Western societies are once again undergoing a process of renegotiating gender roles and the place of both men and women in public and private life. This process is necessary to restore order to our societies, but the current debate is often fraught and lacks coherence. Divisive figures such as Andrew Tate contribute to an environment that is not helpful to the ongoing debate, yet figures like Tate occupy this space because a more logical approach to the gender issues of modern times is not being approached by better people.

Current policymakers are also not contributing constructively. They demonstrate a serious inability to understand or link a few non-complex trends and instead propose solutions that are unlikely to work and may even make the situation worse by wasting time and resources. One ‘solution’ that comes to mind is one put forward by a Republican member of the house who proposed that pregnant women be allowed to collect child support (cash from the child’s father) immediately after confirmation of pregnancy. Such a proposal would only enrage men further, and likely lead to incredible levels of maternity/paternity fraud.

Men should not be used as convenient scapegoats by policymakers, nor should those policymakers neglect the importance of the nuclear family.

The Current Situation:

Women are incredibly unhappy and continue to grow less happy as the years go by. And the situation is only getting worse. Women are more anxious, depressed, lonely, and sad than men are. A study by the National Institutes of Health found that women are considerably more lonely than men as they age, a new development in the West. This is despite decades of feminist empowerment propaganda that women will find happiness and fulfillment in their careers, ‘independence’, and generally in behaving more like men. More women are in the workforce in the West than ever before, yet they are markedly less happy.

A study by Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia and Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies found that married mothers are, by far, the happiest women in Western society. Mothers (in a general sense( are the second happiest while unmarried women and unmarried mothers report the lowest levels of happiness.

Yet, as a result of this intense career pressure, fertility rates, rates of marriage, and rates of family formation have declined rapidly. According to Joyce Harper, a Professor of Reproductive Science at the Institute for Women’s Health, University College London, women are putting off marriage and children in favor of focusing on their careers.

Historically women in the West would marry at the age of 22, and men would marry around the age of 25. Most women would have their first child around 25, while men became fathers closer to 30. The post-1980s world has changed the historic Western pattern of family formation, delaying it significantly and causing a great deal of unhappiness. Most women in the West now have a child at roughly 31 years old and as a result, many women are only able to have one child.

This is incredibly unfortunate, as fulfilling fertility desires is linked very strongly to female happiness. According to the Institute of Family Studies (IFS), women desire to have roughly 2.5 children throughout their lifetime, with women in their early 20s wishing to have nearly 3 children. But these desires often go unfulfilled.

This same IFS study found that only 30% of women in the general population are “very happy”, while women who have achieved their fertility goals (that being to have more rather than fewer children) are much happier. 45% of women who have met their fertility goals classify themselves as “very happy” – a 15-point lead on the women who have not met their fertility goals.

While it is a shame that women have been convinced that putting off their natural desire to have a family young is desirable, so they can focus on a career, it is even more concerning that those same advocates of female careerism are not being honest with women about the results of delaying fertility in this manner. 1 in 5 American women are unaware that age affects their fertility and 30% of American women were unaware that conceiving later in life carries increased chances of genetic defect for their child.

Western women have been pushed, by dogma and social pressure, into prioritizing their careers over family formation, although most women would still like to have more than 2 children, and 40% of women without children would prefer the option to be full-time stay-at-home mothers. 56% of Women who already have children would like to be stay-at-home mothers.

We can confidently say that women would prefer to stay at home (for a while), to have more children, and to prioritize motherhood. Yet they feel unable to do so in the current climate. It is incumbent upon policymakers to offer women alternative paths in education and employment so that most women who seek to be mothers and homemakers have the option to do so first, rather than to attempt and “fit it in” later in life as they are currently forced to.

Our Proposals:

1. Reform the education system and public discourse.

The education system must stop pushing careerism and the “college path” on young women. Instead, the education system must teach the value of family life, marriage, and the facts about childbearing. Women should be informed about the statistics regarding happiness and fulfillment when it comes to having a family vs a career and should be allowed to choose for themselves rather than being presented with a single path.

It is important to present women with a holistic view of their lives so they may pick and choose the stages of life in an order that best fits them: family, education, career, etc etc rather than being forced down a singular path.

2. Post-maternal opportunities.

As argued by Mary Harrington in Feminism Against Progress, women are no longer required to dedicate all of their time to keeping up a household once children are no longer small and have entered the school system. Technological advancements have relegated many once time-consuming household tasks to the simple actions of loading a machine and hitting a button. So, as children age into middle and secondary school age women often find themselves with ample spare time and would prefer to work part-time while retaining flexibility in their schedules to focus on their children as needed.

These desires are best expressed in the data. Some 45% of married women in the US currently work full-time, and only 28% wish to have a full-time job. 40% of married mothers would prefer to work only part-time, yet only 26% currently do so. The desires of mothers are inverted by the current system.

Once children have entered the school system and mothers have more time on their hands the state (and private sector) should create educational opportunities, small business incentives, and employment tracks for women who wish to take up part-time employment. This would much more closely track with the desires of Western women and reverse the current trend of career first and instead put family formation at the top of the priority list.

Companies should create positions specifically designed for mothers who wish for flexible part-time roles. Remote work opportunities for women should be made easily discoverable and technology utilized to the fullest extent.

Other reforms, such as early (full) retirement for grandmothers, should be explored as well. This would give women a lifetime of options where they can mix family life and activities outside of the home in a manner that best suits them.

3. Promote marriage.

The simplest predictor of whether a woman will have more than one child and do so within a happy environment is that of marriage. Married women can be expected to have a total of 2.4 children throughout their lifetime, while unmarried women can be expected to have just one child.

Yet with 41% of births being to unwed mothers, and 52% of all American women being unwed, women are currently not meeting their own self-expressed goals for marriage and childbearing. Something must be done – not least because 80% of women would like to marry before having children and nearly as many desire to be married in general.

The Hungarian state has worked for well over a decade in creating one of the most family-friendly states in the world and this appears to have led to a persistent positive trend, a trend which is now able to withstand economic shocks. Hungary boasts the highest marriage rate in Europe and a declining divorce rate which is below the continental average.

Under this pro-marriage government, the number of marriages per annum has roughly doubled and these policies have also resulted in a 27.7% increase in the nation’s fertility rate from its low in 2011.

4. Create a Breadwinner economy.

After decades of being hollowed out the economies of the West must be restored to a place where a single, generally male, breadwinner can provide for his family. This will enable women to have more options in their lives and for family life to be more stable, while providing men with greater opportunities and communities with more solid foundations.

Married women are more financially secure, more confident in managing their money, and view themselves as having more opportunities.

At the same time the majority of Americans, the majority of young British men, and the majority of Europeans, still prefer that men serve as the primary breadwinners and in this way, there is still a strong desire from both men and women to be part of a married family.

It is evident that the women of the West clearly desire marriage, families, children, and happiness, yet are unable to achieve these goals in a timely fashion (if at all) because of the pressures placed upon them by the organs of modernity to focus on their college experience and subsequently their careers.

Women are not discount men to be shoved into classrooms and cubicles, and policymakers should stop treating them as such.

Instead, actions must be taken that enable the vast bulk of women who wish to prioritize motherhood and marriage to take those steps earlier in life, while not removing the opportunity for the minority of women who wish to prioritize their careers.

Most women would seemingly prefer to be stay-at-home mothers while their children are young, part-time employees and students while their children are in school, and to take on a career for a short period while waiting to become grandmothers. With the right mix of policies, Western societies can, and must, be structured to afford women the opportunity to construct their lives in this family-friendly manner, and away from careerism.

Our policy recommendations are not holistic, and there is much more to be written about the issues of abortion, the elites pushing men out of professions that were historically their domain (the police, the military, etc), and other social ailments in Western societies. But we must start somewhere.