are involved in the most creative of human labour; and none more so than mothers who bear its biological burden, and who experience its most intimate and profound aspects. This cannot be a merely sentimental vision but a practical one, identifying the institutional forms that will allow us to integrate, equalise and universalise care work as work, and do so in a way that enhances the capacity of those who do it to engage in their public lives and not be merely trapped in a narrow private life. In this way we can press towards the diminution of the sexual division of labour, and with it the restrictive identification of the so-called ‘feminine virtues’ with women and the ‘masculine’ with men, towards the marginalisation of the old gender norms.
Eliminating the motherhood penalty requires incentivising or requiring employers to offer more generous parental leave, job-share arrangements for all parents (male or female) of young children, establishing a much more comprehensive scheme of affordable nursery provision for working parents. Actively helping parents can be done through improvements to maternity services, major tax reforms for families and by mitigating the many small burdens of everyday life that children bring in public transport and facilities. Of course, the objection to such a programme will be cost. But that argument should itself be seen as a political opportunity for a new political vision. The costs involved in measures such as these are the costs of investing in the nation’s most valuable resource and its reason for existing: its own people. The nation that is not institutionally committed to its next generation, and to their equality, is one that will not persist. In other words, the nation is a larger collective loyalty and solidarity through which a post-patriarchal society could recover the intergenerational character of human life.
On this point, the politics of women’s freedom as an investment in the nation’s future contributes not merely to the reproduction of the nation, but to the politics of productivity. For increasing the productivity of the nation’s labour force as a whole is similarly an investment in the nation’s future. The alternative is the dystopian political framework of our current ancien regime, one that does not address the needs of the nation either by increasing productivity or helping its population to reproduce, but instead imports its population from elsewhere, into a state that does not value its own people.
The reduction of the anxiety surrounding what we now call ‘parenting’ is another condition of incentivising both women and men into a fuller engagement and lessening the burden of childcare on existing mothers. This requires an end to the politics of vulnerability. Ending the politics of vulnerability does not mean paying no attention to real vulnerabilities; it means ceasing to define everybody by sole reference to their vulnerability and then framing every social question from that perspective. Of course, the state must recognise that women and children are relatively vulnerable to men in some circumstances, and repress and punish crime against them. But we also need to recognise that legal repression and the extension of police powers will never be the solution to the underlying problem of gender norms; it will, if anything, tend to reproduce those norms in the form of womanhood as vulnerability to men.
Nor will relentless fearmongering about and over-regulation of family life improve our childcare. It will make anxious parents who are likely to socialise anxious children who are in turn more likely to become anxious adults. We have a national interest in seeing citizens as the agents of their own lives rather than mere victims and objects of policy; as the solution to the state’s problems rather than the problem for the state to solve. While vigilance against parental negligence and abuse is warranted, the vast majority of people have children as a practice of love and the state needs to encourage them in that and not make them paranoid about it. As a nation we need to find a way to restore real authority to parents just as we do to restore authority to all the institutions of our collective life.
Above all, the raising of real wages for the large mass of the population is in any case a vital question of national interest. Not the least of the reasons to do this is to make family life easier and more possible for women and men before they start to approach middle age. To achieve this, the productivity of labour in the British economy needs to be raised, the housing supply needs to be massively increased so that housing costs are reduced, and energy costs must be brought down.
In all these ways, and many more, the state we need is one that would value child-rearing and incentivise men to be more involved in it. There is no doubt something offensive to many women in the idea that men have to be incentivised to engage more in childcare and domestic work. Men should just do more. But moral exhortation will only get us so far and practical politics is offensive. The relentless targeting of men’s inadequacies will never achieve the cultural change or solve the problem of young men’s unwillingness to commit or of their fading career prospects narrowing the pool of desirable men for women who want to start families. It will be institutional change inspired by a political vision of greater freedom for women that will change the culture. And to succeed this will need to find a new source of authority for men that gives them a stake in the nation too. The only family policy that can in practice address the national interest in increasing the birth rate will be one that self-consciously recognises our post-patriarchal condition.
The cause of women’s freedom is the cause of nation-building. Some feminists may want to dismiss this as yet another attempt (and by a man) to persuade women to choose some interest other than the interests of women as women [30]. But my argument is precisely that the national interest and women’s interests as women now coincide: that women’s freedom is in the national interest. Both those interests now require us to reconcile child-raising and family life with women’s freedom, and this will entail the diminution of the sexual division of labour and the marginalisation of gender. On that we have a long way to go, but we can only get there if we properly honour, reward and facilitate the great work of our own reproduction, a labour that begins with the contribution that only women can make.
(Thanks to Suke, Eve and Zelia for comments and criticisms.)
Full disclosure on the sexual division of labour: I was at best an average father. I cooked and washed up, ferried the kids about and did a share of day-to-day childcare especially when they were little. But the truly hard labour, the daily school-gate grind, the washing, the cleaning, the visits to the doctors, the enforcing of the Kumon, and, above all, the planning and the worrying: they were overwhelmingly the work of my children’s conscientious and industrious mother. My headspace was mostly taken up with paid work. Hers with family. My career continued, she returned to part-time work. I make no personal claims. But then the personal is not political.
Footnotes
[1] Although there appears to be some evidence of a slight improvement in the past year.
[2] A Manning, Why Immigration Policy is Hard And How to Make It Better (2026) 94.
[3] A Heitlinger, Women’s Equality, Demography and Public Policy (1993), esp 139-42.
[4] I am indebted to Alex Gourevitch for putting this key thought in my mind. The rest of the argument is my responsibility.
[5] H Lawford-Smith, Gender Critical Feminism (2022), 50.
[6] A Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology (1969).
[7] R West, Caring for Justice (1997) 132.
[8] N Power, What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents (2023) 69.Williams
[9] K Millett, Sexual Politics (1971) 25.
[10] To be clear, I am not arguing that falling birth rates as such are inconsistent with the patriarchal order of the nuclear family. On the contrary, the long decline in Britain’s birth rate from the very high rates of pre-industrial society began in the 1870s, following the successful cultivation of the nuclear family in the working class. Long before the Pill and legal abortion, the fall in infant mortality rates led to married couples controlling their fertility and having smaller families. What we need to explain now, however, is why fertility has fallen to the very low level that we now experience.
[11] A Berg and R Wiseman, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice (2024) 3.
[12] M Harrington, Feminism Against Progress (2023) 87.
[13] A Berg and R Wiseman, What Are Children For?, 45-46.
[14] F Goldscheider, E Bernhardt and T Lappegård, ‘The Gender Revolution: A Framework for Understanding Changing Family and Demographic Behavior’ (2015) Vol. 41(2) Population and Development Review, 207-39.
[15] E Glaser, Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business (2021).
[16] J Williams, Women Against Feminism (2017), 87.
[17] There is a large literature now on this but for an interesting overview try ‘The Economics of the Baby Bust with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde’, Works in Progress Podcast, 6 November 2025.
[18] H Lawford-Smith, ‘Mobbed but Unbowed: Interview with Kellie-Jay Keen’, Quillette , 4 April 2023.
[19] E Glaser, Motherhood: Feminism’s Unfinished Business, 211-12.
[20] C Mackinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 178
[21] J Williams, Women Against Feminism (2017), 259.
[22] N Power, What Do Men Want? 44.
[23] M Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, 219.
[24] M Harrington, above, 22.
[25] M Harrington, above, 14.
[26] M Loughlin, Advanced Introduction to Political Jurisprudence (2025) Chpt 6.
[27] For a review see, AH Gauthier and S Geitel-Basten, ‘Family Policies in Low Fertility Countries: Evidence and Reflections’ (2025) 51(1) Population and Development Review, 125–161.
[28] For a review of the experience of gender equality policies with respect to the birth rate, see V Leocádio, AP Verona and S Wajnma, ‘A review of research of the relationship between gender equity and fertility in low-fertility settings’ (2025) 42(1) Journal of Population Research. See also Goldscheider et al, above
[29] L Jones Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood 242–45. [30] For a discussion see K Phelan, Feminism Defeated (2025) Chpt 9.
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